Perspectives on Pragmatism: Classical, Recent, and Contemporary 9780674270572

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PERSPECTIVES ON PRAGMATISM

PERSPECTIVES ON PRAGMATISM CLASSICAL, RECENT, AND CONTEMPORARY

Robert B. Brandom

harvard university press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2011

Copyright © 2011 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brandom, Robert. Perspectives on pragmatism : classical, recent, and contemporary / Robert B. Brandom. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-05808-8 (alk. paper) I. Pragmatism. I. Title. B832.B73 2011 144'.3—dc22 2011007667

For Bruce Kuklick, mentor and friend, who as my undergraduate teacher at Yale introduced me to the excitement and discipline of intellectual history in general, and to the American pragmatists in particular. He inspired a lifelong philosophical journey, of which this work is just one report.

CONTENTS

Introduction: From German Idealism to American Pragmatism—and Back

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1 Classical American Pragmatism: The Pragmatist Enlightenment—and Its Problematic Semantics

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2 Analyzing Pragmatism: Pragmatics and Pragmatisms

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3 A Kantian Rationalist Pragmatism: Pragmatism, Inferentialism, and Modality in Sellars’s Arguments against Empiricism

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4 Linguistic Pragmatism and Pragmatism about Norms: An Arc of Thought from Rorty’s Eliminative Materialism to His Pragmatism

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5 Vocabularies of Pragmatism: Synthesizing Naturalism and Historicism

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6 Toward an Analytic Pragmatism: Meaning-Use Analysis

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7 Pragmatism, Expressivism, and Anti-Representationalism: Local and Global Possibilities

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Acknowledgments Index of Names Index of Subjects

221 223 226

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INTRODUCTION

From German Idealism to American Pragmatism—and Back

I. Kant and Hegel Developments over the past four decades have secured Immanuel Kant’s status as being for contemporary philosophers what the sea was for Algernon Swinburne: the great, gray mother of us all. And Kant mattered as much for the classical American pragmatists as he does for us today. But we look back at that sepia-toned age across an extended period during which Anglophone philosophy largely wrote Kant out of its canon. The founding ideology of Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore, articulating the rationale and fighting faith for the rising tide of analytic philosophy, was forged in a recoil from the perceived defects of a British Idealism inspired by G. W. F. Hegel. Mindful of the massive debt evidently and self-avowedly owed by Hegel to Kant, and putting aside neo-Kantian readings of Kant as an empiricist philosopher of science that cast him in a light they would have found more favorable, Russell and Moore diagnosed the idealist rot as having set in already with Kant. For them, and for many of their followers down through the years, the progressive current in philosophy should be seen to have run directly from John Locke, Gottfried Leibniz, and David Hume, to John Stuart Mill and Gottlob Frege, without any dangerous diversion into the oxbow of German Idealism. What did the pragmatists learn from Kant? I want to focus on two of Kant’s master ideas: what I will call his normative turn, and what I will call (tendentiously but only proleptically) his pragmatist methodology. I think that we should still care today about these ideas—ideas that were for complicated reasons largely invisible to classical analytic philosophy. As I understand his work, Kant’s most basic idea, the axis around which all his thought turns, is that what distinguishes exercises of judgment and intentional agency from the performances of merely natural creatures is 1

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that judgments and actions are subject to distinctive kinds of normative assessment. Judgments and actions are things we are in a distinctive sense responsible for. They are a kind of commitment we undertake. Kant understands judging and acting as applying rules—concepts—that determine what the subject becomes committed to and responsible for by applying them. Applying concepts theoretically in judgment and practically in action binds the concept user, commits her, makes her responsible, by opening her up to normative assessment according to the rules she has made herself subject to. The responsibility one undertakes by applying a concept is a task responsibility: a commitment to do something. On the theoretical side, what one is committed to doing, what one becomes liable to assessment as to one’s success at doing, is integrating one’s judgments into a whole that exhibits a distinctive kind of unity: the synthetic unity of apperception. It is a systematic, rational unity, dynamically created and sustained by drawing inferential consequences from one’s judgments, by finding reasons for them, and by rejecting commitments incompatible with those one has undertaken. Apperceiving, the characteristically sapient sort of awareness, is discursive (that is, conceptual) awareness. For it consists in integrating judgments into a unity structured by relations of what judgments provide reasons for and against what others. And those rational relations among judgments are determined by the rules—that is, the concepts—one binds oneself by in making the judgments. Each new episode of experience, paradigmatically the making of a perceptual judgment, requires integration into, and hence transformation of, the antecedent constellation of commitments. New incompatibilities can arise, which must be dealt with critically by rejecting or modifying prior commitments. New joint consequences can ensue, which must be acknowledged or rejected. The process by which the whole evolves and develops systematically is a paradigmatically rational one, structured by the rhythm of inhalation or amplification by acknowledging new commitments and extracting new consequences, and exhalation or criticism by rejecting or adjusting old commitments in the light of their rational relations to the new ones. Kant’s new normative conception of what the activity of judging consists in, of what one must be doing in order to be judging (a corresponding story applies to acting), puts important structural constraints on how he understands the judgeable contents for which one is taking responsibility in judgment. The dominant order of logical and semantic explanation of the tradition Kant inherited began with a doctrine of terms or concepts. On that base, a doctrine of judgments was erected, and then finally 2

INTRODUCTION

a doctrine of consequences or syllogisms. But the minimal unit of responsibility is the judgment. It is judgments, not concepts, that one can invest one’s authority in, commit oneself to, by integrating them into an evolving constellation that exhibits the rational synthetic unity of apperception. Accordingly, in a radical break with his predecessors, Kant takes judgments to be the minimal units of awareness and experience. Concepts are to be understood analytically, as functions of judgment—that is, in terms of the contribution they make to judgeable contents. To be candidates for synthesis into a system exhibiting the rational unity characteristic of apperception, judgments must stand to one another in relations of material consequence and incompatibility. So if one is to understand judging also as the application of concepts, the first question one must ask about the contents of those concepts is how the use of one or another concept affects those rational relations among the judgeable contents that result. This methodological inversion is Kant’s commitment to the explanatory primacy of the propositional. It is a methodological commitment that will be seconded by Frege, whose Begriffsschrift is structured by the observation that it is only judgeable contents to which pragmatic force can attach, and by Ludwig Wittgenstein, who in the Investigations gives pride of place to sentences as the only kind of linguistic expression that can be used to make a move in a language game. Kant’s thought here, I think, is that alongside the local order of explanation, which looks to the contents of the particular concepts applied in judging to explain the specific possibilities of rational integration of judgeable contents containing them (their inferential grounds, consequences, and incompatibilities), there is a global order of explanation according to which one must understand what conceptual content is in terms of what judgeable contents are, and must understand that in terms of what one is doing in judging, in making oneself responsible for such contents. The functionalism about conceptual contents that consists in understanding them as functions of judgment, which is the practical expression of methodological commitment to the explanatory primacy of the propositional, is motivated by an overarching methodological pragmatism according to which semantics must answer to pragmatics (in a broad sense).1 It is the strategy of understanding discursive content in terms of what one is doing in endorsing or applying it, of approaching the notions of judgeable, 1. Later on (in Section V), I will suggest a somewhat narrower use of the term “methodological pragmatism.” 3

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and therefore conceptual content generally, in terms of the constraints put on it by requirements derived from the account of the activity of judging. Although I have for expository reasons focused my sketch on the cognitive, theoretical side of Kant’s thought, it is important to be clear that pragmatism in the sense I am attributing to Kant is not a matter of giving explanatory priority to the practical over the theoretical, to exercises of agency over exercises of cognition. Rather, within both the practical and the theoretical spheres, it is understanding content in terms of force (in Frege’s sense): what is judged, believed, or done in terms of, one must do, what activity one must engage in, to be judging, believing, or doing it. Kant, I am claiming, should be thought of as a pragmatist avant la lettre because of the way his normative theory of conceptual activity (theoretical and practical) shapes his account of conceptual content (both theoretical and practical). I read Hegel as taking over from Kant commitment both to a normative account of conceptual doings, and to a broadly pragmatist approach to understanding the contents of our cognitive and practical commitments in terms of what we are doing in undertaking those commitments. I see him also as taking an important step toward naturalizing the picture of conceptual norms by taking those norms to be instituted by public social recognitive practices. Further, Hegel tells a story about how the very same practice of rational integration of commitments undertaken by applying concepts, that is, the synthesis at once of recognized and recognizing individual subjects and of their recognitive communities, is at the same time the historical process by which the norms that articulate the contents of the concepts applied are instituted, determined, and developed. He calls that ongoing social, historical process “experience” (Erfahrung), and no longer sees it as taking place principally between the ears of an individual. Closer to our own time, we have seen a version of this development repeated as W. V. O. Quine, in a pragmatist spirit, rejects Rudolf Carnap’s two-phase picture, according to which first one institutes meanings (a language) and then applies them (adopts a theory), in favor of a unitary process and practice of using expressions that must be intelligible at every stage as settling (insofar as it is settled) both what one means and how one takes things to be.

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INTRODUCTION

II. Classical American Pragmatism In the broadest terms, the classical American pragmatists, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, developed this German idealist tradition by completing the process of naturalizing it, which had begun already with Hegel. In their hands, it was to take on the shape of an empirical scientific account of us and our transactions with our environment. The sort of understanding they sought was decisively shaped by two new models of scientific explanation, codifying new forms of intelligibility characteristic of late nineteenth-century science. Principal among these, of course, was Darwinian evolutionary explanation. The other form of explanation that was coming to maturity in the science of the day was statistical explanation. Pragmatism begins with a philosophy of science, pioneered by Peirce, that saw these two explanatory innovations as aspects of one conceptual revolution in science. One dimension along which evolutionary and statistical explanations differ from those of the older mathematical physics concerns the dominant modality in which they are expressed. The modality of Newtonian laws is necessity. One explains something by showing that it is necessitated by eternal, exceptionless, universal laws. Evolutionary and statistical explanations explain contingent happenings, by displaying conditions under which they can be seen to have been probable. Both are ways of making intelligible the contingent emergence of collective order from individual randomness. The original subject matter of evolutionary explanation was, of course, the process by which biological species arise and diversify. Taking his cue from the way in which statistical explanation had been generalized from its original applications in social science to provide the basis for the triumph of thermodynamics in physics, Peirce substantially generalized evolutionary-statistical forms of intelligibility in two different directions. Most important was an idea that was picked up and developed by James and above all by Dewey: the recognition that evolution, at the level of species, and learning, at the level of individuals, share a common selectional structure. Both can be understood as processes of adaptation, in which interaction with the environment selects (preserves and reproduces) some elements, while eliminating others. This insight is encapsulated in the concept of habit, and the picture of individual learning as the evolution-by-selection of a population of habits. This master idea made possible the naturalistic construal of a cognitive continuum that runs from 5

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the skillful coping of the competent predator, through the practical intelligence of primitive hominids, to the traditional practices and common sense of civilized humans, all the way to the most sophisticated theorizing of contemporary scientists. All are seen as of a piece with, intelligible in the same general terms as, biological evolution. The other direction in which Peirce generalized the evolutionarystatistical-selectional model of explanation was to inorganic nature. What those older scientific naturalists, for whom the paradigm of scientific understanding was Newtonian physics rather than Darwinian biology, had taken to be eternal, immutable, necessary, universal laws of nature, Peirce now sees as themselves in the largest sense “habits” of the universe—a kind of order that has arisen contingently, but ultimately statistically explicably, by a selectional-adaptational process operating on a population of such regularities, which in turn provides the dynamic habitat to which all must collectively adapt. There is no guarantee that any such accommodation will succeed permanently. As with habits learned by individuals, some of the lawlike regularities may prove more robust and others more fragile. The older picture of laws shows up as at best only approximately true, an idealization extrapolating a situation that actuality approaches at most asymptotically.2 The naturalism of the classical American pragmatists was shaped by the new sort of nature they had been taught about by the best science of their times—a nature viewed through the lens of the new forms of statistical and selectional explanation. The pragmatists’ new form of naturalism was coupled with a new form of empiricism. The experimental scientific method is seen as just the explicit, principled distillation of the selectional learning process that is the practical form common to intelligent creatures at all stages of development. Dewey’s term for that process, in all its varieties, is ‘experience’— the axial concept of such central works as Experience and Nature and Art as Experience. (So central is the concept to Dewey’s thought that sometimes in reading these works it is difficult to overcome the impression that he is, as Richard Rorty once put it, “using the term ‘experience’ just as an incantatory device to blur every conceivable distinction.”) Experience in this sense is not the ignition of some internal Cartesian light—the occurrence of a self-intimating event of pure awareness, transparent and 2. James endorses this Peircean idea in Lecture II of “Pragmatism,” in Pragmatism and Other Writings, ed. William James and Giles Gunn (New York: Penguin, 2000). 6

INTRODUCTION

incorrigible to the subject of the experience. Experience is work: the application of force through distance. It is something done rather than something that merely happens—a process, engaging in a practice, the exercise of abilities, rather than an episode. It is experience, not in the sense of Erlebnis (or Empfindung), but of Hegel’s Erfahrung. It is the decidedly non-Cartesian sense of ‘experience’ in which a want-ad can specify “No experience necessary,” without intending thereby to invite applications from zombies. Earlier empiricists had thought of experience as the occurrence of conscious episodes that provide the raw materials for learning, via processes such as association, comparison, and abstraction. For the pragmatists, experience is not an input to the learning process. It just is learning: the process of perception and performance, followed by perception and assessment of the results of the performance, and then further performance, exhibiting the iterative, adaptive, conditionalbranching structure of a test-operate-test-exit loop. The result of experience is not best thought of as the possession of items of knowledge, but as a kind of practical understanding, a kind of adaptive attunement to the environment, the development of habits apt for successful coping with contingencies. It is knowing how rather than knowing that. Ontological naturalism and epistemological empiricism are both encouraged by the idea that the rise of modern science, the most successful social institution of the past three hundred years, can teach philosophers the most important lessons both about how things are and how we can understand them. But from the beginning they have typically stood in significant tension with one another. The furniture of Isaac Newton’s natural world does not include Locke’s mind. And Hume can find nothing in experience by which we could come to know or understand laws such as Newton’s as having the necessity that distinguishes laws from mere regularities. Nor is this tension a characteristic only of Enlightenment naturalism and empiricism. It equally afflicts the twentieth-century versions. The two principal wings of the Vienna Circle, which Carnap struggled heroically to keep from flying off in different directions, were distinguished precisely by their answers to the question: when empiricism and naturalism conflict, which should be relaxed or given up? Moritz Schlick urged the preeminence of empiricism, while Otto Neurath was committed to the priority of naturalism. Quine never fully reconciled his (logical) empiricist hostility to modality with his naturalist privileging of the deliverances of science. The classical pragmatist versions of naturalism and empiricism, though, fit together much better than the versions that preceded and succeeded 7

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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 selectionaladaptational 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. There is no problem in principle in finding a place for experience construed as learning in nature construed as evolving. Nor is there any analogue of the traditional complementary problem of understanding how experience construed as the dynamic evolution of habits can give its subjects access to the modally robust habits of the things those knowers-and-agents interact with, adapt, and adapt to. The pragmatist forms of naturalism and empiricism are two sides of one coin. The pragmatists’ conception of experience is recognizably a naturalized version of the rational process of critically winnowing and actively extrapolating commitments, according to the material incompatibility and consequence relations they stand in to one another, which Kant describes as producing and exhibiting the distinctive synthetic unity of apperception. For that developmental process, too, is selectional (though not statistical). Some commitments (theoretical and practical) thrive and persist, in concert with their fellows, while others are modified or rejected as unable to flourish in that environment. It might be thought fanciful to focus on this common structure in light of a substantial difference between the conceptions: Kant’s process is structured by rational, conceptual relations of incompatibility and consequence, whereas the pragmatists’ version is structured by natural, causal relations of incompatibility and consequence. But the pragmatists would disagree. For they introduce not only a new conception of experience, but also a new conception of reason. They understand the rationality of the theoretical physicist as continuous with the intelligence of the culturally primitive hunter and the skill of the nonhuman predator. The grooming and development of discursive cognitive and practical commitments is a learning process of a piece and sharing a structure with the achievement of practical attunement to an environment and the acquisition of habits successful in that environment that in one form or another is a part of the natural history of all sentient organisms. Reason and intelligence in this sense can be seen (albeit in an inflexible and unlearned form) already in the maintenance of equilibrium by 8

INTRODUCTION

that emblem of the industrial revolution: the flywheel governor. The nature of the pragmatists is through and through a rational nature—not just the part of it that is intelligible as experience.

III. Fundamental Pragmatism The more specific strategy by which the classical American pragmatists  sought to naturalize the concept of experience—to demystify and domesticate it, to disentangle it from two centuries of Cartesian encumbrances—is what I will call fundamental pragmatism. This is the idea that one should understand knowing that as a kind of knowing how (to put it in Rylean terms). That is, believing that things are thus-and-so is to be understood in terms of practical abilities to do something. Dewey, in particular, saw the whole philosophical tradition down to his time as permeated by a kind of platonism or intellectualism that saw a rule or principle, something that is or could be made conceptually or propositionally explicit, behind every bit of skillful practice. He contrasted that approach with the contrary pragmatist approach, which emphasizes the implicit context of practices and practical abilities that forms the necessary background against which alone states and performances are intelligible as explicitly contentful believings and judgings. In this reversal of the traditional order of explanation, Dewey is joined by the Martin Heidegger of Being and Time, with his project of understanding Vorhandenheit as a precipitate of the more ‘primordial’ Zuhandenheit, and by the later Wittgenstein. All three thinkers are downstream from Kant’s fundamental insight about the normative character of cognition and agency, and share a commitment to the explanatory priority of norms implicit as proprieties of practice to norms explicit as rules or principles. I mean the rubric “fundamental pragmatism” to be a relatively loose and elastic description, whose parameters can be adjusted or interpreted so as to fit the methodology of many thinkers who might differ in many other ways. It is supposed, for instance, to include both the order of explanation that led Quine to criticize the “myth of the museum” in thinking about meaning and that Wilfrid Sellars employs in criticizing the “myth of the given” in thinking about sensory experience. It depends on a contrast, which may be filled in in different ways, between something on the implicit, know-how, skill, practical ability, practice side and something on the explicit, conceptual, rule, principle, representation side. So we might distinguish between two grades of intentionality: practical and discursive. 9

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Practical intentionality is the kind of attunement to their environment that intelligent nonlinguistic animals display—the way they can practically take or treat things as prey or predator, food, sexual partner or rival and cope with them accordingly. Discursive intentionality is using concepts in judgment and intentional action, being able explicitly to take things to be thus-and-so, to entertain and evaluate propositions, formulate rules and principles. The fundamental pragmatist aspiration is to be able to exhibit discursive intentionality as a distinctive kind of practical intentionality. This project can take a strong reductionist form. For instance, what I have elsewhere called the “pragmatist version of artificial intelligence” claims that there is a set of practices or abilities that are nondiscursive, in the sense that each of them can be engaged in or exercised by nondiscursive creatures, and yet that can be algorithmically elaborated into the discursive capacity to use concepts and speak an autonomous language.3 But fundamental pragmatism need not take such a strong, reductive form. One might claim, more modestly, that discursive activity, from everyday thought to the cogitations of the theoretical physicist, is a species of practical intentionality (or a determination of that determinable), and indeed, one that is intelligible as having developed out of nondiscursive practical intentionality, while still maintaining that it is a wholly distinctive variety. Fundamental pragmatism in this sense gives a distinctive shape to the naturalism of the classical American pragmatists. For that methodological commitment ensures that their naturalism is in the first instance a naturalism concerning the subjects of discursive understanding and agency. When we think today about naturalism, we tend to think of it first as a thesis about the objects represented by different potentially puzzling kinds of concepts: semantic, normative, probabilistic concepts, and so on. The question is how to see what those concepts represent as part of the natural world, whether as conceived by fundamental physics, or some special sciences, or even just by unproblematic empirical descriptive concepts. By contrast to this object naturalism, the American pragmatists were subject naturalists.4 Fundamental pragmatism counsels looking first to 3. In chapter 3 of Between Saying and Doing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 4. This is Huw Price’s terminology in “Naturalism without Representationalism,” in Naturalism in Question, ed. Mario de Caro and David Macarthur (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp.   71–88; and (with David Macarthur) “Pragmatism, Quasi-realism and the Global Challenge,” in The New Pragmatists, ed. Cheryl Misak (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 91–120. The other 10

INTRODUCTION

what discursive subjects are doing, to the abilities they exercise, to the practices they engage in. If a naturalistic story can be told about that, it might well be that no questions remain that should trouble the naturalist. One of the points of the toy Sprachspiele that the later Wittgenstein constructs seems to be a fundamental pragmatist, subject naturalist one—which the distinction between subject and object naturalism shows to be entirely compatible with the claim he makes already in the Tractatus and never relinquishes—that “philosophy is not one of the natural sciences.” Not everything we think or say need be understood as representing the world as being some way. And if it is, fundamental pragmatism invites us to understand representation in terms of what discursive subjects must do in order to count thereby as representing, as taking or treating some state, episode, or performance as a representation of something. For representational content is explicit—believing that things are thusand-so. And that is to be made sense of in terms of what is implicit in what the subjects do in virtue of which it is correct to say of them that they believe that. Fundamental pragmatism is opposed to a representationalist order of explanation: one that begins with a notion of representational content, and appeals to that notion to make sense of what it is that knowing and acting subjects do. That is not to say that pragmatists in this sense can have no truck at all with the concept of representation. It is to say at most that talk of representation should come at the end of the story, not the beginning. Once a contrast between skillful practice and explicit representation has been put in place and the issue raised of their relative explanatory priority in the context of different enterprises, the question of the relation between fundamental pragmatism and cognitive science arises. For cognitive science had, as something like its original charter, distinguishing its approach from that of behaviorism: the realization of the explanatory power precisely of appealing to representations to explain various practical cognitive abilities. Thinking about the fundamental pragmatism motivating Heidegger in setting out the project of Being and Time, Hubert Dreyfus drew the conclusion that the methodology of cognitive science is incompatible with the insights of that pragmatism. Is he right? Here I think the beginning of wisdom is the realization that it makes a big difference whether we are talking about representations, rules, and essays in his Naturalism without Mirrors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) can also be consulted with profit in this connection. 11

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explicitness at the personal level or at the subpersonal level. This is in part a matter of whether one construes the rules the platonist invokes to articulate proprieties of practice as being followed by the one whose practice is in question (which would be at the personal level). Cognitive science, by contrast, postulates subpersonal representations, whose role is in causal explanations of various capacities. The sense in which they guide the practice is causal, not in the first instance normative. It is not at all clear that there is (or at any rate needs to be) a clash between fundamental pragmatism at the personal level and cognitive science’s invocation of representations at the subpersonal level—as Dreyfus at least sometimes seems to think there is. Here one important issue is what one means by ‘explicit’ when fundamental pragmatism is articulated in terms of the distinction between what is implicit in practice and what is explicit in a principle, rule, or representation. Representations of rules are crucial for one to count as following a rule (as Sellars insists). In that context, representation can be thought of as the form of explicitness. But it is not a good idea to explicate explicitness in terms of representation if one is thinking of representation in the sense that is appropriate to the subpersonal level. Here the notion of specifically propositional representations is key. It is open to the pragmatist to claim (with Davidson and the author of Making It Explicit) that nothing at the subpersonal level deserves to count as propositionally contentful in the sense that personal level representations can be propositionally contentful. Belief on such a view is not a subpersonal level concept.5 To understand the relations between fundamental pragmatism and the representational approach of cognitive science, we should distinguish three levels: (a) Subpersonal representations (b) Practical abilities (practices) that are cognitive in some broad sense (c) Personal level representations Level (c) is the explicit properly propositional level, at which rules and principles are formulated that can express what is implicit at level (b). Level (b) is practical intentionality, and level (c) is discursive intentionality. Level (a) causally explains level (b)—and a lot of cognitive science is 5. Robert B. Brandom, Making It Explicit (Harvard University Press, 1994), hereafter MIE. 12

INTRODUCTION

concerned with how this can be done in detail. The fundamental pragmatist claim is that level (c) is to be understood, explained, or explicated in terms of level (b). Cognitive science is in the business of postulating inner subpersonal representations in order to explain various kinds of skillful practice or ability. Dreyfus seems to think that approach is incompatible with the sort of fundamental pragmatism that the early Heidegger (and the later Wittgenstein) endorse. But such a view is mistaken. What that pragmatism is incompatible with is seeking to explain (b) in terms of (c), not (b) in terms of (a).6

IV. Instrumental Pragmatism One of the variant rough formulations I offered of the methodological commitment I have called “fundamental pragmatism” is to think about norms explicitly represented in the form of rules or principles only in the context of a prior understanding of norms implicit in practice. This characterization has the advantage of placing fundamental pragmatism in the context of the Kantian normative turn, as I have claimed it should be when we think about the classical American pragmatists. The master argument for fundamental pragmatism about the normative dimension of intentionality is a regress argument familiar from the later Wittgenstein. In a nutshell, it is that the very idea of norms explicitly represented as rules or principles presupposes that of norms implicit in practices. For applying a rule is itself something that can be done correctly or incorrectly. If we can only understand that normative assessment in turn as a matter of applying some other rule (what Wittgenstein calls an “interpretation” [Deutung]), then we are embarked on a fruitless regress. This, too, is a point that Kant had already appreciated, as an integral part of his groundbreaking normative construal of concepts as rules (for judging): If understanding in general is to be viewed as the faculty of rules, judgment will be the faculty of subsuming under rules; that is, of distinguishing whether something does or does not stand under a given rule (casus datae legis). General logic contains and can contain no rules for judgment . . . If it sought to give general instructions 6. In Between Saying and Doing, I explore the significance of the choice of the vocabulary used to specify the practices-or-abilities appealed to at level (b). This is, it seems to me, equally significant for the two enterprises, both the one that seeks to explain them and the one that seeks to use them to explain something else. 13

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how we are to subsume under these rules, that is, to distinguish whether something does or does not come under them, that could only be by means of another rule. This in turn, for the very reason that it is a rule, again demands guidance from judgment. And thus it appears that, though understanding is capable of being instructed, and of being equipped with rules, judgment is a peculiar talent which can be practised only, and cannot be taught.7 The normative fundamental pragmatism of the classical American pragmatists joins cognitive science in rejecting the descriptive-dispositional behaviorism of John B. Watson, B. F. Skinner, and Gilbert Ryle. But it does so for different reasons: because of the failure of the latter group to appreciate the essentially normative character of the practical intentionality that forms the background of discursive intentionality, rather than because of their hostility to the postulation of inner representations. Wittgenstein has been called a ‘behaviorist’, in part because of his antipathy toward some kinds of explanations that appeal to inner representations. A principal danger of talking this way is that it invites overlooking his emphasis not only on the social, but especially on the normative character of the practical intentionality in the context of which he urges us to think about discursive intentionality. In this regard, Wittgenstein belongs in a box with the classical American pragmatists, and with Kant, not with the reductive descriptive-dispositional behaviorists. But how, exactly, do the classical American pragmatists understand the basic kind of normativity implicit in practical intentionality: the kind of skillful know-how, as a species of which we are to understand discursive intentionality and its distinctive kind of normativity? I think it is not so easy to extract a clear answer to this question, even from Dewey, who has the most sophisticated approach to it. It is clear that in the most general terms the response takes the form of an appeal to the selectionaladaptional structure common to learning and evolution. The norms characteristic of the kind of practical intentionality in terms of which we are to understand discursive intentionality are immanent to and elaborated within the development of courses of experience that display this 7. Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), A132/B171. I discuss this regress argument further in chapter 1 of Making It Explicit (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), in the context of arguments against the twin dangers of regulism and regularism about discursive norms. 14

INTRODUCTION

structure. In our own time, we have examples of how to make an account along these lines work. A splendid instance is Ruth Millikan’s sophisticated and nuanced construction of norms in the form of Proper Functions, defined by modal counterfactual claims about selectional processes shaping reproductive families of traits.8 (Millikan, a Sellars student, selfconsciously takes her inspiration from Charles Morris, to whom her book is dedicated. Morris was a student of George Herbert Meade, who was in turn a student of James and a colleague of Dewey.) I think there is every reason to believe that all of the classical American pragmatists (as well as the successors just mentioned) would have welcomed and embraced her careful working-out of their underlying idea. But of course, that detailed account was not available to them. In its absence, they often enough fall into formulations that have, from the very beginnings of the movement, led critics to attribute to the pragmatists commitment to quite a different, though not wholly unrelated, theory and to take it as the very core of the pragmatist approach. I have in mind what is expressed by F. C. S. Schiller’s slogan “The truth is what works.” This is what Dewey calls “the instrumental theory” or “instrumentalism.” He endorses it in such passages as these: What should it mean upon the instrumental theory to accept some view or idea as true upon social credit? Clearly that such an acceptance itself works.9 What the experimentalist means is that the effective working of an idea and its truth are one and the same thing—this working being neither the cause nor the evidence of truth but its nature.10 Naturally, the pragmatist claims his theory to be true in the pragmatic sense of truth: it works, it clears up difficulties, removes obscurities, puts individuals into more experimental, less dogmatic, and less arbitrarily sceptical relations to life; aligns philosophic

8. Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984). The basic connection between selectional processes and alethic modal counterfactuals is indicated already by Elliot Sober’s distinction between traits that are selected versus traits that are selected for (The Nature of Selection [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984]). Millikan takes the thought much farther. 9. “A Reply to Professor Royce’s Critique of Instrumentalism,” in The Middle Works of John Dewey, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 7:75. 10. “The Intellectualist Criterion of Truth,” Middle Works, 4:69. 15

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with scientific method; does away with self-made problems of epistemology; clarifies and reorganizes logical theory, etc. He is quite content to have the truth of his theory consist in its working in these various ways, and to leave to the intellectualist the proud possession of a static, unanalyzable, unverifiable, unworking property.11 And James says such things as the following: We here assume Japan to exist without ever having been there, because it WORKS to do so, everything we know conspiring with the belief, and nothing interfering . . . 12 On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true.13 Semantic norms are understood in instrumental terms, in terms of utility. Truth-evaluable states such as beliefs are thought of on the model of tools, which can be more or less apt or useful, in concert with others that are available in a concrete situation, relative to some desired end or purpose. Taking my cue from Dewey’s terminology, I will call this approach “instrumental pragmatism” about semantic norms. There are two principal points about which it is important to be clear in thinking about the instrumental strain in classical American pragmatism. First, it should be understood as at base a theory of meaning, not a theory of truth. The pragmatists did themselves no favors by pitching it in the latter way. The general idea is the fundamental pragmatist one: that the contentfulness of intentional states such as belief should be understood in terms of the contribution they make to what the believers do. The new element is that the doing is thought of as purposive, as aimed at some kind of end, at the satisfaction of some desire or need. Identifying success in the doing with the truth of the items to be thought of as contentful in virtue of their role in that process is a further, optional move. It threatens to overshadow the underlying account of meaning and content. The second point is that that theory of the contentfulness of intentional states is a functionalist account. Instrumental pragmatism is a comprehensive holist functionalism about the content of states such as beliefs, desires, and intentions. It is comprehensive in that the functional systems considered comprise the organism and its whole environment. The role in such 11. “A Short Catechism Concerning Truth,” Middle Works, 6:10. 12. Pragmatism, Lecture VI. 13. Pragmatism, Lecture VIII. 16

INTRODUCTION

a functional system that determines the contents of states and performances caught up in it is a role in the process by which the system develops, through cycles of perception, thought, interventions that transform the environment, and perception of the results of that transaction. This is a role in a course of experience, in what is very much a naturalized version of Hegel’s sense of that term—a notion of experience that was in turn an already somewhat naturalized descendant of Kant’s process of synthesis (by rational amplification, criticism, and justification) of something that exhibits the structure and unity of apperception. Processes of this sort involve felt dissatisfactions with the situation as it is at one moment, attempts to diagnose the nature of those felt dissatisfactions and to address and remove them, a process that, when all goes well, is at once the clarification of the dissatisfaction and its dissolution—the transformation of the old situation into a new one that is dissatisfying in some other way. That Kantian ancestry is particularly evident in some formulations of instrumental pragmatism. Here is one by James: A new opinion counts as ‘true’ just in proportion as it gratifies the individual’s desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock. It must both lean on old truth and grasp new fact; and its success . . . in doing this, is a matter for the individual’s appreciation. When old truth grows, then, by new truth’s addition, it is for subjective reasons. We are in the process and obey the reasons. That new idea is truest which performs most felicitously its function of satisfying our double urgency. It makes itself true, gets itself classed as true, by the way it works; grafting itself then upon the ancient body of truth, which thus grows much as a tree grows by the activity of a new layer of cambium.14 Friction with stubborn reality is an integral component in this sort of process. That is the objective element in James’s “double urgency.” Feedback-regulated practices are ‘thick’, in the sense of essentially involving objects, events, and worldly states of affairs. Bits of the world are incorporated in such practices, in the exercise of such abilities. In this regard they contrast with words and sentences, considered merely as signdesigns or items in the natural world, which are ‘thin’ in that they can be specified independently of a specification of the objects or states of affairs they refer to or represent. For you cannot say what, for instance, the 14. Pragmatism, Lecture II. 17

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practice of attaching two boards with a hammer and nails is without referring to the boards, nails, and hammer. Dewey thinks of the thickness of pragmatist semantics as one of its cardinal advantages over its more traditional thin rivals. If one focuses on success as the measure of truth, rather than on functionalism about meaning, and further fails to appreciate that the functional system being considered is capacious enough to include the environment being acted on and in as well as the organism transacting with it, one will misunderstand instrumental pragmatism as a radically subjectivist view, according to which all that matters for truth is subjective feelings, and objective constraint vanishes. This is what I call “vulgar” pragmatism. James complains about this flatfooted, reductive reading already in Pragmatism: Schiller says the true is that which ‘works.’ Thereupon he is treated as one who limits verification to the lowest material utilities. Dewey says truth is what gives ‘satisfaction.’ He is treated as one who believes in calling everything true which, if it were true, would be pleasant.15 And he spends most of The Meaning of Truth (a book that on my interpretation would better have been called The Truth about Meaning) rebutting that reading. Here is Dewey responding to this subjectivizing reading: Pupil: Objection Nine. Still the pragmatic criterion, being satisfactory working, is purely personal and subjective. Whatever works so as to please me is true. Either this is your result (in which case your reference to social relations only denotes at bottom a number of purely subjectivistic satisfactions) or else you unconsciously assume an intellectual department of our nature that has to be satisfied; and whose satisfaction is truth. Thereby you admit the intellectualistic criterion. Teacher: Reply. We seem to have got back to our starting-point, the nature of satisfaction. The intellectualist seems to think that because the pragmatist insists upon the factor of human want, purpose, and realization in the making and testing of judgments, the impersonal factor is therefore denied. But what the pragmatist does is to insist that the human factor must work itself out in cooperation with the environmental factor, and 15. Pragmatism, Lecture VI. 18

INTRODUCTION

that their coadaptation is both “correspondence” and “satisfaction.” As long as the human factor is ignored and denied, or is regarded as merely psychological (whatever, once more, that means), this human factor will assert itself in irresponsible ways. So long as, particularly in philosophy, a flagrantly unchastened pragmatism reigns, we shall find, as at present, the most ambitious intellectualistic systems accepted simply because of the personal comfort they yield those who contrive and accept them. Once recognize the human factor, and pragmatism is at hand to insist that the believer must accept the full consequences of his beliefs, and that his beliefs must be tried out, through acting upon them, to discover what is their meaning or consequence.16 The possible misunderstanding is, I think, actual in the reference to “our needs” as a criterion of the correctness or truth of an idea or plan. According to the essays, it is the needs of a situation that are determinative. They evoke thought and the need of knowing, and it is only within the situation that the identification of the needs with a self occurs; and it is only by reflection upon the place of the agent in the encompassing situation that the nature of his needs can be determined. In fact, the actual occurrence of a disturbed, incomplete, and needy situation indicates that my present need is precisely to investigate, to explore, to hunt, to pull apart things now tied together, to project, to plan, to invent, and then to test the outcome by seeing how it works as a method of dealing with hard facts. One source of the demand, in short, for reference to experience as the encompassing universe of discourse is to keep us from taking such terms as “self,” “my,” “need,” “satisfaction,” and so on, as terms whose meanings can be accepted and proved either by themselves or by even the most extensive dialectic reference to other terms.17 Here Dewey emphasizes not only the importance of the functionalism being comprehensive in considering a developing functional system that encompasses environment as well as the striving knower-agent, but also the holism about content that such a functionalism entails. There is no antecedently specifiable determinate content that a belief has, apart from its fellows and in advance of participating in a cycle of experience, which 16. “A Short Catechism Concerning Truth,” Middle Works, 6:11. 17. Introduction to Essays in Experimental Logic, in Middle Works, 10:364. 19

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can then be judged true by pragmatist standards should the cycle conclude successfully. Rather, the belief is intelligible as having the content it does only insofar as it acquires that content by playing the role it does, along with its concomitant states, in the transactions between the believer and her world. What goes for beliefs goes also for desires. Ends and purposes themselves are to be understood as having their content as a matter of their role in this overall system and its developmental processes. What might start out as a vague dissatisfaction itself can be clarified during the course of experience in which finding out how things are and finding out what one wants are two aspects of one process. The satisfaction of needs and wants, the achievement of goals and purposes, is the source of normativity on the instrumental construal; doing that is “working.” But what they are is (like the contents of the beliefs we are working with) itself part of what is to be determined in the course of inquiry—‘determined’ both in the sense of being made more definite and in the sense of being discovered. The former shows up from a prospective perspective, and the latter from a retrospective perspective. Dewey expended a great deal of effort in the dual process of trying to make clear and get clear himself about how the norms and standards and what they are norms and standards for assessing jointly develop in the course of experience. I cannot say that it seems to me that he succeeded very well at either task. But I do think that there is an important thought that he was after: an essentially historical perspectival structure of discursive normativity articulating a conception of determinate conceptual content that I see as also the key to understanding Hegel’s conception of experience. I have myself expended considerable effort in the dual task of trying to make that conception clear and get clear about it myself—with what success remains to be seen. I am not going to rehearse those efforts here.18 Dewey’s and James’s instrumentalism arises as one (optional) way of elaborating what is often called “Peirce’s Principle”: the meaning of a claim is the difference that adopting it would make to what one does. In fact, as I argue in chapter 8 of Making It Explicit, one can get a lot more 18. I talk about this structure in chapter 3 of Reason in Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009) and chapter 7 of Tales of the Mighty Dead (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). It is the principal topic of my big work in progress on Hegel, A Spirit of Trust.

20

INTRODUCTION

from this principle if one bifurcates it by keeping separate sets of books on the difference it makes to what one tries to do and the difference it makes to what one succeeds in doing. The first of these gives one a practical difference de dicto. The second gives one a practical difference de re. Further articulating Peirce’s Principle so as to take account of the intimate social perspectival relations between these two sorts of practical consequence—the sense in which they are two sides of one coin—allows a much more fine-grained account of conceptual content than the classical American pragmatists managed to formulate. But that, too, is a story for another occasion. The combination of the distinction of historical points of view between prospective (determining as clarifying) and retrospective (determining as discovering) perspectives, and social points of view between attributing (de dicto) and acknowledging (de re) commitments is one of my principal suggestions for how to move forward with the ideas of the classical pragmatists.

V. The Linguistic Turn When classical American pragmatism is looked back upon from the perspective of the analytic movement that dominated Anglophone philosophy for at least the last half of the twentieth century, it can easily appear that a decisive wrong turn was taken after Peirce. The pragmatist founder-member was principally concerned to advance philosophical understanding of modern logic, symbolic and natural languages, and the natural sciences—a constellation of topics that remained at the center of the analytic tradition. In his logic of relations, Peirce independently achieved the bonanza of expressive power that Russell saw in Frege’s logic. But what did his successor pragmatists make of that achievement? Particularly in contrast to what Russell made of Frege, it would seem from a later vantage point that an opportunity was missed. James had little interest in logic and wrote almost nothing about it—in striking contrast to his Hegelian colleague Josiah Royce, who saw in the algebraic constructions of Alfred Bray Kempe (whom he had learned about from Peirce) a tool with which he hoped to solve the riddle of how to elaborate spatio-temporal relations from a purely conceptual basis.19 The logic 19. See Bruce Kuklick’s discussion of this fascinating late project in his Josiah Royce: An Intellectual Biography (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1985).

21

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Dewey wrote his late, important book about was unrecognizable as such to those of his readers in 1938 whose paradigm of logic was to be found in the works of Frege, Russell, and Carnap.20 The only pragmatist whose concern with logic matched and was recognizable as continuing that tradition was the homegrown neo-Kantian C.   I. Lewis, the founder of twentiethcentury modal logic, who saw his own work as an attempt to synthesize the approaches of his teachers James and Royce, and in turn passed on pragmatist ideas to his students Quine and Nelson Goodman. Again, although James was surely by far the best writer among the classical triumvirate, his philosophical interests focused on experience rather than language. Dewey did write a lot about language—what he called the “tool of tools.”21 He has many good things to say about the relations between meaning and use (particularly in chapter 5 of Experience and Nature). But he, too, would not be recognizable to later philosophers of language as one of their number. As for science, it is not the case that James and Dewey did not care about science and the philosophy of science. But where Peirce focused on the natural sciences, James’s contributions lay on the side of psychology, and Dewey’s main interests were in the social sciences. By “the linguistic turn,” here I mean putting language at the center of philosophical concerns and understanding philosophical problems to begin with in terms of the language one uses in formulating them. But there is a more specific significance one can take language to have. By ‘lingualism’ (compare: ‘rationalism’)—admittedly an unlovely term—I shall mean commitment to understanding conceptual capacities (discursiveness in general) in terms of linguistic capacities. Michael Dummett epitomizes a strong version of this order of explanation: We have opposed throughout the view of assertion as the expression of an interior act of judgment; judgment, rather, is the interiorization of the external act of assertion.22

20. Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, reprinted in The Later Works of John Dewey, Volume 12: 1938, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008). 21. Experience and Nature, in The Later Works of John Dewey, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 1:134. 22. Frege: Philosophy of Language, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p.  361. 22

INTRODUCTION

A weaker version of lingualism claims only that language is a necessary condition of discursiveness, not that it is a sufficient condition that can at least in principle be made intelligible independently of talk about discursive commitments. It would be a mistake to conclude that the pragmatists after Peirce missed the linguistic turn. In fact, Dewey at least is clearly a (weak) lingualist about the discursive. What the pragmatists did was develop these thoughts within the context of a different approach to understanding the crucial phenomenon of language—one that was complementary to that of the analytic tradition. The Frege-Russell-Carnap approach to language takes as its paradigm artificial, formal, logistical languages articulated by explicit rules. The American pragmatists, like their fellow fundamental pragmatists—the Heidegger of Being and Time and the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations—address natural languages, which they think of anthropologically, as aspects of the natural history of a certain kind of being. Their focus to begin with is not on meaning, but on use: on discursive practices, skills, and abilities, on what one must be able to do in order to count as saying or thinking that things are thus-and-so. We can think of these two approaches as distinguished by their preferred order of explanation. The question is: which comes first, semantics (the theory of meaning) or pragmatics (the theory of use)? The logistical tradition begins with semantics: stipulating the association of some kind of semantic interpretants (paradigmatically, extensions) with basic expressions and deriving associations for more complex ones, or stipulating basic rules of derivation and then seeing what consequence relation they jointly determine. The question of how it is appropriate to use expressions governed by those rules is then deferred to a subsequent pragmatic theory, to which this current of thought has not traditionally devoted a great deal of attention. By contrast, the pragmatist tradition begins with pragmatics: an account precisely of how it is appropriate to use expressions. It is also true that the pragmatists have not traditionally given a lot of attention to the specifics of the semantics that goes with such a pragmatics. But I think we can see two principles that govern fundamental pragmatists’ understanding of the relation between pragmatics and semantics. They express complementary aspects of the sense of the pragmatism in the philosophy of language that consists in insisting that semantics must answer to pragmatics. First is what I have called “methodological pragmatism”: the principle that the point of associating meanings, extensions, contents, or other semantic interpretants with linguistic expressions 23

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is to codify (express explicitly) proprieties of use. I think we can discern commitment to this methodological principle even in a semantic nihilist such as the later Wittgenstein. For one thing he means by saying that language is a motley is that so many and so various are the uses of any expression that there are no realistic prospects of systematizing them by associating some underlying meaning, on the basis of which one hopes then uniformly to derive the various uses (say, by one rule for declarative uses, another for imperative ones, another for hypothetical, and so on). If the variety of uses is open-ended and unsurveyable, then there is no prospect for semantic theorizing in philosophy, precisely because the only point of such theorizing would be systematizing those proprieties of use. The second principle governing the pragmatists’ understanding of the sense in which semantics should answer to pragmatics is what I shall call “semantic pragmatism.” This is the principle that in a natural language, all there is to effect the association of meanings, contents, extensions, rules, or other semantic interpretants with linguistic expressions is the way those expressions are used by the linguistic practitioners themselves. Formal semantics for artificial languages can content itself with the explicit stipulation, by the semantic theorist working in a semantic metalanguage, of such rules or associations of meanings. Philosophical semantics for natural languages is obliged to say what it is about the practices the users of those expressions engage in or the abilities they exercise, in virtue of which they should be understood as governed by those rules, or as conferring those meanings. Semantic pragmatism is a kind of use-functionalism about meaning (the classical American pragmatists being comprehensive functionalists, in the sense I have given that qualification). Again, given his practice, I think commitment to such a principle can be attributed even to such a semantic pessimist as the later Wittgenstein, precisely in virtue of his criticism of various traditional ways of thinking about meaning or content for their failure to live up to this requirement. And that sort of strategy is equally evident in Dewey’s criticisms of traditional intellectualist and mentalistic conceptions. The combination of methodological and semantic pragmatism, the two senses in which semantics can be taken to answer to pragmatics, broadly construed, might be called “linguistic pragmatism.” It is one natural way of applying fundamental pragmatism to systematic theorizing about language. One of the clearest and most emphatic proponents of that conjunctive doctrine among recent philosophers is Dummett—though of course he does not associate it with pragmatism. 24

INTRODUCTION

Quine carries forward this general pragmatist tradition in the philosophy of language when he criticizes Carnap’s two-stage picture of language, according to which first meanings are stipulated, and only subsequently are theories formulated to determine which of the sentences with those meanings are true. That division of labor makes sense for artificial languages. But to understand natural languages, we have to understand how the one thing we do, use the language, can serve at once to settle the meanings of our expressions and determine which of them we take to be true. Linguistic practice is not illuminated by postulating language/theory or meaning/belief distinctions of the Carnapian kind. As Quine famously concludes an early essay on Carnap: The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences . . . It is a pale grey lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones.23 In fact, though he did not know it, in making this pragmatist point against Carnap, Quine was recapitulating one of the important ways in which Hegel moves beyond Kant. For Kant, all our empirical activity, cognitive and practical, is discursive activity. In endorsing judgeable contents and practical maxims, knowers and agents are applying concepts. Though further concepts may be developed thereby, for instance by judgments of reflection, one must always already have concepts in order to be apperceptively aware of anything at all. Hegel thought Kant was uncharacteristically, but culpably, uncritical about the origins of our primordial concepts. The locus of those concepts, Hegel thought, lies in language, not in some kind of experience understood as prelinguistic. Language, he said, is the existence (Dasein) of Geist—that is, of the whole normatively articulated discursive realm.24 Compare Dewey: Language in its widest sense—that is, including all means of communication such as, for example, monuments, rituals, and formalized arts—is the medium in which culture exists and through which it is transmitted.25 23. “Carnap on Logical Truth,” in The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, ed. P. A. Schilpp (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1963), p.  406. 24. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.   V. Miller (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1977), §§652, 666. 25. Logic: the Theory of Inquiry, in Later Works, 12:28. 25

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For Hegel, no less than for Quine and Dewey, we must understand linguistic practices as both instituting conceptual norms and applying them.26 It is precisely by applying concepts in judging and acting that conceptual content is both made more determinate, going forward, and shows up as always already determinate (in the only sense in which conceptual contents are determinate), looking back.27

VI. Rationalism and Pragmatism Pragmatists who have made the linguistic turn take it that the most important feature of the natural history of creatures like us is that we have come into language: come to engage in distinctively linguistic practices and to exercise distinctively linguistic abilities.28 This is both an ontogenetic and a phylogenetic achievement. Understanding it requires, at a minimum, addressing three large, interconnected kinds of question. These concern the issues of demarcation, emergence, and leverage. The demarcation question is definitional. How are linguistic practices and abilities (and hence, the lingualist about discursivity claims, discursive ones) to be distinguished from nonlinguistic ones? The emergence question concerns the requirement that any account of language that aspires to being naturalistic in even a very broad sense must explain the possibility of the transition from nonlinguistic to linguistic practices and abilities. How are the abilities we can see in non- or prelinguistic creatures recruited, deployed, 26. Here are some characteristic passages: It is therefore through culture that the individual acquires standing and actuality. His true original nature and substance is the alienation of himself as Spirit from his natural being. . . . This individuality moulds itself by culture into what it intrinsically is. (Phenomenology of Spirit, §489) What, in relation to the single individual, appears as his culture, is the essential moment of the substance itself, viz. the immediate passage of the [mere] thoughtform of its universality into actuality; or, culture is the simple soul of the substance by means of which, what is implicit in the substance, acquires an acknowledged, real existence. The process in which the individuality moulds itself by culture is, therefore, at the same time the development of it as the universal, objective essence, i.e. the development of the actual world. Although this world has come into being through individuality, it is for self-consciousness immediately an alienated world which has the form of a fixed and solid reality over against it. (Phenomenology of Spirit, §490)

27. Introduction to Essays in Experimental Logic, in Middle Works, 10:364. 28. We have come to see that there are substantial, potentially controversial presuppositions involved in characterizing this in terms of language learning. 26

INTRODUCTION

and transformed so as to amount to linguistic ones? The leverage question is how to characterize and explain the massive qualitative difference in capacity between linguistic and nonlinguistic creatures: the bonanza of new abilities and possibilities that language opens up for those that do make the transition. One of the principal accomplishments of the classical American pragmatists is the attention they gave to the problem of emergence, to displaying the continuities that make it naturalistically intelligible that species and individuals should be able to cross the boundary separating the prelinguistic from the linguistic. In Experience and Nature, Dewey sets the emergence problem this way: Upon the whole, professed transcendentalists have been more aware than have professed empiricists of the fact that language makes the difference between brute and man. The trouble is that they have lacked a naturalistic conception of its origin and status.29 In his Logic, he expands on this thought: Any theory that rests upon a naturalistic postulate must face the problem of the extraordinary differences that mark off the activities and achievements of human beings from those of other biological forms. It is these differences that have led to the idea that man is completely separated from other animals by properties that come from a non-natural source. . . . The development of language (in its widest sense) out of prior biological activities is, in its connection with wider cultural forces, the key to this transformation. The problem, so viewed, is not the problem of the transition of organic behavior into something wholly discontinuous with it—as is the case when, for example, Reason, Intuition and the A priori are appealed to for explanation of the difference. It is a special form of the general problem of continuity of change and the emergence of new modes of activity—the problem of development at any level.30 29. Experience and Nature, in Later Works, 1:134. 30. Logic: the Theory of Inquiry, in Later Works, 12:50. This emphasis on continuity does not lead Dewey to ignore the differences that language makes, as he states the following: The evidence usually adduced in support of the proposition that lower animals, animals without language, think, turns out, when examined, to be evidence that when men, organisms with power of social discourse, think, they do so with the 27

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The hallmark of an untenable intellectualism, he thinks, is an appeal to an inexplicable saltation: the ultimately miraculous dawning of consciousness or self-consciousness, the infusion of reason into a brute. The desire to provide a more satisfactory response to the emergence question than that sort of cartesian approach can offer binds Dewey together with the later Wittgenstein in a common enterprise. The point of many of the toy Sprachspiele the latter describes is to show us how features of discourse that might seem mysterious in a sense that calls for the invocation of a cartesian discontinuity can be exhibited already in practices we can see that intelligent nonlinguistic hominids could master. When we turn to the demarcation question, however, I think the pragmatists disappoint. What is distinctive of linguistic (or discursive) practices? What sets them apart from prelinguistic or nondiscursive practices? It is one’s answer to this question that ties together the emergence question with the leverage question. For the criteria of adequacy for answers to those questions turn on its being the same kind of practices and abilities about which one has told a story of nonmiraculous emergence, in answering the first question, that one then must show can intelligibly account for the huge differences in cognitive and practical capabilities that come with the advent of language, in answering the second question. We need not assume that the emergence of language is an all-or-none thing. One might, with Wittgenstein, want to deny that there is or need be a bright line separating the discursive from the nondiscursive, in favor of a familyresemblances sort of view. A pluralist-incrementalist response to the demarcation question makes the emergence question easier to answer, but makes the leverage question correspondingly more difficult. I do not think Dewey’s meta-instrumentalist “tool of tools” line can be made to work to bring the emergence and leverage issues into harmony—but I have argued that elsewhere and will not rehearse my complaints here.31 Apart from that, he seems to offer only vague remarks about language as enhancing

organs of adaptation used by lower animals, and thus largely repeat in imagination schemes of overt animal action. But to argue from this fact to the conclusion that animals think is like concluding that because every tool, say a plow, originated from some pre-existing natural production, say a crooked root or forked branch, the latter was inherently and antecedently engaged in plowing. The connection is there, but it is the other way around. (Experience and Nature, in Later Works, 1:215)

31. Experience and Nature, in Later Works, 1:134. I discuss this approach in chapters 1 and 2. 28

INTRODUCTION

the possibilities of co-operation and making it possible to rise above the individual standpoint.32 I cannot here address the all-important leverage question.33 But the demarcation question is prior. After all, if one is going to say how Geist precipitates out of nature and how it transforms sentient organisms into sapient ones, one should try to say what it is. The challenge is to offer satisfactory responses to both the emergence question and the leverage question. Focusing on just one of them makes it too easy. In the passage above, Dewey says in effect that the neo-cartesian intellectualists make the leverage question too easy to respond to, by ignoring (or making it impossible to address) the question of emergence. I have just accused him of making the complementary mistake. In any case, it is clear that the hinge that connects the issues of emergence and leverage is the question of demarcation. For the challenge is to show that the same phenomenon that one has accounted for the emergence of can leverage sentience into sapience. So demarcating the realm of linguistic or discursive practices and abilities is an absolutely essential element of the philosophical project I have been describing. I want to close with a suggestion as to one way fundamental pragmatists (those committed to understanding discursive intentionality as a kind of practical intentionality) who are weak lingualists about discursiveness (take engaging in linguistic practices as a necessary condition of deploying concepts)—a class I take to include at least Peirce, Dewey, the early Heidegger, and the later Wittgenstein—might answer the demarcation question, and so determine definite criteria of adequacy for responses to the leverage question. My idea is that pragmatism can usefully be combined with a rationalist criterion of demarcation of the linguistic—and hence of 32. I have in mind passages such as this one: The importance of language as the necessary, and, in the end, sufficient condition of the existence and transmission of non- purely organic activities and their consequences lies in the fact that, on one side, it is a strictly biological mode of behavior, emerging in natural continuity from earlier organic activities, while, on the other hand, it compels one individual to take the standpoint of other individuals and to see and inquire from a standpoint that is not strictly personal but is common to them as participants or “parties” in a conjoint undertaking. It may be directed by and towards some physical existence. But it first has reference to some other person or persons with whom it institutes communication—the making of something common. Hence, to that extent its reference becomes general and “objective.” (Logic: the Theory of Inquiry, in Later Works, 12:52)

33. I do address it in Making It Explicit and Between Saying and Doing. 29

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discursiveness in general. By this I mean that what distinguishes the linguistic practice in virtue of which we are sapient and not merely sentient beings is its core practices of giving and asking for reasons. A necessary and sufficient condition of being a discursive practice is that some performances are accorded by it the pragmatic significance of claimings or assertings. Semantically, claimable or assertible contents are propositional contents. Syntactically, what expresses those contents is declarative sentences. This combination of pragmatic, semantic, and syntactic features is the iron triangle of discursiveness. The pragmatist order of explanation of course starts with the pragmatics. The thought is that to have the pragmatic significance of an assertion is to be able both to serve as a reason and potentially to stand in need of reasons. So propositional contents are those that can play the role both of premise and of conclusion in inferences. Discursive practice is accordingly understood as essentially inferentially articulated. In Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, the normative status with which Dewey’s pragmatics begins, in terms of which the semantics is to be articulated, is assertibility. I have argued on the one hand that to be recognizable as engaging in a practice of making claims and (so) giving and asking for reasons, a community must distinguish at least two normative statuses: commitment and entitlement to commitments, and further, that splitting the single status of assertibility into these two aspects pays huge benefits semantically.34 Specifically, one can use them to define three kinds of material inference: commitment-preserving inferences, entitlementpreserving inferences, and incompatibility entailments. The core of my strong inferentialist version of rationalistic pragmatism lies in the claim that conceptual content consists in inferential role in a broad sense, articulated along those three dimensions.35 Of course the underlying rationalist criterion of demarcation of the discursive could be worked out in other ways. Commitment to a rationalist criterion of demarcation of the discursive requires disagreeing with Wittgenstein: language does have a down34. See chapter 6 of my Articulating Reasons (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 35. For the distinction between weak, strong, and hyperinferentialism, see the Introduction to Articulating Reasons. Inferentialism is just one form that rationalism might take. For there is more to reason than inference. Making distinctions, formulating definitions, and producing constructions are all rational processes, alongside drawing conclusions. 30

INTRODUCTION

town, and it is the practice of making claims and giving and asking for reasons. Other things we can do with language are ancillary to and parasitic upon these essential core functions. On this view, most of the toy practices Wittgenstein calls “Sprachspiele” are vocal, but not genuinely verbal, not really language games. The builder’s utterances in the opening ‘Slab’ practice, for instance, should not be understood as imperatives. They are vocalizations that have the pragmatic significance of making certain responses on the part of the assistant appropriate. But genuine imperatives do that by saying what it is that ought to be done. In this full-blooded sense, no practice can contain the genuine imperative “Bring me a slab” unless it also contains declaratives such as “This is a slab.” Wittgenstein and Dewey are together in rejecting rationalist criteria of demarcation of the linguistic (and hence the discursive)—indeed, in resisting offering any answer at all to the demarcation question. In Dewey’s case, the idea of a rationalist pragmatism would probably have struck him as a contradictio in adjecto. But rationalism as I have described it is not a form of the intellectualism that stands opposed to fundamental pragmatism. It is wholly compatible with understanding discursive intentionality as a kind of practical intentionality: specifically, as the kind that includes practices of making claims and giving and asking for reasons. It aims to say what structure a norm-instituting social practice must have in order properly to be understood as such a practice. It offers a specific proposal for how to understand the kind of practical knowing how that adds up to cognitive claiming that: it is practical mastery of inferential relations and transitions. And answering the demarcation question about discursive practice in a rationalist manner neither makes it impossible in principle to answer the emergence question nor obliges one to give a cartesian answer to it. I began my story about pragmatism in an unconventional place: with Kant’s normative criterion of demarcation of the discursive, that is, with his idea that what is distinctive of judgments and intentional actions is that they are things we are responsible for. They are kinds of commitments. But that normative criterion of demarcation was also a rationalist criterion of demarcation. For he understood that responsibility, that commitment, as a rational responsibility, as the justificatory responsibility to have reasons for one’s theoretical and practical commitments, the ampliative responsibility to acknowledge their inferential consequences, and the critical responsibility to revise commitments that are incompatible, that is, that serve as reasons against one another. Kant’s pragmatism consists in his strategy 31

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of understanding semantic content in terms of what apperceiving subjects must do to fulfill those responsibilities. Judgeable contents have to stand to one another in relations of material consequence and incompatibility: the inferential relations that constrain the process of synthesizing a constellation of commitments and entitlements exhibiting the distinctive unity of apperception. Wittgenstein’s example teaches that we should follow Hegel’s steps toward naturalizing Kant’s notion of norms by understanding norms as implicit in social practices. Normative statuses of responsibility and commitment are social statuses: creatures of our practical attitudes of taking or treating each other as responsible and committed. The move beyond Dewey and Wittgenstein to a rationalist, more specifically inferentialist pragmatism that I am recommending is accordingly also a return to pragmatism’s roots in German Idealism. As Kant synthesized empiricism and rationalism, and the pragmatists synthesized naturalism and empiricism, I am suggesting that a way forward is to synthesize pragmatism and rationalism—in the form of the rationalist response to the demarcation question.

VII. This Volume In this Introduction I have retrospectively rationally reconstructed a line of thought that leads from certain strands of thought prominent in German Idealism to the core ideas of classical American pragmatism, and from there to a hoped-for synthesis of those ideas with a revived rationalism about discursiveness. Much of my own work has taken the shape of an effort to work out one form of such a rationalist pragmatism. This book is conceived as a kind of companion volume to my book Reason in Philosophy.36 That one expatiated on the rationalist side of this program, and its antecedents in Kant and Hegel, and this one on the pragmatist side, and its antecedents in American pragmatism. My aim in the body of this book is to fill in some missing pieces from the story I have sketched in the Introduction. Chapter 1 offers further discussion of the distinctive synthesis of naturalism and empiricism I see as the common thread linking Peirce, James, and Dewey. Chapter 2 further develops some of the analytic apparatus introduced here, and expands on the way I see classical pragmatism as significant for contemporary philosophy of language. Both of these chap36. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. 32

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ters also discuss critically an instrumentalist line of thought about discursive norms that has been a perennial target of critics, who often attribute to the American pragmatists uncharitably flatfooted and reductive formulations of it. I think some version of the instrumentalist thought is undoubtedly present in James and Dewey, and that they themselves fall into ways of talking that invite the misunderstandings of which they complain. I am concerned not only to show what is wrong with instrumentalism about fundamental semantic norms, even in its more nuanced forms— particularly as addressed to language as whole (the “tool of tools” view)— but also to argue that it is an optional, late-coming, peripheral accretion to the important and workable ideas that really do lie at the core of the pragmatists’ philosophical contribution. Chapters 3 through 5 discuss two of the most important recent pragmatists: Wilfrid Sellars and Richard Rorty. I am concerned to show why and in what sense Sellars should be thought of as a pragmatist—a term he did not himself use to characterize his views—by applying the analytic apparatus of Chapter 2 to some of his most central arguments.37 Of course Rorty, my Doktorvater at Princeton in the mid-seventies, did call himself a pragmatist. Chapters 4 and 5, together with the discussion of antirepresentationalism in Chapter 7, present my characterization and the first stages of a critical assessment of his pragmatist views. Chapters 6 and 7 address contemporary versions of pragmatism. Chapter 6 is an introduction to the program of analytic pragmatism—a way of synthesizing the insights of the pragmatist tradition, especially the later Wittgenstein, with those of twentieth-century analytic philosophy—that I develop in Between Saying and Doing. It presents a new metatheoretic conceptual apparatus, meaning-use analysis, as epitomized in meaninguse diagrams. Although it has many other applications, most centrally in the analysis of the expressive roles characteristic of logical, modal, normative, and intentional vocabularies, one principal application of the apparatus is to clarify methodologically the relations between meaning and use that I explore and exploit in Making It Explicit. Chapter 7 is a first coming to grips with the deep and original way Huw Price has found to something very like Rorty’s anti-representationalist pragmatism, and an attempt to locate my own project by triangulating with respect to these two landmarks. 37. This chapter can usefully be read alongside the discussion of Sellars in chapter 12 of Tales of the Mighty Dead. 33

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With the exception of Chapter 6, this book does not expound and develop my version of the rationalist pragmatism whose pedigree is reconstructed in this Introduction. For that, and to find out what I have to say about how the question of emergence and the question of leverage look in the light of an inferentialist version of the rationalist answer to the question of demarcation, readers must look to my other works, especially Making It Explicit and Between Saying and Doing. The point of this discussion of various pragmatists and their arguments, together with the elaboration of rationalist themes in its companion Reason in Philosophy, is rather to place that enterprise in philosophical space so as to indicate how one might come to think it worthwhile to pursue such a project in the first place.

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1 CLASSICAL AMERICAN PRAGMATISM

The Pragmatist Enlightenment—and Its Problematic Semantics

I. A Second 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 Russell and 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 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?” James and Dewey then show up as adopting this conception of a practical reason and extending it to the theoretical sphere of epistemology, semantics, and the philosophy of mind. Rationality in general appears as instrumental intelligence: a generalized capacity for getting what one wants. From this point of view, the truth is what works; knowledge is a species of the useful; mind and language are tools. The instinctive materialism and anti-intellectualism of uncultivated common sense is given refined expression in the form of a philosophical theory. The utilitarian project of founding morality on instrumental reason is notoriously subject to serious objections, both in principle and in practice. But it is rightfully seen as the progenitor of contemporary rational choice theory, which required only the development of the powerful mathematical tools of modern decision theory and game theory to emerge (for better or worse) as a dominant conceptual framework in the social sciences. Nothing comparable can be said about the subsequent influence of 35

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the pragmatists’ extension of instrumentalism to the theoretical realm. In American philosophy, the heyday of Dewey quickly gave way to the heyday of Carnap, and the analytic philosophy to which Carnap’s logical empiricism gave birth supplanted and largely swept away its predecessor. Although pragmatism has some prominent recent heirs and advocates— most notably, perhaps, Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam—there are not many contemporary American philosophers working on the central topics of truth, meaning, and knowledge who would cite pragmatism as a central influence in their thinking.1 But classical American pragmatism can also be seen differently, as a movement of world historical significance—as the announcement, commencement, and first formulation of the fighting faith of a second Enlightenment. For the pragmatists, like their Enlightenment predecessors, reason is the sovereign force in human life. And for the later philosophes, as for the earlier, reason in that capacity is to be understood on the model provided by the forms of understanding distinctive of the natural sciences. But the sciences of the late nineteenth century, from which the pragmatists took their cue, were very different from those that animated the first Enlightenment. The philosophical picture that emerged of the rational creatures who pursue and develop that sort of understanding of their surroundings was accordingly also different. Understanding and explanation are coordinate concepts.2 Explanation is a kind of saying: making claims that render something intelligible. It is a way of engendering understanding by essentially discursive means. There are, of course, different literary approaches to the problem of achieving this end, different strategies for doing so. But there are also different operative conceptions of what counts as doing it—that is, of what one needs to do to have done it. It is a change of the latter sort (bringing in its train, of course, a change of the former sort) that the pragmatists pursue. For the original Enlightenment, explaining a phenomenon (occurrence, state of affairs, process) is showing why what actually happened had to happen that way, why what is actual is (at least conditionally) necessary. By contrast, for the new pragmatist Enlightenment, it is possible to explain what remains and is acknowledged as contingent. Understanding whose paradigm is Newton’s physics consists of univer1. In Chapter 7 I discuss an important Anglophone exception: Huw Price. 2. This claim is discussed further in Chapter 7, under the heading of the “entanglement thesis.” 36

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sal, necessary, eternal principles, expressed in the abstract, impersonal language of pure mathematics. Understanding whose paradigm is Charles Darwin’s biology is a concrete, situated narrative of local, contingent, mutable practical reciprocal accommodations of particular creatures and habitats. Again, the nineteenth century was “the statistical century,” which saw the advent of new forms of explanation in natural and social sciences. In place of deducing what happens from exceptionless laws, it puts forth a form of intelligibility that consists in showing what made the events probable. Accounts in terms both of natural selection and of statistical likelihood show how observed order can arise, contingently, but explicably, out of chaos—as the cumulative diachronic and synchronic result respectively of individually random occurrences.

II. Two Models of Nature and Science The mathematical laws articulating the basic order of the universe were for enlightened thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the ultimate given, the foundational unexplainable explainers—structural features of things so basic that this explanatory residue might even (as it did for the transitionally postreligious Deists) require and so justify a final, minimal, carefully circumscribed, nostalgic appeal to the Creator. Charles Sanders Peirce, the founding genius of American pragmatism, elaborated from the new selectional and statistical forms of scientific theory a philosophical vision that sees even the laws of physics as contingently emerging by selectional processes from primordial indeterminateness. They are adaptational habits, each of which is in a statistical sense relatively stable and robust in the environment provided by the rest. The old forms of scientific explanation then appear as special, limiting cases of the new. The now restricted validity of appeal to laws and universal principles is explicable against the wider background provided by the new scientific paradigms of how regularity can arise out of and be sustained by variability. The “calm realm of laws” of the first Enlightenment becomes for the second a dynamic population of habits, winnowed from a larger one, which has so far escaped extinction by maintaining a more or less fragile collective self-reproductive equilibrium. It is not just that we cannot be sure that we have got the principles right. For the correct principles and laws may themselves change. The pragmatists endorse a kind of ontological fallibilism or mutabilism. Since laws emerge only statistically, they may change. No Darwinian adaptation is final, for the 37

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environment it is adapting to may change—indeed must eventually change, in response to other Darwinian adaptations. And the relatively settled, fixed properties of things, their habits, as Peirce and Dewey would say, are themselves to be understood as such adaptations. The pragmatists were naturalists, but they saw themselves confronting a new sort of nature, a nature that is fluid, stochastic, with regularities the statistical product of many particular contingent interactions between things and their ever-changing environments, hence emergent and potentially evanescent, floating statistically on a sea of chaos. The science to which this later Enlightenment looked for its inspiration had changed since that of the earlier in more than just the conceptual resources that it offered to its philosophical interpreters and admirers. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the impact of science was still largely a matter of its theories. Its devotees dreamed of, predicted, and planned for great social and political transformations that they saw the insights of the new science as prefiguring and preparing. But during this period those new ways of thinking were largely devoid of practical consequences. They were manifestations, rather than motors, of the rising tide of modernity. By the middle of the nineteenth century, though, technology, the practical arm of science, had changed the world radically and irrevocably through the Industrial Revolution. From the vantage point of established industrial capitalism, science appeared as the most spectacularly successful social institution of the previous two hundred years because it had become not only a practice, but a business. Its practical successes paraded as the warrant of its claims to theoretical insight. Technology embodies understanding. The more general philosophical lessons the pragmatists drew from science for an understanding of the nature of reason and its central role in human life accordingly sought to comprehend intellectual understanding as an aspect of effective agency, to situate knowing that (some claim is true) in the larger field of knowing how (to do something). The sort of explicit reason that can be codified in principles appears as just one, often dispensable, expression of the sort of implicit intelligence that can be exhibited in skillful, because experienced, practice—flexible, adaptable habit that has emerged in a particular environment, by selection via a learning process. Like their Enlightenment ancestors, the pragmatists were not only resolutely naturalist in their ontology, but also broadly empiricist in their epistemology. For both groups, science is the measure of all things—of

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those that are, that they are, and of those that are not, that they are not.3 And for both, science is not just one sort, but the very form of knowing: what it knows not, is not knowledge. But in place of the atomistic sensationalist empiricism of the older scientism (which was later rescued and resuscitated by the application of powerful modern mathematical and logical techniques, to yield twentieth-century logical empiricism), the pragmatists substituted a more holistic, less reductive, practical empiricism. Both varieties give pride of place to experience in explaining the content and rationality of knowledge and agency. But their understandings of that concept are very different, corresponding to the different characters of the science of their times. The older empiricism thought of the unit of experience as self-contained, self-intimating events: episodes that constitute knowings just in virtue of their brute occurrence. These primordial acts of awareness are then taken to be available to provide the raw materials that make any sort of learning possible (paradigmatically, by association and abstraction). By contrast to this notion of experience as Erlebnis, the pragmatists (having learned the lesson from Hegel) conceive experience as Erfahrung. For them the unit of experience is a test-operate-test-exit cycle of perception, action, and further perception of the results of the action. On this model, experience is not an input to the process of learning. Experience is the process of learning: the statistical emergence by selection of behavioral variants that survive and become habits insofar as they are, in company with their fellows, adaptive in the environments in which they are successively and successfully exercised. (This is the sense of ‘experience’, as Dewey says, in which the job ad specifies “Three years of experience necessary.”) The rationality of science is best epitomized not in the occasion of the theorist’s sudden intellectual glimpse of some aspect of the true structure of reality, but in the process by which the skilled practitioner coaxes usable observations by experimental intervention, crafts theories by inferential postulation and extrapolation, and dynamically works out a more or less stable but always evolving accommodation between the 3. This formulation of the doctrine—which has come to be known as his scientia mensura—is due to Wilfrid Sellars, in his masterwork, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, reprinted with an introduction by Richard Rorty and a study guide by Robert Brandom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p.  83. Hereafter EPM.

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provisional results of those two enterprises. The distinctive pragmatist shift in imagery for the mind is not from mirror to lamp, but from telescope and microscope to flywheel governor. These new forms of naturalism and empiricism, updated so as to be responsive to the changed character and circumstances of nineteenthcentury science, meshed with each other far better than their predecessors had. Early modern philosophers notoriously had trouble fitting human knowledge and agency into its mechanist, materialist version of the natural world. A Cartesian chasm opened up between the activity of the theorist, whose understanding consists in the manipulation of algebraic symbolic representings, and what is thereby understood: the extended, geometrical world represented by those symbols. Understanding, discovering, and acting on principles exhibited for them one sort of intelligibility, matter moving according to eternal, ineluctable laws another. On the pragmatist understanding, however, knower and known are alike explicable by appeal to the same general mechanisms that bring order out of chaos, settled habit from random variation: the statistical selective structure shared by processes of evolution and of learning. That structure ties together all the members of a great continuum of being stretching from the processes by which physical regularities emerge, through those by which the organic evolves locally and temporarily stable forms, through the learning processes by which the animate acquire locally and temporarily adaptive habits, to the intelligence of the untutored common sense of ordinary language users, and ultimately to the methodology of the scientific theorist—which is just the explicit, systematic refinement of the implicit, unsystematic but nonetheless intelligent procedures characteristic of everyday practical life. For the first time, the rational practices embodying the paradigmatic sort of reason exercised by scientists understanding natural processes become visible as continuous with, and intelligible in just the same terms as, the physical processes paradigmatic of what is understood. This unified vision stands at the center of the pragmatists’ second Enlightenment.

III. Pragmatism and Romanticism A number of these master ideas of classical American pragmatism evidently echo themes introduced and pursued by earlier romantic critics of the first Enlightenment. Pragmatism and romanticism both reject spectator theories of knowledge, according to which the mind knows best when it inter40

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feres least and is most passive, merely reflecting the real. Knowledge is seen rather as an aspect of agency, a kind of doing. Making, not finding, is the genus of human involvement with the world. They share a suspicion of laws, formulae, and deduction. Abstract principle is hollow unless rooted in and expressive of concrete practice. Reality is revealed in the first instance by lived experience, in the life world. Scientific practice and the theories it produces cannot be understood apart from their relation to their origin in the skillful attunements of everyday life. Pragmatists and romantics accordingly agree in rejecting universality as a hallmark of understanding. Essential features of our basic, local, temporary, contextualized cognitive engagements with things are leached out in their occasional universalized products. Both see necessity as exceptional, and as intelligible only against the background of the massive contingency of human life. Both emphasize biology over physics, and see in the concept of the organic conceptual resources to heal the dualistic wound inflicted by the heedless use of an oversharp distinction between mind and world. The European Enlightenment had seen the “natural light of reason” as universal in the sense of shared, or common, so that what one disinterested, selfless scientist could add as a brick to the edifice of knowledge, another could in principle do as well. By contrast, the pragmatists, looking at the division of labor in what had become a modern industrial economy, saw the enterprise of reason as social in a more genuine, articulated, ecological sense, in which the contributions of individuals are not interchangeable or fungible, in which each has potentially a unique contribution to make to the common enterprise, which requires many different sorts of skills, responses, ideas, and assessments, all collectively serving as the environment in which each adapts and evolves. Here too, they made some common cause with the romantics on some general issues, while offering their own distinctive blend of rationalism, naturalism, and Darwinian-statistical scientism as a way of filling in those approaches. Nonetheless, pragmatism is not a kind of romanticism. Though the two movements of thought share an antipathy to Enlightenment intellectualism, pragmatism does not recoil into the rejection of reason, into the privileging of feeling over thought, intuition over experience, or of art over science. Pragmatism offers a conception of reason that is practical rather than intellectual, expressed in intelligent doings rather than abstract sayings. Flexibility and adaptability are its hallmarks, rather than mastery of unchanging universal principles. It is the reason of Odysseus rather than of Plato. But both are thought of as part of the natural 41

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world—in the sense in which natural science is acknowledged to have final authority over claims about nature. The pragmatists are also materialists— though theirs is Darwinian, rather than Newtonian materialism. Evolutionary natural history aside, the biology that inspires them is the result of the shift of attention (largely effected in Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century) from anatomy to physiology, from structure to function. The climate of German romanticism may have provided an encouraging environment for this development, but the vitalistic biology that provided their organic metaphors was only a by-then-embarrassing, prescientific precursor of the recognizably modern sort of biology pursued in the German laboratories in which William James trained. In fact, romanticism had almost no direct influence on American pragmatism—another point of contrast with the various forms of nineteenth-century materialism in Europe. There was an indirect influence, through Hegel’s idealism (which was particularly important for Peirce and Dewey)—but Hegel’s rationalism mattered as much for them as his romanticism. The transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson is another conduit for idiosyncratically filtered and transfigured romantic ideas. It was pervasive, though perhaps not dominant, in the Boston milieu in which Charles Peirce, William James, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (who was a pragmatist, even though he disavowed the label because he associated it with James’s “sentimental” attempt to find a place for religion in the modern worldview) were first acculturated, and it clearly affected their thought in complex ways. But the pragmatists thought of themselves as continuing the Enlightenment philosophical tradition of René Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Kant—all of whom thought that being a philosopher meant being a philosopher of science, understanding above all what the new science had to teach us not only about the world, but about us knowers of it and agents in it. The advances of nineteenth-century science were to provide the corrective needed to remedy the conceptual pathologies to which the giants of the Enlightenment had fallen prey. Those advances, properly understood, would make it possible to reconcile its central rationalist and materialist impulses in an irenic empiricist naturalism. Although pursuing some elements of the anti-Enlightenment agenda of romanticism by quite other means, the pragmatists always thought of themselves as offering friendly amendments in support of the basic philosophical mission of rethinking inherited ideas of rationality, understanding, agency, and self, in the light of the very best contemporary scientific understanding of the natural world. 42

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IV. Pragmatism and America Pragmatism was a distinctively American movement of thought in ways far more important than its immunity to romantic impulses, however. We have been taught just how much it owes to the peculiarities of its native cultural and historical soil by an important book: Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America.4 The pragmatists themselves tended to situate and motivate their views by reference to the specifically philosophical tradition. They were, after all (with the exception of Holmes), at least at some point in their careers, professional philosophers (in Peirce’s case, a chronically unemployed professional philosopher—but the point remains). Their interpreters, also professional philosophers, have generally followed them in this practice. Menand’s great achievement is to widen the cultural focus and increase the depth of field of the scene in which they show up for us. The context Menand provides extends far beyond the sort of philosophical and scientific considerations sketched by way of introduction above. He shows how much more there is to the history of ideas than just their intellectual history. The rise of mass democracy, the ascendancy of industrial capitalism, the institutional professionalization of university education and the high culture more generally, and the decentralization and shift of the cultural center of gravity of the country away from its original seat in Boston are all shown so to shape the development of pragmatism as to stamp it indelibly as a specifically American phenomenon. Menand deftly portrays the relations between these grand historical forces and the particularities, peculiarities, and personalities of the ideaempowered pragmatists who are his heroes. A principal limb of his argument concerns the significance of the experience of the Civil War on the birth and growth of pragmatism. Northern politics before the war was driven by the disagreement between abolitionists and unionists. Abolitionists saw slavery in terms of absolute moral principles: slavery was evil, and so the country had to pay whatever price was required to eliminate it—including, if necessary, splitting the South off so as to keep the Union pure. The unionists, by contrast, acknowledged slavery as an evil, but urged that means be found to eliminate it more gradually, over a period of decades, so as to acknowledge the economic and cultural interests of white Southerners, and keep the 4. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. 43

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Union whole. The South’s secession rendered the unionists’ arguments moot, by uniting both parties as patriots of the Union. The attack on Fort Sumter made unavoidable a war that the bulk of the abolitionists, no less than the unionists, had neither anticipated nor desired. The horrific violence that ensued changed forever the thinking of the young generation of Harvard men who went off idealistically to fight. Holmes, who had been a staunch abolitionist, was severely wounded more than once. James was not a combatant, but two of his younger brothers were, and one was seriously wounded. Peirce, like the others, had friends and classmates maimed and killed. They saw the Civil War as above all a colossal failure of American democracy. The democratic institutions on which we pride ourselves had proven themselves incapable of dealing with the high-stakes moral and economic issue of slavery. Politically unresolvable disputes degenerated into military conflict. Holmes, closest to the fighting, was also the most explicit about the lessons he drew from his experience, and about their effect on the lifelong course of his thought. As Menand puts it: “The lesson Holmes took home from the war can be put in a sentence. It is that certitude leads to violence” (p. 61). But Menand also makes a persuasive case that roughly the same dynamic moved the other founder members of the Metaphysical Club to draw the same general conclusion. What had choked democracy was inflexible, uncompromising commitment to principles. What was needed was a different attitude toward our beliefs: a less ideologically confident, more tentative and critical attitude, one that would treat them as the always provisional results of inquiry to date, subject to experimental test and revision in the light of new evidence and experience, as permanently liable to obsolescence due to altered circumstances, shifting contexts, or changes of interest. Though the point is not put this way in the book, we are to see the American Civil War as playing a role in shaping the pragmatist Enlightenment comparable to that played by the wars of religion for the earlier European Enlightenment. Menand makes a cumulatively plausible case for how the climate of ideas in which pragmatism arose was shaped by the experience of passionate political convictions overwhelming democratic institutions and leading with seeming inevitability to the sort of senseless slaughter Holmes experienced (and happened to survive) at Ball’s Bluff, Antietam, and the Bloody Angle of Spotsylvania. But he is not very clear about just what sort of connection he envisages between this historical impetus and the contents of the philosophical theories the pragmatists came to hold. 44

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A number of issues need to be separated. For it could be that while pragmatism would not have arisen without the influence of the war, that merely necessary condition is of little help in understanding the thought to which it gave rise. After all, one of the crucial material conditions that made possible jazz—another distinctively American cultural phenomenon—was the flood of cheap, war surplus trumpets and military band instruments left over from the same war. But knowing that will not tell one much about what makes the music special.

V. Is Pragmatism about Believing or What Is Believed? To begin with, the view that immediately emerges from consideration of the failure of antebellum (more or less) democratic political practices concerns how one holds basic, action-orienting beliefs. What rules out compromise, accommodation, and reciprocal adaptation is the sort of unshakable conviction that brooks no opposition, admits no qualification, ignores the possibility or significance of collision with other important principles, and is reckless of the practical consequences of its absolutism for the possibly worthy aims of others and the stability of the framework institutions of the community. But the pragmatists did not just draw conclusions about the act of believing—roughly, that fallibilism is a better attitude than fanaticism. The centerpiece of their philosophical theory was an account of the contents that are believed or believable. To squeeze the most explanatory juice out of Menand’s fascinating and instructive story, we need to know something about how an understanding of the act or attitude of believing might be thought to connect with and inform an understanding of the contents of those acts or attitudes. Again, even at the level of how beliefs should be held, the immediate lesson seems to concern political beliefs: the ones we use to orient our practical undertakings, in particular those that involve cooperation or decisions about what we all shall do. It is not obvious that considerations bearing on our assessment of admissible, desirable, or defensible features of such practical political commitments carry over to apply as well to theoretical and doxastic commitments—from claims about what we should do to claims about how things are in the natural world. If, as Menand persuasively argues, the pragmatists’ ideas were in fact motivated by the spectacle of abstract, absolute political principles proving indigestible by democratic institutions and leading to the most violent sort of conflict resolution imaginable, are they not guilty of illegitimately 45

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extending a lesson appropriate to the practical sphere of deciding what we ought to do, to the theoretical sphere of deciding what beliefs are true? Here is a way one might think about such a move. In the practical sphere of morality, the European Enlightenment had taught us that we need not think of our moral principles as deriving their authority from their conformity to (mirroring of) an antecedent, eternal, nonhuman ontological (theological) reality. We could and should instead think of them as products of our own rational activity—as something for which we must ourselves ultimately take responsibility. As Kant put the point in “What Is Enlightenment?” it is by acknowledging that responsibility that humanity passes from its adolescent age of self-imposed tutelage by paternal authority into the autonomous maturity of its adulthood. A second Enlightenment might then repeat that lesson, only now on the theoretical side. Doing that would be seeing norms for belief, no less than for action, as our doing and our responsibility, as not needing to reflect the authority of an alien, nonhuman Reality, which comes to seem as mythical, dispensable, and ultimately juvenile a conception as Old Nobodaddy came to seem to the érudits. Richard Rorty, inspired by Dewey and James, has been urging just such a conception of what would be required to finish the work of the first Enlightenment.5 He argues that the move from thinking of moral norms in terms of divine commandments to thinking of them in terms of social compacts should be followed by one from thinking of the truth of belief in terms of correspondence with reality to thinking of it in terms of agreement with our fellows. Such a conception is vulnerable to the charge that in so assimilating the theoretical to the practical, the distinction between intentions and beliefs is being elided. Intentions have a world-to-mind direction of fit: the aim is for the world to conform to our attitudes. Beliefs have a mindto-world direction of fit: the aim is for our attitudes to conform to the world. In her classic work Intention, G. E. M. Anscombe illustrates the difference with a parable of a man shopping from a list, followed by a detective assigned to write on his own list everything the man buys.6 The two lists exhibit the two different directions of fit. If what is bought does 5. See Rorty’s essay “Universality and Truth,” chap. 1 in Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert Brandom (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2000). I discuss this aspect of Rorty’s views further in Chapter 4. 6. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1957. Reprinted by Harvard University Press, 2000. 46

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not match what is on the lists, in the first case the error lies in what is bought, and in the second it lies in what is written (cf. lamp shadows and mirror reflections). The first Enlightenment can then be seen as liberating us from inappropriate use of a theoretical, spectatorial model of the practical—as though our reasoning about what we ought to do should, like our reasoning about how we ought to believe things are, reflects an antecedent reality whose authority settles its correctness. The old picture used the wrong direction of fit for practical matters. But surely it would be a misunderstanding of this lesson simply to turn the old picture on its head by treating the theoretical as though it had the direction of fit, and so the structure of authority and responsibility, appropriate to the practical. But the pragmatists do not do that. They reject the dualism of a practical sphere with just one direction of fit and theoretical sphere with just the complementary one. They start with the idea of a cyclical process of intervening and learning, of perception of an initial situation, action in it, and perception of the result, leading to new action (including the tweaking both of means and goals), with the loop repeated until it converges or is abandoned. This is what they call ‘experience’. Talk of belief and intention makes sense for them only as the abstraction of phases or aspects from such a process. Our beliefs have practical consequences and our intentions have theoretical conditions. In the undertaking of actual inquiries and practical projects one does not find one direction of fit without the other. At this level, the pragmatists are not modeling the theoretical on the practical as the tradition had conceived those categories, but reconceptualizing both in terms of ecological-adaptational processes of interaction of organism and environment of the sort epitomized by evolution and learning. What about the other charge, that the pragmatists slide from a view about how beliefs should be held (tentatively, provisionally, negotiably) to a view about what beliefs are (something like practical coping strategies)— from an insight into the attitude of believing to a claim about the contents believed? Once again the pragmatists (in keeping with the Hegelian roots of Peirce’s and Dewey’s thought) seek to reconceptualize belief and meaning so as to resist a dualism of force and content, doing and thought, pragmatics and semantics. Their strategy may be thought of as coming in two pieces. First, believing or knowing that things are thus-and-so (the category of explicit, statable, theoretical attitudes characteristic of us) is to be understood in terms of skillful knowing how to do something (the category of implicit, enactable, practical capacities characteristic of our intelligent 47

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but not rational mammalian cousins and ancestors).7 Their question is what you have to be able to do in order to count as having conceptually contentful beliefs. And their answer will look to the role of those beliefs in practical reasoning, to their capacity to serve as reasons for action. For their second move is to offer a kind of functionalism about the propositional contents of beliefs, an account of meaning in terms of use. The contents of beliefs and the meanings of sentences are to be understood in terms of the roles they play in processes of intelligent reciprocal adaptation of organism and environment in which inquiry and goal-pursuit are inextricably intertwined aspects. Functionalist (and most recently, teleosemantic) strategies in the philosophy of mind dominate the second half of the twentieth century. But the pragmatists deserve to be thought of as having pioneered them.

VI. Four Mistakes of Instrumentalist Pragmatism If that is not generally recognized, it is in part because the pragmatists did not achieve the sort of clarity of methodological self-consciousness that would have allowed them to separate the general strategy of functionalism about the relations between pragmatics and semantics (what is done with words and what they mean, or the role of beliefs in the behavioral economies of believers and the contents of those beliefs) from the specific conceptual tactics they employed to pursue that strategy. And there are some real problems with their ideas at this more specific level. For they offer an instrumentalist semantics, understanding content in terms of success conditions rather than truth conditions.8 This is not a silly idea. But after a century of intensive subsequent work in philosophical semantics, we are in a position to be much clearer about the criteria of adequacy such accounts must answer to, and some of the sorts of ways they can go wrong. From this contemporary vantage point, we can see that the instrumentalist version of the pragmatist program involves four distinct mistakes.

7. This is what in the Introduction and Chapter 2 I call “fundamental pragmatism.” 8. In Chapter 2 I call this thesis “instrumental pragmatism” (or sometimes, “vulgar pragmatism”). There are cruder and more sophisticated versions of this thesis. Recall the discussion of “comprehensive holist functionalism” in Section IV of the Introduction. 48

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First, in thinking about the functional role of belief in reciprocal interactions and attunements between believers and their environments, the pragmatists look only downstream, to the practical consequences of beliefs. That is to say that they look only at the role of beliefs as premises in practical inferences. They do not also look upstream, to the antecedents of belief, to their role as conclusions of inferences, or as the results of other processes of belief formation. In this regard, they simply invert the exclusive emphasis on the origin of belief in experience characteristic of the semantics of traditional empiricism. But each of these one-sided approaches to semantics leaves out the crucial complementary aspect of the functional role of beliefs. For whether one thinks of the role of belief as a node in a network of matter-of-factual causal relations, or of normative inferential ones—corresponding to two flavors of functionalism—one must look both to antecedents and to consequences. The meaning conferred on an expression by its role in a language game can be identified with the pair of its circumstances of appropriate application, specifying when it is properly uttered, and its appropriate consequences of application, specifying what properly follows from its utterance.9 Neither one by itself will do, for sentences can have the same circumstances of application and different consequences of application, or the same consequences of application and different circumstances of application. In either case they will have different meanings. As an example of the first kind, we could regiment the use of ‘foresee’ so that the sentence “I foresee that I will write a book about Hegel,” is appropriately asserted (the belief it expresses appropriately acquired) in just the same circumstances as “I will write a book about Hegel.” But they have different meanings, for different things follow from them, as is clear if we think about the very different status of the two conditionals “If I will write a book about Hegel, then I will write a book about Hegel,” and “If I foresee that I will write a book about Hegel, then I will write a book about Hegel.” The first, stuttering inference is as secure as could well be. The truth of the second depends on how good I am at foreseeing (and whether I am hit by a bus). To see the second point, notice that one could know what follows from the claim that someone is responsible for an action, or that the action is immoral or sinful, without for that reason counting as understanding the claims or concepts in question (grasping the meaning of the words), if 9. I discuss this way of thinking about semantics further in chapter 1 of Articulating Reasons (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 49

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one knew nothing at all about the circumstances in which it was appropriate to make those claims or apply those concepts. Empiricist, verificationist, reliabilist, and assertibilist semantic theories are defective because they ignore the consequences of application of expressions in favor of their circumstances of application. Pragmatist semantic theories are defective because they make the complementary mistake of ignoring the circumstances in favor of the consequences. In fact, both aspects are essential to meaning. The second mistake instrumentalist pragmatists can make is to look only at the role of beliefs in justifying or producing actions.10 But their role in justifying or producing further beliefs is equally important in articulating their content, and there is no good reason to think that the latter can be reduced to or fully explained in terms of the former. Trying to define the contents of internal states just in terms of relations to outputs (even—taking on board the previous point—in terms of outputs and inputs) to the system is a broadly behaviorist strategy. And one of the things we have learned by chewing these things over in the last forty years or so is that taking into account also the relations of internal states to each other yields a much more powerful and plausible account. This is precisely the surplus explanatory value of functionalism over behaviorism in the philosophy of mind. Though the general considerations that motivate the pragmatists approach are recognizably functionalist, when it came to working out their ideas, the pragmatists did so in behaviorist terms because the various distinctions and considerations in the vicinity had not yet been sorted out. Even if these two difficulties with the pragmatists’ instrumentalist semantics are put aside, they face a third. For in seeking to move from (the success or failure of) actions to the contents of beliefs, they were ignoring the necessary third component in the equation: desires, preferences, goals, or norms. Your action of closing your umbrella underwrites the attribution of a belief that it has stopped raining only against the background of the assumption that you desire to stay dry. If instead you have the Gene Kelly desire to sing and dance in the rain, the significance of that action for a characterization of the content of your belief will be quite different. 10. “Peirce’s Principle,” that the meaning of a claim is the difference that adopting it would make to what one does, is one formulation that invites this one-sided way of thinking. At various points James and Dewey do repudiate this narrow reading of their instrumentalism. But other texts invite the reading. 50

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And the point is fully general. What actions beliefs rationalize or produce depends on what desires, aims, or pro-attitudes they are conjoined with.11 The conditions of the success of our actions depend on what we want just as much as they do on what we believe. Contemporary rational choice theory incorporates this insight. Coupling this fundamental observation with the insight that the semantic contents of beliefs and desires are also and equally up for grabs (contrary to the rational choice approach, which takes these for granted as inputs to its process) leads Donald Davidson to his sophisticated interpretivist successor to narrowly pragmatist approaches to semantics. It is clear in retrospect that without some such structural emendation, the pragmatist strategy cannot work. The fourth problem is intimately connected with the third. For although the pragmatists failed to appreciate the significance of the fact that desires can vary independently of beliefs, they did not simply ignore desires. Rather, they equated the success of actions with the satisfaction of desires, and wanted to attribute to the beliefs that conduced to satisfaction and hence success a special desirable property: their successor notion to the classical concept of truth. In their sense, true beliefs were those that conduced to the satisfaction of desires. But the notion of desire and its satisfaction required by their explanatory strategy is fatally equivocal. It runs together immediate inclination and conceptually articulated commitment in just the way Wilfrid Sellars criticizes, for beliefs rather than desires, under the rubric “the Myth of the Given.”12 For on the one hand, desires are thought of as things like itches and thirst: one can tell whether desires in this sense are satisfied just by having them. If one is no longer moved to do something, the desire is satisfied. If—bracketing the previous point—one could infer from the success of an action in satisfying a desire in this sense to the truth of a belief, the pragmatist semantic strategy would be sound. The idea is to make that transition by exploiting the role of beliefs and desires in practical reasoning: in inferences leading 11. In chapter 2 of Articulating Reasons, I argue for an inferential construal of the expressive role of statements of preference or pro-attitude, and of normative vocabulary generally. But this reconstrual does not affect the point that there is a further element in play, besides beliefs and actions or intentions, whose variability undercuts the possibility of any straightforward inference from things done to things believed. See also “What Do Expressions of Preference Express?” in Practical Rationality and Preference: Essays for David Gauthier, ed. Christopher Morris and Arthur Ripstein (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 11–36. 12. See EPM, p.  33. 51

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to the formation of intentions and the performance of actions. But the desires that, along with beliefs, play a role in rationalizing actions are not like itches and thirst. They have the same sort of conceptually explicit propositional contents that beliefs do. I cannot tell just by having raw feels whether my desire that the ball go through the hoop is satisfied— never mind my desire that the engineering problem has been solved or that the chances of achieving world peace have been increased. For finding out whether desires of that sort have been satisfied just is finding out whether various claims are true: that the ball has gone through the hoop, that the engineering problem has been solved, or that the chances of achieving world peace have been increased. Satisfaction of the sorts of desires that are elements of reasons for actions gives us no immediate, nonconceptual point of entry into the conceptual realm of contents of beliefs. The only reason to think that explanatory ground is gained by starting with satisfaction of desires (success of actions) in attempting to explain the truth of beliefs—that is, the only reason to pursue the instrumental strategy in semantics—is that one has conflated the two sorts of desire. For what is needed to make it work is something that is like an itch in that one can tell whether it has been scratched without needing to decide what is true, and like a conceptually articulated desire in that it combines inferentially with propositionally contentful beliefs to yield reasons for action. But nothing can do both.13 The traditional early modern conception of experience as Erlebnis wanted to have it both ways. (This difficulty is orthogonal to those caused by eliding what Sellars called “the notorious ‘ing’/‘ed’ distinction” between acts of experiencing and the contents experienced.) It is just at this point that dispositionalcausal and inferential-normative functionalisms part company. The challenge behind calling givenness a myth is a question Kant taught us to ask: does the experience (or whatever) merely incline one (dispositionally)? Or does it justify one in making a claim, drawing a conclusion? From our privileged vantage point a century or more later, then, we can see that the pragmatists’ instrumentalist semantic strategy for explaining credenda in terms of agenda, and so their theory of meaning and truth is fundamentally flawed. This is of course not to say that they did not have any good ideas, or that they did not make any progress, or that 13. Dewey at least appreciated and articulated this crucial distinction (as he shows in Art and Experience)—but even he did not manage to think through its consequences for fundamental structural features of his guiding methodology. 52

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we do not still have something to learn from them. I think we also know by now that the semantic strategy of the logical empiricism that succeeded pragmatism in American academic philosophy is unworkable, and that its conceptions of meaning and truth are also wrong. The point is that forging, from the insights of either, a theory that fares better by the contemporary standards that were achieved with great effort in no small part by criticizing those earlier attempts, will require substantial selection, supplementation, and reconstrual.

VII. What Is Progressive in Classical Pragmatism It is a useful exercise to divide the pragmatists’ motivations and conceptual responses to those motivations into two categories: the larger, orienting, strategic commitments; and the more local, executive, tactical ones. (Example of the genre: Descartes’ ontological semantics generically divides the world into representings and representeds. He then filled in that picture with a theory of representings as incorrigible, immediately self-intimating episodes, and of representeds as extended and moving. Even given that way of setting things up, it is a nice question whether to treat the fact that his paradigm of the representing/represented relation is the relation between discursive algebraic equations and the extended geometrical figures they specify in his algebraic coordinate geometry as a generic, framing commitment or as part of the filling-in of such a picture.) My criticisms primarily address the latter: the more detailed ways in which the pragmatists tried to entitle themselves to the more sweeping framework commitments. Those framing commitments—the ones I take it they seek to entitle themselves to by doing the more detailed work—are by and large admirable. Among the large features of their thought that I take to be progressive are these: • They were Darwinian, evolutionary naturalists, aiming to reconstrue the world, us, and our knowledge of the world in the terms made available by the novel explanatory structures characteristic of the best new science of their time. • In the service of a renovated empiricism to go methodologically with that naturalism in ontology, they developed a concept of experience as Erfahrung rather than Erlebnis: as situated, embodied, transactional, and structured as learning, a process rather than a state or episode. Its slogan might be “No experience 53

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•

•

•

•

without experiment.” Representing and intervening were for them two sides of one conceptual coin—or less imagistically, reciprocally sense-dependent concepts concerning aspects of processes exhibiting the selectional, adaptational structure common to evolution and learning. They appreciated the explanatory priority of semantic over epistemological issues, which had been one of Kant’s great lessons. So they seek to understand content in terms of experience (as they construe it), that is, in terms of role in learning. They reject an orienting goal thought of as achievement of knowledge as a static, permanent state, in favor of thinking of it as a dynamic process of practical understanding as adaptation. They understood the normative character of semantic concepts: that they must underwrite assessments of correctness and incorrectness, truth and falsity, success and failure. The semantic instrumentalism criticized in the foregoing is the more specific strategy the pragmatists adopted in their attempt to give a naturalistic account of this normative dimension of semantic concepts. In semantics, they tried to develop nonmagical, indeed, scientific theories of content, by contrast to ‘ideas’ theories, which are constructively responsive to skeptical worries about the success of ideas’ reference to things in the world— intentionality—but not about its purport. The pragmatists tried to figure out what it is we do—something continuous with what preconceptual critters can do—that adds up to thinking or knowing something, even unsuccessfully. They were broadly functionalists in thinking about the contents of the concepts that articulate intentional states, looking to the role the contentful states play in the whole synchronic, developing behavioral economy of an organism in order to understand the concepts they involve. While reason and the sort of intelligence that ultimately issues in scientific theories and technologies are given pride of place in their picture of us, they move decisively beyond the intellectualism and platonism that had plagued the first Enlightenment, by privileging practical knowing how over theoretical knowing that in their order of explanation. 54

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At this level of very general explanatory strategy, what one misses most in the pragmatists—at any rate, what most separates them from us—is that they do not share the distinctively twentieth-century philosophical concern with language, and with the discontinuities with nature that it establishes and enforces. The dominant philosophical lineages of the century are soaked in a sense of the centrality of language: both the HusserlHeidegger-Gadamer line and the structuralist-poststructuralist lines that come together in Jacques Derrida, on the one hand, and the Frege-Russell line that goes through Carnap to Sellars, Quine, and Davidson, and to Wittgenstein and Dummett on the other. This is partly because of the pragmatists’ assimilationism about the conceptual: their emphasizing continuities between concept users and organic nature. That emphasis, too, has good credentials, and I think it is fair to say that even now we have not yet sorted out the tensions between naturalistic assimilationism and normative exceptionalism about the discursive practices most distinctive of us. But I also take it that the philosophical way forward from the ideas of the American pragmatists must be a linguistic pragmatism, allied with the later Wittgenstein and the Heidegger of division 1 of Being and Time.

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2 ANALYZING PRAGMATISM

Pragmatics and Pragmatisms

I. Introduction Pragmatism can be thought of narrowly: as a philosophical school of thought centered on evaluating beliefs by their tendency to promote success at the satisfaction of wants. Its paradigmatic practitioners were the classical American triumvirate of Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. But pragmatism can also be thought of more broadly: as a movement centered on the primacy of the practical, initiated already by Kant, whose twentieth-century avatars include not only Peirce, James, and Dewey, but also the early Heidegger, the later Wittgenstein, and such figures as Quine, Sellars, Davidson, Rorty, and Putnam. I think that the broader version of pragmatism is much more important and interesting than the narrower one. But I also think that an understandable tendency to bring the pragmatist tradition into relief by emphasizing features distinctive of that narrower conception has made it difficult to bring the broader one into focus. In this chapter, I want to say something about the relations between the two. I will start by distinguishing a number of commitments of different sorts that shape pragmatism in the broader sense. I will then try to say how pragmatism in the narrower sense might be thought to fit into this constellation of ideas. I will close by arguing against the utility of the model of language (and thought generally) as a kind of tool, which is characteristic of the narrower construal of pragmatism.

II. Pragmatics and Semantics Philosophers approach language from at least two quite different directions. Language can be seen as a kind of practice or activity, a kind of doing. What is most prominent from this point of view is language use— 56

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which falls into place as an aspect of the natural history of certain kinds of organisms. We are encouraged to think of ourselves as language-using animals in much the same sense in which we are (to pick an example not wholly at random) tool-using animals. Contrasting with this anthropological Wittgensteinean approach is a semantic Tarskian approach to language. Here the emphasis is not on the use of linguistic expressions, but on their content or meaning—not on the activity of saying, but on what is said.1 We can distinguish these approaches as focusing respectively on pragmatics and on semantics. Using the terminology this way, pragmatics is the systematic or theoretical study of the use of linguistic expressions, and semantics is the systematic or theoretical study of the contents they express or convey. This way of using the expression ‘pragmatics’ is different from some standard contemporary ones. According to one such use, the topic of pragmatic theory is the semantics of expressions whose meaning varies with circumstances of use: paradigmatically, indexicals and demonstratives.2 According to another common contemporary usage, pragmatics studies the ways in which the broadly economic demands of efficient communication in the face of the potentially differing expectations of the parties to a conversation explain conventional practices of understanding one another. Here a paradigm is Gricean implicatures. The more inclusive usage I am recommending and employing understands pragmatics as the study of Fregean force generally: of the moves one can use utterances to make in language games, encompassing the study of locutionary and illocutionary as well as perlocutionary force. A paradigmatic undertaking of a general theory of speech acts and practices of this sort would be trying to say what one should be understood as doing in making a claim or assertion. It is possible to pursue the pragmatic and the semantic theoretical enterprises independently of one another. One might think, with some 1. It is important not to confuse the general distinction between Wittgensteinean/Tarskian approaches with specific, more or less reductive versions of them (e.g., language use as modeled on tool use, content as modeled on representation). 2. Not, oddly, also anaphoric expressions such as pronouns. I think this is for largely historical reasons (the assimilation of anaphoric pronouns to bound variables, which are treated in the strictly semantic part of the theory) and that this commitment has led to various sorts of distortions and misunderstandings—particularly of the role of deictic expressions. I discuss this issue in chapter 7 of Making It Explicit (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), hereafter MIE. 57

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Wittgensteineans, that properly appreciating the variety of uses of expressions found in actual practice entails giving up the idea of a unitary conception of meaning somehow structuring them all. One might think, with some Tarskians, that actual usage is scarcely enlightened by an appreciation of semantics. The idea is that since we so often do not know what our terms refer to or what the facts are, learning from semantics about when it would in a semantic sense be correct to apply various expressions (for instance, when the claims made would be true) just does not tell the theorist much about how practitioners in fact are disposed to use them. Views that in these ways see pragmatics and semantics as autonomous disciplines wholly independent of one another represent extremes on the contemporary scene, however. It is much commoner for those who study linguistic practice and those who study content and meaning to assert systematic connections between their topics.3 ‘Pragmatism’, as I understand and shall use the term, is a generic expression that picks out a family of views asserting various senses in which practice and the practical may be taken to deserve explanatory pride of place. One more determinate class of such views concerns the relations between pragmatics and semantics. In this more specific sense, a view deserves the appellation ‘pragmatism’ insofar as it insists that semantic theory must answer in various ways to pragmatic theory—for instance, by asserting some sort of explanatory priority of pragmatics over semantics. Many sorts of priority are possible, so there are many sorts of pragmatism as well. We will do well to begin with some analytic work, to sort out some of the important variants. In what follows my aim will be to delineate and distinguish various views—with perhaps a few words about what motivates and attracts their proponents—rather than to endorse or argue for the views discussed.

III. Methodological Pragmatism Here is a thesis characteristic of a kind of pragmatism: the point of talking about the content expressed or the meaning possessed by linguistic  expressions is to explain at least some features of their use. This claim expresses commitment to what we might call ‘methodological 3. My account of the relation between semantics and pragmatics in this sense is elaborated in Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008), hereafter BSD. 58

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pragmatism’.4 Pragmatism of this sort sees semantics as answering to pragmatics in the sense that pragmatic theory supplies the explanatory target of semantic theory—and hence is the ultimate source of the criteria of adequacy according to which the success of that theoretical enterprise is to be assessed.5 Here is a characteristic statement of Dummett’s: [A] semantic theory which determines the truth-conditions of sentences of a language gets its point from a systematic connection between the notions of truth and falsity and the practice of using those sentences.6 Methodological pragmatism in this sense might be used as a criterion of demarcation distinguishing genuinely semantic theories from others. For example, consider Alfred Tarski’s topological semantics for the first-order predicate calculus. Its underlying idea is that quantifiers can be understood as corresponding to topological closure operations. Mathematically, it takes the form of a representation theorem: exhibiting a structure-preserving mapping relating sentences to objects in a topological domain. Now twentieth-century mathematics is replete with representation theorems, but most of them are not properly thought of as underwriting specifically semantic claims. The Stone Representation Theorem, for instance, which correlates operations on Boolean algebras with set-theoretic operations on power sets does not (at least by itself) constitute a semantics for anything. What is it that makes Tarksi’s representation theorem, but not Stone’s, qualify as a semantics? (The fact that one of the structures it relates is a formal language may be necessary, but is nowhere near sufficient.) Methodological pragmatism supplies an answer to this question. It is that Tarski’s mapping reconstructs a crucial dimension of the use of expressions of firstorder quantification theory: namely, the inferential consequence relation (and hence the property of logical theoremhood). His theory qualifies as a semantic theory precisely because and insofar as it serves the purposes of codifying this central feature of the practice of using quantificationally complex expressions. 4. The phrase is often used in other ways, as it is for instance in Nicholas Rescher’s book of that name (New York: New York University Press, 1977). 5. Which is not to say the sole source. Semantic theory might well supply additional, purely internal, criteria of adequacy: simplicity, compositionality, computability, and so on. 6. Frege: Philosophy of Language, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993) p.  413. Hereafter FPL. 59

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Methodological pragmatism might also be appealed to in arguing that semantic theory ought not appeal to certain sorts of theoretical objects. For instance, the overall argumentative strategy Quine pursues in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” can be understood as having this form.7 For there he finds wanting semantic theories that have as a central element a distinction between two sorts of true sentences: analytic ones, supposedly true in virtue of meaning alone, and synthetic ones, whose truth depends in addition on how things are in the extralinguistic world. He does so by asking what feature of the use of those sentences it is that is to be explained by this theoretical distinction. Canvassing various alternatives, such as immunity from revision, he concludes that there is nothing about linguistic practice that is explained by the semantic distinction in question. And on that basis he rejects semantic theories that treat it as central. (This argument may or may not succeed; my point is just that the strategy it deploys is recognizably that here denominated ‘methodological pragmatism’.)8 Methodological pragmatism might usefully be compared with the principle that the point of postulating theoretical objects is to explain the behavior of observable ones. Such a commitment to what we might call methodological empiricism could also be appealed to as a criterion of demarcation, or in criticizing a particular theory. Thus, judicial astrology— trying to explain the vicissitudes of personal fortune on the basis of theoretical properties of the stars and planets—would at least count as an empirical theory, albeit a bad one. But if the only reason the theologian could give us for caring about which doctrine of the Trinity is correct is that unless we know that we cannot know who the true Pope is, then his theory would be disqualified, as not even aiming at the explanation of anything observable. 7. Reprinted in W.V.O. Quine, From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953; second, revised edition 1961). 8. One who accepts the methodological pragmatism governing the argumentative strategy, but rejects the conclusion, is Wilfrid Sellars. He responds by pointing to a feature of the use of expressions that he thinks is usefully talked about in terms of the distinction between claims true (or inferences good) in virtue of relations among concepts and those only to be explained by appeal to matters of fact. His candidate is the difference between counterfactually robust claims, and those that are not: All the coins in my pocket are copper. It does not follow that if that nickel were in my pocket, it would be copper, while it does follow that if this penny were not in my pocket, it would still melt at 1,083°C. 60

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In the context of some auxiliary hypotheses, methodological pragmatism appears as a special case of methodological empiricism. Thus if one both believes that semantic properties are not observable and restricts one’s account of linguistic practice or the use of language to features that are observable, then a commitment to methodological empiricism will entail a commitment to methodological pragmatism.

IV. Semantic Pragmatism A related, but I believe distinguishable, sort of pragmatism takes as its point of departure the plausible view that it is the way practitioners use expressions that makes them mean what they do. After all, just as noises— that is, apart from the way we use them, the role they play in our practices— our utterances do not mean anything. The noise ‘horse’ could mean anything (or nothing) at all, depending on how it came to be used. This truism at least motivates a methodological requirement on the semantic theorist: that whenever she associates with expressions some semantically relevant whatsis as its content or meaning, she undertakes an obligation to explain what it is about the use of that expression that establishes in practice the association between it and the semantically relevant whatsis. Thus a semantic theory that tells us to associate sets of possible worlds with utterances of declarative sentences as the propositions they express should be understood as issuing a promissory note to the effect that a pragmatic story can be told about what features of the use of those sentences (or their component words) it is in virtue of which it is related both to any set of possible worlds, and in particular to that set, rather than to a slightly different one.9 This sort of responsibility can be particularly onerous for a semantic theory that appeals to semantic interpretants that are either abstract objects or very finely individuated. (Some possible-worlds theorists have both problems.) I take it that the arguments Saul Kripke attributes to Wittgenstein show that individuation can cause a problem in this context, quite apart from issues of abstractness.10

9. This is a challenge to which David Lewis responds directly, in “Languages and Language,” reprinted in his Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). 10. In Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: An Elementary Exposition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). 61

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We might call this sense in which one can take it that semantics must answer to pragmatics ‘semantic pragmatism’. One way to see that it is different from what I called “methodological pragmatism” is to think about the analogy with the relation between theoretical and observational vocabulary. We are accustomed to the idea that observations underdetermine theory. To say that is to say that the theorist is precisely not obliged to be able in every case to say what observations do or would entitle her to apply a certain theoretical term or to endorse a certain theoretical claim.11 Further, to insist on an account of what features of the use of an expression it is that confer on it the content associated with it—that in that sense establish the semantic association—is not yet to say, as Dummett sometimes does, that one ought to be restricted in one’s choice of semantic interpretants to features of the use of the expressions so interpreted.12 Such a restriction would be the analogue of instrumentalism

11. This is a delicate point. I follow Sellars (see Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, with an introduction by Richard Rorty and study guide by Robert Brandom [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997], pp.  79ff and 162–166) in taking the distinction between theoretical and observable entities to deal not with the kind of thing they are, but only with our mode of access to them. A concept counts as theoretical at a given time if its only conditions of appropriate application (according to the practices that govern it at that point in time) are inferential: it cannot be applied in the making of a report noninferentially elicited from an observer by the perceptible presence of the state of affairs in question. But what is theoretical in this sense at one time can become observable at another: Pluto was originally postulated inferentially, but later became observable. It did not alter its ontological status thereby, but only its epistemic relation to us. One can be a realist in this sense about theoretical entities and still maintain that the point of postulating merely inferentially accessible entities is to explain the antics of observable ones. 12. Here is a representative passage: [M]ost philosophical observations about meaning embody a claim to perceive . . . a simple pattern: the meaning of a sentence consists in the conditions for its truth and falsity, or in the method of its verification, or in the practical consequences of accepting it. Such dicta cannot be taken to be so naive as to involve overlooking the fact that there are many other features of the use of a sentence than the one singled out as being that in which its meaning consists: rather, the hope is that we shall be able to give an account of the connection that exists between the different aspects of meaning. One particular aspect will be taken as central, as constitutive of the meaning of any given sentence . . . ; all other features of the use of the sentence will then be explained by a uniform account of their derivation from that feature taken as central. (FPL, pp.  456–457; emphasis added)

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about theoretical entities: insisting that one not postulate anything unobservable in order to explain observable goings-on. We might call such a view “semantic pragmatism in the narrow sense,” contrasting that with the broad sense defined above. The differences between what I’ve called ‘methodological’ and ‘semantic’ pragmatism are subtle.13 For instance, one might read Quine in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” as asking what it is about the use of sentences in virtue of which they deserve to be semantically interpreted as true in virtue of meanings alone. That would be to read him as a semantic pragmatist, rather than as a methodological pragmatist. But there is a real difference of explanatory order between these strategic commitments. The methodological pragmatist looks at the explanation of the practice of using expressions, the subject of pragmatics, in terms of the contents associated with those expressions, the subject of semantics. The semantic pragmatist looks at the explanation of the association of contents with expressions in terms of the practice of using those expressions. While those explanations may be facets of one story, they need not be.

V. Significance of the Vocabulary in Which Use Is Specified The semantic pragmatist is in a very general sense a functionalist about content. While the meanings studied by semantics may not consist in the roles played by expressions in linguistic practice (meaning need not be identified with use), according to this view those roles must at least establish the connection between contents, meanings, or semantic interpretants, on the one hand, and linguistic expressions on the other. The semantic pragmatist’s basic insight is that there is nothing apart from the use of expressions that could establish such connections. And this is surely correct—if we construe the notion of use broadly enough. I have been talking about ‘use’ as though we all knew and agreed about what that term means. Of course that is not so. The specifications of both the varieties of pragmatism I have offered so far leave unspecified some crucial parameters. And for each of those parameters there are some values that would trivialize the claims in question.

13. The author of MIE (who might be expected to know better), for instance, does not clearly distinguish between these two sorts of methodological commitment.

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One such parameter is the vocabulary one is allowed to use in describing the practices that are the use of linguistic expressions.14 If one is allowed to use the full resources of semantic vocabulary in specifying the use—describing an operator as “used so as to express negation,” or a term as “used to refer to Leibniz”—then the requirements of semantic pragmatism will automatically be met. For in that case one can easily point to the features of the use of those expressions that establish their association with their semantic interpretants. Another such parameter is the sort of interpretant associated with expressions by semantic theory. If one picks some aspect of the use of expressions—say, assertibility conditions (on some renderings of such conditions)—as the semantic interpretants, then the requirements of methodological pragmatism will automatically be met. For in that case the relevance of semantics to pragmatics comes for free: the semantic features of the language are just a subset of the pragmatic ones.15 Typically, when philosophers of language put forward claims about the relations between pragmatics and semantics—for instance, versions of methodological or semantic pragmatism—they have in mind, at least implicitly, some sort of restrictions on the vocabulary in which pragmatic and semantic features of the language are specified. They are thinking of specifying linguistic behavior in a naturalistic vocabulary, for instance, or thinking of semantics in terms of truth conditions and reference relations. Once those presuppositions are made explicit, claims about how semantic theory must answer to pragmatic theory become substantive. Some of these specifications—and I have in mind here particularly those directed at the vocabulary one is allowed to use in describing linguistic

14. BSD uses this fact to motivate the concept of pragmatic metavocabularies: vocabularies expressively powerful enough to let one say what is it one must do in order thereby to be using some other vocabulary (to say something else). 15. Notice that according to the pragmatist theses, other claims about use will have consequences for semantics (besides just the issue of what vocabulary one is allowed to use in specifying use). For instance, if one believes that speech acts are the fundamental unit of the use of language, then the semantic interpretants associated with expressions whose utterance can be used to perform a speech act will have a certain kind of priority over the interpretants associated with expressions whose utterance is in principle only ever significant as part of the utterance of a compound expression that can be so used. (The priority of the propositional would be one consequence one might come to in this way, given some further auxiliary hypotheses.) 64

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practice—are themselves associated with varieties of pragmatism. A couple of these are considered in what follows.

VI. Fundamental Pragmatism It is characteristic of pragmatists in the broad sense to see knowing how as having a certain kind of explanatory priority over knowing that. This is one influential form taken by an insistence on the explanatory primacy of the practical over the theoretical. Explicit theoretical beliefs can be made intelligible only against a background of implicit practical abilities. Pragmatism in this sense—call it “fundamental pragmatism”—is opposed to the kind of platonistic intellectualism that seeks to explain practical abilities in terms of some sort of grasp of principles: some sort of knowing that behind each bit of know how. That sort of intellectualism was the dominant philosophical approach until at least the nineteenth century. Among the contemporary heirs of this tradition are programs in cognitive science that are committed to explaining an organism’s capacities to navigate around and cope with various environments and environmental features by postulating the presence of internal representations of those environments and features. Opposing intellectualism by seeing the capacity to know or believe that something is the case as parasitic on more primitive kinds of know how—capacities to do something that is not yet saying, thinking, or believing anything—is the basic thesis of the first part of Heidegger’s Being and Time.16 It is this fundamental pragmatism that links his thought of the twenties to Dewey’s thought of the same decade (much to Heidegger’s later chagrin).17 It is the basis of criticisms by contemporary pragmatists such as Dreyfus and John Haugeland of the project of classical artificial intelligence, which depends on being able to make explicit in the form of claims, rules, and principles, all of the practical know how that is implicit 16. See Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-world: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, div. 1 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); and my “Heidegger’s Categories in Being and Time,” Monist 66, no. 3 (1983), pp.  387–409; reprinted in Heidegger: A Critical Reader, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Harrison Hall (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1992), pp.  45–64; German translation by Reiner Ansén reprinted in Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 45, no. 4 (1997), pp.  531–549. 17. See Richard Rorty, “Overcoming the Tradition: Heidegger and Dewey,” in Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp.  37–59. 65

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in the everyday skills and capacities to cope with the environment deployed by intelligent creatures.18 One consideration that has been taken to motivate this sort of pragmatism is the kind of regress argument epitomized by Lewis Carroll’s “Achilles and the Tortoise.”19 Beliefs would be idle unless the believer could at least sometimes tell what followed from them (what else they committed the believer to) and what was incompatible with them. (Even if they might still in some sense be said to have propositional contents, those contents would not make a difference to the believer.) But distinguishing the potential beliefs that are incompatible with a given belief, and those that are its inferential consequences is a practical skill or ability: a kind of know how. This sort of ability or know how cannot be taken in every case to be codified in the form of an explicit, propositionally contentful belief (say, conditional beliefs, including conditionals whose consequent is negated), on pain of an explanatorily unproductive infinite regress. Being able explicitly to believe that p (endorse a theory) presupposes a background of practical implicit know how. An even more direct version of this argument is available to those pragmatists, like Sellars, who insist on specifically linguistic practice as essential to the capacity so much as to entertain propositions. If, as he claims, grasping a concept is practically mastering the use of a suitable word, then it is clear such mastery cannot in every case itself be explained in terms of prior grasp of a concept. Fundamental pragmatism enforces a restriction on the vocabulary a semantic pragmatist can use to describe the linguistic practices that establish the association of semantic interpretants with linguistic expressions. A semantic pragmatist who is also a fundamental pragmatist cannot use exclusively intentional vocabulary in describing the use of language. It follows that, from the point of view defined by these two strategic theoretical commitments, accounts of meaning such as that of H. P. Grice must be deemed essentially incomplete. For his account of what it is to use a linguistic expression with a certain meaning appeals only to propositionally and conceptually contentful beliefs and intentions. According to the fundamental pragmatist, such an account leaves out the implicit back18. See Hubert Dreyfus, What Computers Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), and the papers collected in John Haugeland, Having Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 19. Mind 4 (1895), pp.  278–280. 66

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ground of not explicitly conceptual abilities presupposed by the capacity to have explicitly conceptually contentful beliefs and intentions. The fundamental semantic pragmatist need not, however, be committed to the possibility of explaining the association of semantic interpretants with expressions in terms of linguistic practice specified entirely in nonintentional terms. This view might be called “reductive fundamental semantic pragmatism.” Such a reductive project (about which more will be said later) would depend on further collateral metatheoretical commitments. Fundamental pragmatism does, however, open the door for the characteristically twentieth-century view that might be called “linguistic pragmatism.”20 This is the view that engaging in specifically linguistic practices is an essential necessary condition for having thoughts and beliefs in a full-blooded sense. The view of Sellars, adverted to previously, according to which possession of a concept just consists in mastery of a word, is a cardinal instance. Davidson’s linguistic pragmatism is encapsulated in his claim that to be a believer one must be an interpreter of the speech of others.21 Dummett gives voice to an even more extreme version of this commitment: We have opposed throughout the view of assertion as the expression of an interior act of judgment; judgment, rather, is the interiorization of the external act of assertion.22

VII. Normative Pragmatics Theorists pursuing any of the varieties of pragmatist explanatory strategies considered so far must worry about what vocabulary it is appropriate to employ in pragmatic theory—that is, in specifying the practices of using linguistic expressions that i) are to be explained by semantics, according to methodological pragmatism; ii) establish the association of linguistic expressions with semantic interpretants, according to semantic pragmatism; and

20. I do not mean to deny that earlier philosophers—such as Johann Gottfried Herder and Hegel—subscribed to this view. 21. “Thought and Talk,” in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1984). 22. FPL, p.  362. 67

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iii) constitute the practical know how against the background of which alone the capacity to know, believe, or think that can be made intelligible, according to fundamental pragmatism. The suggestion concerning that vocabulary that is most important for understanding the relation between classical pragmatism and the broader tradition of pragmatism in which it is embedded is, I think, that any pragmatics whose concept of practice is a serious candidate for playing the three roles just adverted to must employ normative vocabulary. This thought has a distinguished pedigree. One of Kant’s most basic ideas is that what distinguishes our judgments and actions from the responses of merely natural creatures is that they are things we are in a distinctive way responsible for—that they involve the undertaking of commitments. He understands judging and acting as essentially discursive activities—that is, as consisting in the application of concepts. And he takes concepts to be rules: rules that specify what one has committed oneself to, what one has become responsible for, in producing a judgment or an action. They are the rules that govern assessments of the correctness of a judgment, in the light of a fact, and of a performance, in the light of an intention. Since one of the tasks of his theoretical concept of conceptual contents is to determine the conditions of correctness of practical performances of judging and acting, Kant is a methodological pragmatist.23 But his account of discursive practices is couched in a pointedly normative idiom. We owe to Frege the distinction between force and content—and so, as I have been using the terms, the distinction between pragmatics (the study of force) and semantics (the study of content). Claiming, or making a claim, is attaching to or investing in a sentence the fundamental sort of pragmatic force, namely assertional force. Frege understands assertional force in terms of a certain kind of normative assessment. Asserting a sentence is taking it to be correct in a specific sense: taking it to be true. Frege’s most basic objection to psychologistic logicians is that they do not provide the theoretical resources to fund a notion of content that can make sense of the essential dimension of normative assessment that is implicit in attaching assertional force to a sentence. Sentences (or ideas) must for them just matter-of-factually be there, like eddies in a stream, 23. This thought is expanded in the first three chapters of Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 68

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whose occurrence is not intelligible as the making of a claim, the undertaking of a commitment, the adoption of a stance toward the truth of the sentence. They cannot show how assessments of sentences as correct or incorrect in the sense of true or false get a grip on them, and hence cannot explain what we are doing in making a claim. Since he takes providing the resources to make sense of that notion of pragmatic force to be one of the central tasks of the theory of content, Frege is a methodological pragmatist. And his understanding of pragmatic force is a normative one. One of Wittgenstein’s central preoccupations in the Philosophical Investigations is with the norms implicit in linguistic practices.24 To take an expression, say the ‘plus’ of arithmetic, to have a determinate meaning is to commit oneself to the correctness of certain ways of applying it and to the incorrectness of others. To understand, or grasp the content of an intention, is to know what performances would count as correct according to it, in the sense of fulfilling it. Wittgenstein sees a pair of theoretical perils raised by these implicit practical norms. On the one hand, certain pictures of or ways of thinking about our practices can make this normative dimension seem puzzling, mysterious, or unintelligible. On the other hand, restricting the vocabulary in which we discuss our practice to resolutely nonnormative terms—discussing only regularities and dispositions to move and make noises—renders invisible the very phenomena we discuss under such rubrics as ‘meaning’, ‘understanding’, ‘assertion’, ‘belief’, and ‘intention’. The later Wittgenstein endorses fundamental pragmatism: the thesis that the attribution of intentional states with contents that can be explicitly stated in the form of propositional ‘that’ clauses (‘knowing that’, for short) is intelligible only in the context of the attribution also of practical skills and abilities (‘know how’, for short). In the context of his commitment to a normative pragmatics, this fundamental pragmatism takes a distinctive form: pragmatism about norms, or normative pragmatism. For he deploys a version of the sort of regress argument characteristic of fundamental pragmatism to draw the conclusion that norms that are explicit in the form of rules are intelligible only against a background of norms that are implicit in practices. A rule codifies a norm. It makes a distinction between what is correct and what is not correct, according to the norm it 24. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations: The German Text, with a Revised English Translation 50th Anniversary Commemorative Edition, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 1991). 69

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formulates, by saying or describing what is and is not correct. But understanding a rule, applying the concepts expressed by the words used in its formulation, is itself something that can be done correctly or incorrectly. If explicit rules are the only form that norms can take, then one would need another rule—what Wittgenstein calls an ‘interpretation’ (Deutung), a rule for applying a rule—in order for the first rule in fact to distinguish performances that are correct according to that rule from those that are incorrect according to it. That platonist or intellectualist hypothesis about norms accordingly generates a regress that makes the very idea of normative assessment unintelligible. The alternative is to acknowledge that some norms are implicit in practices—in what practitioners actually do—rather than explicit in the form of rules that say what the norm is. This pragmatism about norms is normative fundamental pragmatism.

VIII. Classical Pragmatism It should not be assumed that commitment to a normative pragmatics is incompatible with pursuing both one’s pragmatic theory and one’s semantic theory in a naturalistic spirit. Normative pragmatics is incompatible with naturalism only in the context of some sort of dualistic understanding of the relation between the normative and the natural. One might accept that the discursive practice to which methodological, semantic, and fundamental pragmatism are addressed must be susceptible to specification in normative terms—that it must make sense to distinguish performances that are correct in various senses from those that are not, that talk of what one commits oneself to or becomes responsible for by producing a speech act must be in order, and so on—without giving up hope for an ultimately naturalistic account of the applicability of such normative assessments. (Of course, a great deal will turn on what one means by ‘naturalistic’ here. But this is an issue I cannot pursue here.) I think it is useful to think of the classical American pragmatists as engaged in an enterprise that has this shape. As I read them, they are pragmatists in all of the senses I have distinguished so far.25 They manifest their endorsement of what I have called ‘fundamental pragmatism’ by giving pride of place to habits, practical skills, and abilities, to know25. One might question whether James is a linguistic pragmatist. I take it to be pretty clear that Peirce and Dewey are (though one might want to put Peirce in some such broader category as “semiotic pragmatist”). 70

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how in a broad sense, and in the way they distinguish themselves from the intellectualist tradition in terms of this explanatory priority. They manifest their endorsement of methodological pragmatism by taking it that the point of our talk about what we mean or believe is to be found in the light it sheds on what we do, on our habits, our practices of inquiry, of solving problems and pursuing goals. They manifest their endorsement of semantic pragmatism by taking it that all there is that can be appealed to in explaining the meaning of our utterances and the contents of our beliefs is the role those utterances and beliefs play in our habits and practices. I also think that the classical American pragmatists endorse a normative pragmatics, and therefore, given their fundamental pragmatism, a normative pragmatism. But this generic commitment is to some degree masked by the specific account they go on to offer of the norms they see as structuring our broadly cognitive practices. For, as I indicate in Chapter 1, I take it that they, like contemporary rational choice theorists, focus exclusively on instrumental norms: assessments of performances as better or worse, correct or incorrect, insofar as they contribute to the agent’s success in securing some end or achieving some goal. This is the kind of norm they see as implicit in discursive practice, and (in keeping with their semantic pragmatism) as the ultimate source of specifically semantic dimensions of normative assessment such as truth. They understand truth in terms of usefulness and take the contents possessed by intentional states and expressed by linguistic utterances to consist in their potential contribution to the success of an agent’s practical enterprises. Peirce, James, and Dewey are at base (though not always, and not in every respect) instrumental normative pragmatists. Indeed, they—and their critics—place so much emphasis on this aspect of their approach that both their commitment to a normative pragmatics and the other strands of their pragmatism are in danger of receding from view entirely. The strategy of understanding how what underwrites various sorts of normative assessment can be implicit in practice in terms ultimately of the success or failure of practical performances to achieve antecedent ends has some conspicuous advantages. Not the least of these is the promise it holds of reconciling the insights that motivate normative pragmatics with a thoroughgoing naturalism. The instrumental construal of norms allows discursive practice to be seen as norm-laden without appearing mysterious. Since even the beasts of the field have desires and distinguish 71

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between performances that lead to their satisfaction and those that do not, this basic sort of normativity has sound evolutionary credentials. Appeal to the success of practical undertakings is the master idea the classical pragmatists used to reconcile their kantian appreciation of the essential normativity of discursive practice with their post-Darwinian naturalism.

IX. Three Objections to Instrumental Pragmatism I said at the beginning of this chapter that I think that the broader version of pragmatism is much more important and interesting than the narrower one. The analytic apparatus that has been put into play so far makes it possible to refine this claim a bit. I think that the constellation of ideas thrown up by the broader pragmatist tradition—methodological pragmatism, semantic pragmatism, fundamental pragmatism, and a normative approach to pragmatics—offers a richer and more promising field for exploration, construction of variants, tinkering, and recombination when considered on its own than it does when supplemented by an instrumental construal of basic practical norms of the sort characteristic of the narrower classical pragmatist tradition. This is far too large a claim for me to try to demonstrate here. Elsewhere I have tried to offer some cash for the positive part of the claim.26 Here I want to indicate at least briefly why I am skeptical about the promise of the instrumental reading of the kind of implicit practical norms that matter for thinking about conceptual content. One way of pursuing the idea of instrumental pragmatism (whether or not the classical American pragmatists endorsed this approach) is that one can understand normative assessments of the truth of beliefs as assessments of the extent to which the holding of that belief would contribute to the satisfaction of desires.27 Beliefs are true insofar as they are good tools or instruments for getting what one wants. Very abstractly, then, the order of explanation proceeds from the satisfaction of desires to the truth of beliefs, and so from the satisfaction conditions of desires to the truth conditions of beliefs. The project of this sort of pragmatism is to 26. In Making It Explicit. 27. For present purposes, we need not be concerned with the details of the later steps in the argument that warrant a move from this account of taking-true to an account of truth, and then further to an account of content in terms of conditions of truth in that sense. 72

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elaborate a semantic theory—a theory of the contents of beliefs and claims—based on the pragmatic distinction between a desire’s being satisfied and its not being satisfied. What is there to recommend an order of explanation that begins with the concept of a desire’s being satisfied, rather than, say, the concept of a belief’s being true? I think the basic idea is that there is a notion of felt satisfaction of a desire that can be made sense of prior to any content attributions. Just by being in those states, an animal knows that it itches ( just watch it scratch), and again that its itch has been removed (watch it stop scratching). By considering what behavior removed or relieved the motivating state (and what did not, or would not have), one can characterize the itch as a need to be scratched just there, and not elsewhere. On that sort of basis, one can then hope to get more complex content attributions off the ground. How might those content attributions go? Desires motivate behavior, and permit the sorting of behavior into that which does and that which does not satisfy, fulfill, or eliminate the desire. In the context of those desires, beliefs can be imputed as implicit in the behavioral strategies an organism adopts to satisfy them. The beliefs will concern how things are, and so what effects can be expected to ensue from various sorts of performance. The success or failure of those strategies then permits assessment of the truth or falsity of the beliefs—at least when we look at the contribution any one belief would make to the success or failure of a variety of practical enterprises. This line of thought is not silly; but I believe that it is mistaken and ultimately unworkable. Furthermore, the mistake is of a familiar sort. It depends on commitment to what Sellars called the “Myth of the Given.”28 For on this story, the central concept of felt satisfaction is called on to play two roles. On the one hand, one is not supposed to need to have mastered concepts in order to be in this state and to discriminate it from the state of felt dissatisfaction that motivates behavior. On the other hand, being in those states is supposed to count as knowing something, in the sense that it provides evidence for or against the truth of a belief. Felt satisfaction of a desire, in playing both these roles, is a paradigm of givenness in the sense Sellars insists—rightly, I think—is a myth.

28. “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” p.  33. 73

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Making out the difference between the states of itching and not itching does not require attributing conceptually articulated content to those states. It is not in that sense an intentional matter at all. This is what makes it tempting to appeal to such a difference as a point d’appui outside of and antecedent to intentional interpretation—something that can constrain and shape such interpretation, providing its criteria of adequacy and serving as the ultimate source of evidence for intentional attributions. But when we say, as I did previously, that in the context of desires, beliefs can be imputed as implicit in the behavioral strategies an organism adopts to satisfy them, we are thinking of desires as something that has intentional—that is, conceptually articulated—content. For we are thinking of desires as something that can play a role as premises in pieces of practical reasoning such as If i) ii) then iii) iv)

Sara desires to stay dry (i.e., that she stay dry), and Sara opens her umbrella, Sara believes that it is raining, and Sara believes that if she opens her umbrella, she will block the rain and stay dry.

Desires of this sort engage inferentially (both evidentially and consequentially) with beliefs. Desires that are capable of playing this sort of role in the imputation of beliefs are quite different from mere itches. They are not an external input to the Davidsonian process of intentional interpretation, but one more element requiring such interpretation. Given actions and desires, we can infer an agent’s beliefs by considering what constellations of beliefs and desires would provide practical reasons for those actions. Dually, given actions and beliefs, we can infer an agent’s desires. But Davidson is right that desires are in the same boat with beliefs here. Neither of them can be counted as a given in the process of interpretation, even in the relatively weak sense in which what the agent actually does can be so counted.29 The idea that there can be one sort of state that can have the properties both of itches and of the conceptually contentful desires that engage with conceptually contentful beliefs in 29. ‘Weak’ because so much turns on the vocabulary in which one specifies what is done.

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practical reasoning is an episode of the Myth of the Given.30 It is perhaps ironic that if this is right, the methodological pragmatists Sellars and Davidson show what is wrong with pragmatism of the classical instrumentalist sort. One way the difference that matters between things like itches and things like desires emerges concerns the possibility of mistakes. The notion of felt satisfaction, of relief from a motivating pressure, includes an element of immediacy as incorrigibility. The organism cannot be mistaken about whether its itch has been relieved. But I do not always and automatically know whether I have gotten what I want. The desires that, together with actions, permit the imputation of beliefs are not like that. If I desire to stay dry or to put the ball through the hoop, to play a good chess game, or to eradicate world poverty, I may in each case mistakenly think I have succeeded in satisfying that desire when in fact I have not. For desires of this sort, by contrast with itches, satisfaction of the desire just is the truth of a belief: that I am dry, that the ball went through the hoop, that I play a good chess game, that world poverty is eradicated. (One might be tempted to respond that in the case of the itch, relieving it corresponds to the truth of the belief that the desire that is the itch has been satisfied. But this is not in fact analogous, as the need to use a secondorder concept such as satisfied in stating the content of the belief shows.) Even putting aside the issue of givenness by staying resolutely within the realm of intentional interpretation, and ignoring the fallibility of our judgments of success (understood as consisting in the satisfaction of desire), the strategy of defining the truth of beliefs (and so ultimately their content in the sense of truth conditions) by appealing solely to the contribution they make to the success of practical undertakings is hopeless— and it is so for structural reasons. The essentially inferential articulation of conceptual content means that it is in principle impossible in general to isolate the contribution a belief makes to the success of practical undertakings based on it—again, even bracketing concerns about the inherent circularity of supposing that assessments of success in satisfying a desire can be taken for granted (counted as ‘given’) in advance of knowing anything about the truth of beliefs. For a true belief makes success of 30. Dewey, at least, was aware of this distinction, and makes much of it in his writings on value. But I believe that he never thought through its consequences for the foundations of his approach.

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a practical undertaking more likely only in the absence of substantial relevant collateral false belief and the absence of substantial relevant ignorance. My true belief that one can tan hides by boiling them together with bits of oak bark will contribute to the satisfaction of my desire for leather only if I have true beliefs about which trees are oak trees. Your false belief that one can tan hides by boiling them together with bits of birch bark will contribute to the satisfaction of a desire for leather in the context of the false belief that what are in fact oak trees are birch trees. A true belief conduces to practical success only in the context of a set of true background beliefs. In the context of the sort of semantic program pursued by the classical pragmatists, there is no noncircular way to state or eliminate this condition. And without that, it simply is not true that having a true belief about some particular topic is more likely to lead to satisfactory results than having a false one. And ignorance can be as corrosive in this context as actual error. My true belief that I find my way better in the light than in the dark and my true belief that I can produce light by striking a match will not help me satisfy my desire to find my way safely out of the room I am in if I am unaware that it is filled with an explosive vapor. The attempt to impute truth and truth conditions to beliefs on the basis of their role in practical reasoning that does and practical reasoning that does not result in success in the sense of satisfaction of desires fails not only because of the circularity of appealing to satisfaction of desires in this context (tempting because of the mistaken assimilation of desires to itches), but also because of the intractability of the problem of isolating the contribution of individual beliefs to such success or failure.31 For these reasons, I think an instrumental construal of the norms implicit in discursive practice will not support the project of fundamental semantic pragmatism. So although I take it that there is a lot to be said for the broad pragmatism that project epitomizes, I reject pragmatism in the narrower instrumental sense of the thesis, of which the classical American pragmatists are the paradigmatic proponents. (Of course, as I indicate in the Introduction and Chapter 1, there is lots more to appreciate about their ideas.) Happily, there is another way to understand the norms implicit in discursive practice, besides the instrumental. Implicit conceptual commitments can be understood as social statuses, instituted 31. I discuss the application of this thought to a sophisticated contemporary version of the pragmatic idea in “Unsuccessful Semantics,” Analysis 54, no. 3 (1994), pp.  175–178. 76

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by the practical attitudes of participants in an essentially social linguistic practice. It is on that basis of a working-out of that idea that I pursue the project of semantic and fundamental pragmatism in Making It Explicit— but I will not say anything more about it here.

X. The Language-as-Tool Metaphor Instead, I would like to close by considering briefly a more global sort of instrumentalism about discursive practice. Classical pragmatism, in respect of the ideas I have focused on here, is a local instrumentalism, in that it considers possession of each particular concept, mastery of each particular word, and adoption of each particular belief as means for securing antecedent ends generally. The classical pragmatists pursue the project of semantic pragmatism (inter alia) by seeking to derive the content of particular concepts and beliefs from the role that they play in the pursuit of a variety of independently specifiable goals. That functional role is a matter of the instrumental difference the concept or belief in question makes in the context of a constellation of other concepts and beliefs already in play as a background. This last feature is the origin of the isolation objection to the feasibility of this sort of local instrumentalism as a means for achieving the end of semantic pragmatism. It is possible to think of discursive practice as a whole as being for something. Thus Locke understands language itself as a tool for the expression of thought. In this regard he epitomizes the entire early modern tradition, which takes linguistic expressions generally to be instruments for the communication to others of ideas that are what they are antecedently to and independently of their relation to the means of expressing them. This view is something like the converse of linguistic pragmatism. I do not find this approach attractive, but it is not my current target.32 For there is another fairly widespread way of thinking of discursive practice as a whole in instrumental terms. One can understand language and thought as a tool, not for communication, but for the securing of any 32. Making It Explicit consists (among other things) of an extended argument for linguistic pragmatism of a broadly Davidsonian sort. In outline, it goes something like this: Conceptual content is unintelligible as such except as involving a representational dimension. But when that representational dimension of semantic content is properly understood, it is seen to be a function of the social perspectival character of the inferential articulation of deontic statuses. And that amounts to requiring specifically linguistic practice for conceptual content. 77

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ends whatsoever. (In the Introduction, I quoted a passage in which Dewey calls language “the tool of tools.”) Classical pragmatism sought to assess individual concepts and beliefs in terms of their utility in pursuing ends in general. The sort of global discursive instrumentalism I want to address puts discursive practice in a box with tools and sees its point as consisting in its utility as a means for getting what we want. The language-as-tool trope unites broadly pragmatist figures otherwise as diverse (in spite of their shared fundamental pragmatism) as the early Heidegger and the later Wittgenstein. I want to close this chapter by arguing that the idea that we can understand language by understanding what it is for—in particular that it is for pursuing antecedently intelligible ends—is confused and wrongheaded. I do not mean to say that everything about the language-as-tool metaphor is bad or misleading. There are a number of important points it can be used to make. I would include among these at least the following: a) If we understand grasp of a concept as mastery of the use of a word, then we should acknowledge that those uses are quite varied. They do not all have the same point—do not all answer to the same sort of norms. One way of talking about the very different roles they play is to talk about the ‘jobs’ they perform. Indeed, talk about their ‘point’, their ‘role’, their ‘job’ or ‘office’ are all ways of talking about their use in broadly instrumental terms. Thus words such as ‘the’, ‘not’, ‘somewhat’, ‘tall’, ‘cat’, ‘imaginary’, ‘aches’, and so on are used in quite different ways. Being reminded of how different the use of tools such as a wrench, glue, a straightedge, a level, and a toolbelt are can be helpful in reminding ourselves of this. (Notice, for instance, that a tape measure has a different ‘direction of fit’ from a hammer, a level can work either way, and the toolbelt does not have one.) This is a point to which we can easily be blinded by a picture—for instance, the nominalist representationalist picture that structured the classical semantic tradition, according to which words should be thought of as names of things (compare: signifiers/signifieds). The purposes that can be served by tools are many and various, and so are the uses to which words can be put.33 We might call this the “motley” point. 33. Though it does not follow that a good way to think about those uses is as serving purposes! 78

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b) Often the use of one tool makes sense or is possible only in connection with the use of others: nuts, bolts, and wrenches (and possibly drills) all depend on one another, as do screws and screw drivers, nails and hammers. These “equipmental involvements” (as Heidegger calls them) are at least as essential to the functioning of the equipment as are their reference to other things (e.g. relatively flat objects that we might want to fasten together). We might call this the “holism” point. c) The language-as-tool metaphor might also be a way of introducing the idea of a normative pragmatics. For it brings into play the idea that the use of a tool to perform a task induces a dimension of normative assessment. Uses can be assessed as more or less successful, and so tools can be assessed as more or less adequate or apt for the task in question, and their deployment as more or less skillful. We might call this the “normative” point. d) Such assessment will not typically be all-or-none; it is more typically a more-or-less affair. Thinking of the application of concepts this way will start us off with access to a sense in which a concept such as Newtonian mass can give us a cognitive grip on things (slipperier or firmer, in various circumstances). This contrasts with the puzzlement we have when we realize that since, strictly, there is no such thing as Newtonian mass (at best rest mass or relativistic mass), all claims in which it essentially occurs are false. Once again, the representationalist paradigm is liable to mislead here about normative assessment. (Even thinking about this in terms of ‘approximation’ is wrong, since it presupposes we are still in the space in which exactness is possible. But that is just not how the use of all concepts works.) We might call this the “more-orless” point. e) Again, the assessment of success and aptness may be seriously multidimensional: one can succeed fully in some respects, partly in others, and not at all in still others. We might call this the “multidimensionality” point. The motley point, the holism point, the normative point, the more-or-less point, and the multidimensionality point all provide good reasons to be attracted to the language-as-tool metaphor. So what is wrong with it? What I object to is the idea that language as a whole is to be understood in terms of its being for something, in terms of its point being to serve as 79

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a means for the pursuit of ends. Now, of course, typically the thought is not that there is some particular set of ends that language should be seen as in aid of. (Although some reductive evolutionary accounts come close to putting the reproductive success of the species in this role.) It is rather that language can be thought of as a tool for pursuing whatever goals we might find ourselves with. I think this idea gets the essence of the linguistic precisely backwards. What is wrong about it is that making something intelligible as a tool is exhibiting it as a means to an end that can be grasped or specified independently of consideration of that means. Our antecedent grasp of the goal or purpose then provides the basis for normative assessments of success and failure of the tool, and so for comparison of various alternative means to that same end. My claim is that it is a mistake to seek to make discursive practice as a whole intelligible on this model. The reason is straightforward. Though linguistic practice does, to be sure, help us in pursuing our ends, the vast majority of those ends are ones we could not so much as entertain, never mind secure, apart from our participation in linguistic practice. Most of the things we want to do we can only even want to do because we can talk. The very intelligibility of the ends depends on our linguistic capacities. They are precisely not goals we can make sense of first, so that later language can be brought into the picture playing the role of a possible tool for achieving them—as fastening two pieces of wood firmly together can be made sense of in advance of considering nails and hammers, screws and drivers, glue, clamps, and so on. In fact, insofar as it makes sense to talk about language as for anything, what it is ‘for’ is making intelligible and accessible the possibility of novel ends. One of the founding insights on which Noam Chomsky erected the edifice of contemporary linguistics is the observation that almost every sentence uttered by an adult native speaker is a novel one— not just novel in the sense that that speaker has never before heard or uttered that very sequence of words, but novel in the far stronger sense that no one has ever before heard or uttered it. Linguistic know-how is essentially productive and creative, in the sense that the skilled linguistic practitioner can produce and understand an indefinite number of novel sentences, and that the core of linguistic practice consists in the exercise of that capacity. Participants in such a practice are bound by norms governing the use of familiar words: not just any use is appropriate. They

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accordingly surrender some negative freedom—freedom from constraint by such norms. But in return they are richly rewarded with positive freedom—freedom to do things they could never otherwise do or contemplate doing. For the novel, though norm-governed, rearrangements of those familiar words express candidate beliefs, desires, and intentions available for adoption or rejection by speakers and their audiences. And this, if anything, is what language is ‘for’. Only by its ‘means’ can one deny that for every tree there is another that is taller, or wonder whether it is always possible to do what one ought to do, or decide to devote one’s life to relieving poverty. The essence of specifically discursive practice—the practice of deploying concepts—is precisely its engendering of this capacity to entertain an indefinite number of novel beliefs, and to frame an indefinite number of novel ends. Thinking of discursive practice itself in instrumental terms obscures just this defining feature of it. Of course, one can still use instrumental formulae—saying, as I just did, something to the effect that the aim, goal, or purpose served by language is to make possible the envisaging and endorsing of new aims, goals, or purposes. But this is a misleading way of describing the situation. For the particular sort of intelligibility promised by exhibiting something as a means to an end depends on the end being specifiable antecedently to consideration of possible means for pursuing or securing it, on the in-principle possibility of alternative means to that same end, and on the availability of means of assessment of the success in achieving the goal that is independent of the means employed. The case in point satisfies none of those conditions of instrumental intelligibility. For this reason, I think one ought to reject the global form of instrumental pragmatism, as well as the local one.34

XI. Conclusion I have tried to sketch the elements of a broad tradition of pragmatism about the discursive and to distinguish it from the narrower instrumental pragmatism notoriously associated with the classical American pragmatists. I 34. Accordingly, I find a major tension in Rorty’s thought, between his robust appreciation of the transformative potential of new vocabularies and his continued appeal to instrumental models for thinking and talking about them. This thought is developed further in Chapter 5.

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have not attempted to argue for the commitments encapsulated in methodological, semantic, fundamental, and linguistic pragmatism—merely to delineate them. I have tried to say why I think conjoining the instrumental variety of pragmatism with these other thoughts makes them less, rather than more, promising.

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Pragmatism, Inferentialism, and Modality in Sellars’s Arguments against Empiricism

I. Introduction In this chapter I want to place the arguments of “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” into the context of some of Sellars’s other, nearly contemporary articles, by tracing further, into those neighboring works, some strands of argumentation that intersect and are woven together in his critique of empiricism in its two principal then-extant forms: traditional, and twentieth-century logical empiricism. Sellars always accepted that observation reports resulting noninferentially from the exercise of perceptual language-entry capacities play both the privileged epistemological role of being the ultimate court of appeal for the justification of empirical knowledge-claims and therefore (given his inferentialist semantics) an essential semantic role in determining the contents of the empirical concepts applied in such judgments. But in accord with his stated aspiration to “move analytic philosophy from its Humean into its Kantian phase,” he was severely and in principle critical of empiricist ambitions and programs in epistemology and (especially) semantics that go beyond this minimal, carefully circumscribed characterization of the cognitive significance of sense experience. Indeed, I think the lasting philosophical interest of Sellars’s thought lies primarily in the battery of original considerations and arguments he brings to bear against all weightier forms of empiricism. Some, but not all, of these are deployed in the opening critical portions of “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” where the ground is cleared and prepared for the constructive theorizing of the last half. But what is on offer there is only part of Sellars’s overall critique of empiricism. We accordingly court misunderstanding of what is there if  we do not appreciate the shape of the larger enterprise to which it contributes. 83

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In an autobiographical sketch, Sellars dates his break with traditional empiricism to his Oxford days in the thirties. It was, he says, prompted by concern with understanding the sort of conceptual content that ought to be associated with “logical, causal, and deontological modalities.” Already at that point, he says that he had the idea that “[w]hat was needed was a functional theory of concepts which would make their role in reasoning, rather than supposed origin in experience, their primary feature.”1 This telling passage introduces two of the master ideas that shape Sellars’s critique of empiricism. The first is that a key criterion of adequacy with respect to which its semantics will be found wanting concerns its treatment of modal concepts. The second is that the remedy for this inadequacy lies in an alternative broadly functional approach to the semantics of these concepts that focuses on their inferential roles—as it were, looking downstream to their subsequent use, as well as upstream to the circumstances that elicit their application. This second, inferential-functionalist, semantic idea looms large in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.” In fact, it provides the raw materials that are assembled and articulated into Sellars’s positive account of the semantics of the concepts applied in reporting thoughts and sense impressions. Concern with the significance of modality in the critique of empiricism, however, is almost wholly absent from that work (even though it is evident in articles Sellars wrote even earlier). I do not think that is because it was not, even then, an essential element of the larger picture of empiricism’s failings that Sellars was seeking to convey, but rather because it was the result of a hard-won but ultimately successful divide-and-conquer expository strategy. That is, I conjecture that what made it possible for Sellars finally to write “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” was figuring out a way to articulate the considerations he advances there without having also at the same time to explore the issues raised by empiricism’s difficulties with modal concepts. Whether or not that conjecture about the intellectual-biographical significance of finding a narrative path that makes possible the separation of these aspects of his project is correct, I want to claim that it is important to understand what goes on in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” in the light of the fuller picture of the expressive impoverishment 1. “Autobiographical Reflections (February, 1973),” in Action, Knowledge, and Reality, ed. H.  N. Castañeda (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1975), p.  285.

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of empiricism that becomes visible when we consider what Sellars says when he does turn his attention to the semantics of modality.2 There is a third strand to the rope with which Sellars first binds and then strangles the excessive ambitions of empiricism. That is his methodological strategy of considering semantic relations among the meanings expressed by different sorts of vocabulary that result from pragmatic dependencies relating the practices one must engage in or the abilities one must exercise in order to count as using those bits of vocabulary to express those meanings. This is the pragmatist element in Sellars’s multifront assault on empiricism. It makes a significant contribution to the early, critical portion of EPM, though Sellars does not overtly mark it, as he does the contribution of his inferential functionalism to the later, more constructive portion. The concern with what one must do in order to say (so, to think) various kinds of things remains implicit in what Sellars does, rather than explicit in what he says about what he does. As we will see, both the pragmatist and the inferentialist ideas are integral to his critique of empiricist approaches to modality and to his constructive suggestions for a more adequate treatment of modal vocabulary.

II. The Inferentialist and Pragmatist Critique of Empiricism in EPM I think of the classical project of analytic philosophy in the twentieth century as being the exploration of how the meanings expressed by some target vocabularies can be exhibited as in some sense a logical elaboration of the meanings already expressed by some base vocabularies.3 The conception of the desired semantic relation between vocabularies (the sense of ‘analysis’) varied significantly within this broadly defined semantic project, including definition, paraphrase, translation, reduction in various senses, supervenience, and truth-making, to name just a few prominent candidates. I take it to be integral to the analytic philosophical project during this period that however that semantic relation is conceived, logical vocabulary is taken to play a special role in elaborating 2. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, reprinted with an introduction by Richard Rorty and a study guide by Robert Brandom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), hereafter cited as EPM. 3. This line of thought is pursued in more detail in Chapter 6.

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the base vocabulary into the target vocabulary. The distinctively twentiethcentury form of empiricism can be understood as one of the core programs of this analytic project—not in the sense that every participant in the project endorsed some version of empiricism (Neurath, for instance, rejects empiricism where he sees it clashing with another core semantic program that was dearer to his heart, namely naturalism), but in the sense that even those who rejected it for some target vocabulary or other took the possibility of an empiricist analysis to be an important issue, to set a legitimate philosophical agenda. Construed in these terms, twentieth-century empiricism can be thought of as having proposed three broad kinds of empiricist base vocabularies. The most restrictive kind comprises phenomenalist vocabularies: those that specify how things subjectively appear as opposed to how they objectively are, or the not-yet-conceptualized perceptual experiences subjects have, or the so-far-uninterpreted sensory given (the data of sensation: sense data). A somewhat less restrictive genus of empiricist base vocabularies limits them to those that express secondary qualities, thought of as what is directly perceived in some less demanding sense. And a still more relaxed version of empiricism restricts its base vocabulary to the observational vocabulary deployed in noninferentially elicited perceptual reports of observable states of affairs. Typical target vocabularies for the first, phenomenalist class of empiricist base vocabularies include those expressing empirical claims about how things really or objectively are—that is, those expressing the applicability of any objective empirical concepts. Typical target vocabularies for secondary-quality empiricism include any that specify primary qualities or the applicability of concepts that are not response dependent. And typical target vocabularies for observational vocabulary empiricism include theoretical vocabulary. All species of empiricism are concerned with the possibility of underwriting a semantics for the modal vocabulary used to express laws of nature, probabilistic vocabulary, normative vocabulary, and other sophisticated vocabularies of independent philosophical interest. The standard empiricist alternatives are either to show how a given target vocabulary can be semantically elaborated from the favored empiricist base vocabulary, on the one hand, or to show how to live with a local skepticism about its ultimate semantic intelligibility, on the other.4

4. I discuss further this way of setting things up in Chapter 6. 86

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At the center of Sellars’s critique of empiricism in EPM is an argument against the weakest, least committive, observational, version of empiricism (a critique that then carries over, mutatis mutandis, to the more demanding versions). That argument depends on both his inferentialfunctionalist semantics and on his pragmatism. Its fundamental strategy is to show that the proposed empiricist base vocabulary is not pragmatically autonomous, and hence not semantically autonomous. Observational vocabulary is not a vocabulary one could use though one used no other. Noninferential reports of the results of observation do not form an autonomous stratum of language. In particular, when we look at what one must do to count as making a noninferential report, we see that that is not a practice one could engage in except in the context of inferential practices of using those observations as premises from which to draw inferential conclusions, as reasons for making judgments and undertaking commitments that are not themselves observations. The contribution to this argument of Sellars’s inferential functionalism about semantics lies in underwriting the claim that for any judgment, claim, or belief to be contentful in the way required for it to be cognitively, conceptually, or epistemically significant, for it to be a potential bit of knowledge or evidence, to be a sapient state or status, it must be able to play a distinctive role in reasoning: it must be able to serve as a reason for further judgments, claims, or beliefs, hence as a premise from which they can be inferred. That role in reasoning, in particular, what those judgments, claims, or beliefs can serve as reasons or evidence for, is an essential, and not just an accidental, component of their having the semantic content that they do. And that means that one cannot count as understanding, grasping, or applying concepts noninferentially in observation unless one can also deploy them at least as premises in inferences to conclusions that do not, for that very reason, count as noninferential applications of concepts. Nor, for the same reason, can any discursive practice consist entirely of noninferentially acquiring premises, without any corresponding practice of drawing conclusions. So noninferential, observational uses of concepts do not constitute an autonomous discursive practice: a language game one could play though one played no other. And this conclusion about the pragmatic dependence of observational uses of vocabulary on inferential ones holds no matter what the subject matter of those observations is: whether it is observable features of the external environment, how things merely appear to a subject, or the current contents of one’s own mind. 87

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Here the pragmatist concern with what one must do in order to be able to say (or think) something combines with semantic inferentialistfunctionalism about conceptual content to argue that the proposed empiricist base vocabulary is not pragmatically autonomous—since one must be able to make claims inferentially in order to count as making any noninferentially. If that is so, then potentially risky inferential moves cannot be seen as an in-principle optional superstructure erected on a semantically autonomous base of things directly known through observation. Although this is his most general and most powerful argument, Sellars does not limit himself to it in arguing against the substantially more committive forms of empiricism that insist on phenomenalist base vocabularies. In addition, he develops a constructive account of the relations between (at least one principal species of) phenomenalist vocabulary and objective vocabulary that depends on pragmatic dependences between what one must do in order to deploy each kind, to argue once again that the proposed empiricist base vocabulary does not form a semantically autonomous stratum of the language. This is his account of the relation between ‘looks’-talk and ‘is’-talk. It develops out of his positive account of what one must do in order to use vocabulary observationally. To apply the concept green noninferentially one must be able to do at least two sorts of things. First, one must be able reliably to respond differentially to the visible presence of green things. This is what blind and color-blind language users lack, but nonlanguageusing pigeons and parrots possess. Second, one must be able to exercise that capacity by reliably responding differentially to the visible presence of green things by applying the concept green. So one must possess, grasp, or understand that concept. “Grasp of a concept is mastery of the use of a word,” Sellars says, and his inferential functionalism dictates that this must include the inferential use of the word: knowing at least something about what follows from and is evidence for or against something’s being green. This the blind or color-blind language user has, and the pigeon and parrot do not. Only the performances of the former can have the pragmatic significance of taking up a stand in the space of reasons, of committing themselves to something that has a conceptual, that is, inferentially articulated, content. The point of Sellars’s parable of John in the tie shop is to persuade us that the home language game of the ‘looks’ or ‘seems’ vocabulary that expresses how things merely appear to us, without undertaking any commitment to how they actually are, is one that is pragmatically parasitic 88

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on the practice of making in-principle risky reports of how things objectively are. For what one must do in order to count as saying how things merely look, Sellars claims, is to evince the reliable differential disposition to respond to something by claiming that it is green, while withholding the endorsement of that claim (because of one’s collateral beliefs about the situation and one’s reliability in it). If that is what one is doing in making a ‘looks’-claim, then one cannot be wrong about it in the same way one can about an ‘is’-claim, because one has withheld the principal commitment rather than undertaking it. And it follows that phenomenalist ‘looks’-talk, which expresses how things merely appear, without further commitment to how things actually are, is not an autonomous discursive practice—not a language game one could play though one played no other—but is in fact pragmatically parasitic on objective ‘is’-talk. My point in rehearsing this familiar argument is to emphasize the role played both by Sellars’s pragmatist emphasis on what one must be able to do in order to count as saying various kinds of thing—using vocabulary so as to express certain kinds of meanings—and by his inferentialistfunctionalist insistence that the role some vocabulary plays in reasoning makes an essential contribution to its semantic content. Although Sellars does not go on to make this argument, the way these two lines of thought conspire to undermine the semantic autonomy of candidate empiricist base vocabularies provides a template for a parallel objection to secondaryquality empiricism. For at least a necessary condition on anything’s being a secondary-quality concept is that it have an observational role that supports the introduction of corresponding ‘looks’-talk, so that mastery of that ‘looks’-talk can be taken to be essential to mastery of the concept—as ‘looksgreen’ arguably is for mastery of the concept green, but ‘looks’-square is not for mastery of the concept square. What would be needed to fill in the argument against secondary-quality empiricism via the nonautonomy of its proposed base vocabulary, would be an argument that nothing could count as mastering a vocabulary consisting entirely of expressions of this sort, apart from all inferential connections to primary-quality concepts that did not have this structure.

III. Pragmatism and Phenomenalism Thus far I have confined myself to offering a general characterization of anti-empiricist arguments that appear in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.” None of them involve empiricism’s treatment of modality. 89

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Now I want to put those arguments in a somewhat different frame, by conjoining them with one that is presented elsewhere, and which does turn on the significance of modal concepts. The previous arguments concerned the suitability of some vocabulary to serve as the base vocabulary of an empiricist analysis—because plausible motivations for caring about such an analysis typically require that it be semantically autonomous. This one turns on the criteria of adequacy of the analysis itself. My remarks in this section concern Sellars’s arguments in his essay “Phenomenalism,” which can be regarded as a kind of companion piece to EPM. (Later I will discuss another contemporary essay that I think should be thought of as yoked together with these two in a troika.) The first, modal point is one that Sellars registers there, but does not linger on—his principal concern being rather with a second point, concerning another aspect of the vocabulary in which phenomenalist analyses would have to be couched. But given my purposes here, I want to make a bit more of the modal point than he does. The basic idea of a phenomenalist-empiricist semantic analysis of ordinary objective vocabulary is that the expressive work done by talk of mind-independent objects and their properties and relations can be done by talk of patterns in, regularities of, or generalizations concerning sense experiences characterized in a phenomenalist vocabulary. Saying that the curved red surface I am experiencing is an experience of an apple that has parts I am not experiencing—a similarly bulgy, red back and a white interior, for instance—is properly understood as saying something about what I would experience if I turned it around or cut it open. That it continued to exist in the kitchen when I left the room is a matter of what I would have experienced had I returned. The first, obvious observation is that an account of objective reality in terms of the powers of circumstances to produce, or my dispositions to have, sensations, experiences, beings-appeared-to, and so on essentially involves modal concepts. The patterns, regularities, or generalizations in subjective appearances that are supposed to constitute objective realities are modally robust, counterfactualsupporting patterns, regularities, or generalizations. Talk of what I actually do experience will not by itself underwrite claims about unexperienced spatial or temporal parts of empirical objects. Twentieth-century logical empiricism promised to advance beyond traditional empiricism because it could call on the full expressive resources of logical vocabulary to use as the ‘glue’ sticking sensory experiences together so as to construct simulacra

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of external objects. But extensional logical vocabulary is not nearly expressively powerful enough for the phenomenalist version of the empiricist project. So the phenomenalist conditional “terminating judgments,” into an infinite set of which C.  I. Lewis proposes (in his Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation) to translate the “non-terminating judgments” of ordinary objective empirical discourse, have to use his modal notion of strict or necessary implication.5 And similar points could be made about other phenomenalist reductionists such as A. J. Ayer. The consequence of this observation to which I want to draw attention is that one cannot use such a strategy in one’s phenomenalist-empiricist analysis, translation, or reduction of objective talk and at the same time be a Humean skeptic about what modal vocabulary expresses. So essential features of the only remotely plausible constructive strategy of phenomenalist empiricism are simply incompatible with the most prominent skeptical consequences about modal concepts characteristically drawn both by traditional and twentieth-century logicist empiricism. This is a powerful argument. Sellars’s principal concern in his essay “Phenomenalism,” however, is with a subsequent point. The conditionals codifying the patterns, regularities, or generalizations concerning sense experience that correspond to judgments about how things objectively are must not only be subjunctive, counterfactually robust conditionals, but in order to have any hope of being materially adequate (getting the truthconditions even approximately correct) their antecedents must themselves be expressed in objective vocabulary, not in phenomenalist vocabulary. What is true (enough) is that if I were actually to turn the apple around, cut it open, or return to its vicinity in the kitchen, I would have certain sense experiences. It is not in general true that if I merely seem to do those things, I am guaranteed to have the corresponding experiences. For, phrased in such phenomenalist terms, the antecedent is satisfied in cases of imagination, visual illusion, dreaming, hallucination, and so on that are precisely those not bound by the supposedly object-constituting rules and regularities. As Sellars summarizes the point: To claim that the relationship between the framework of sense contents and that of physical objects can be construed on the [phenomenalist] model is to commit oneself to the idea that there are 5. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1946.

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inductively confirmable generalizations about sense contents which are ‘in principle’ capable of being formulated without the use of the language of physical things. . . . [T]his idea is a mistake.6 It is a mistake because the very selection of the complex patterns of actual sense contents in our past experiences which are to serve as the antecedents of the generalizations in question presuppose our common sense knowledge of ourselves as perceivers, of the specific physical environment in which we do our perceiving and of the general principles which correlate the occurrence of sensations with bodily and environmental conditions. We select those patterns which go with our being in a certain perceptual relation to a particular object of a certain quality, where we know that being in this relation to an object of that quality normally eventuates in our having the sense content referred to in the consequent. This argument then makes evident the logical dependence of the framework of private sense contents on the public, inter-subjective, logical space of persons and physical things.7 So the phenomenalist vocabulary is not autonomous. It is not a language game one can play though one plays no other. In particular, the uses of it that might plausibly fulfill many of the same pragmatic functions as ordinary objective empirical talk themselves presuppose the ability to deploy such objective vocabulary. As Sellars points out, the lessons learned from pressing on the phenomenalist version of empiricism apply more generally. In particular, they apply to the more liberal version of empiricism whose base vocabulary is observational, including observations of enduring empirical objects, and whose target vocabulary is theoretical vocabulary. To begin with, if talk of theoretical entities is to be translated into or replaced by talk of patterns in, regularities of, or generalizations about observable entities, they must be lawlike, counterfactual-supporting regularities and generalizations. They must permit inferences to what one would observe if one were to 6. “Phenomenalism,” in In the Space of Reasons, ed. Kevin Scharp and Robert Brandom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p.  331. 7. “Phenomenalism,” p.  328. 92

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find oneself in specified circumstances, or to prepare the apparatus in a certain way. For, once again, the patterns, regularities, or generalizations about observations the assertion of which an instrumentalist empiricist might with some initial plausibility take to have the same pragmatic effect as (to be doing the same thing one is doing in) deploying theoretical vocabulary must reach beyond the parochial, merely autobiographically significant contingencies of what subjects happen actually to observe. The theory is that electrical currents cause magnetic fields regardless of the presence of suitable measuring devices. And that can only be made out in terms of what is observable, that is, could be observed, not just what is observed. And that is to say that the instrumentalist-observational form of empiricism is also incompatible with Humean-Quinean skepticism about the intelligibility of what is expressed by alethic modal vocabulary. And an analogue of the second argument against phenomenalist forms of empiricism also applies to instrumentalist forms. For, once again, the antecedents of the counterfactual conditionals specifying what could or would have been observed if certain conditions had obtained or certain operations were performed cannot themselves be formulated in purely observational terms. The meter needle would have been observably displaced if I had connected the terminals of a volt-ohmmeter to the wire, but that something is a VOM is not itself a fact restatable in purely observational terms. Even leaving apart the fact that it is a functional characterization not equivalent to any specification in purely physical terms, a description of the construction of some particular kind of VOM is still going to help itself to notions such as being made of copper, or being an electrical insulator (another bit of vocabulary that is both functional and theoretical). To satisfy the semantic ambitions of the instrumentalist, it is not enough to associate each theoretical claim with a set of jointly pragmatically equivalent counterfactual-supporting conditionals whose consequents are couched wholly in observational vocabulary. All the theoretical terms appearing in the antecedents of those conditionals must be similarly replaced. No instrumentalist reduction of any actual theoretical claim has ever been suggested that even attempts to satisfy this condition. Though Sellars does not, and I will not, pursue the matter, one expects that corresponding arguments will go through, mutatis mutandis, also for the kind of empiricism that seeks to understand the use of primary-quality vocabulary wholly in terms of the use of secondary-quality vocabulary. What we mean by talk of primary qualities will have to be cashed out in 93

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terms of its powers to produce, or our dispositions to perceive, secondary qualities—that is, in terms of modally robust, counterfactual-supporting generalizations. And it will be a challenge to specify the antecedents of a  materially adequate set of such conditionals wholly in the official secondary-quality vocabulary.

IV. Sellars’s Pragmatism and Modality The arguments I have considered so far set limits to the semantic ambitions of phenomenalist and instrumentalist forms of analytic empiricism, first by focusing on the pragmatic preconditions of the required semantic autonomy of the proposed empiricist base vocabularies, and second by looking in more detail at the specific sorts of inferential patterns in the base vocabulary in terms of which it is proposed to reconstruct the circumstances and consequences of application of items in the various target vocabularies. Here it was observed that the material adequacy of such reconstructions seems to require the ineliminable involvement of terms from the target vocabulary, not only on the right side, but also on the left side of any such reconstruction—in the definiens as well as in the definiendum. Modality plays a role in these arguments only because the material adequacy of the reconstruction also turns out to require appeal to counterfactually robust inferences in the base vocabulary. Insofar as that is so, the constructive semantic projects of the phenomenalist, instrumentalist, and secondary-quality forms of empiricism are at odds with the local semantic skepticism about what is expressed by alethic modal vocabulary that has always been a characteristic cardinal critical consequence of empiricist approaches to semantics, as epitomized for its traditional phase by Hume and for its logicist phase by Quine. In another massive, pathbreaking essay of this period, “Counterfactuals, Dispositions, and the Causal Modalities”8 (completed in February of 1957), Sellars argues directly against this empiricist treatment of modality, completing what then becomes visible as a two-pronged attack on the principal contentions and projects of empiricism, only the opening salvos

8. In Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 2, ed. H. Feigl, M. Scriven, and G. Maxwell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1957), pp.  225–308. Hereafter CDCM.

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of which were fired in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.”9 His principal target here is the “tendency to assimilate all discourse to describing,” which he takes to be primarily “responsible for the prevalence in the empiricist tradition of “nothing-but-ism” in its various forms (emotivism, philosophical behaviorism, phenomenalism).”10 The form Sellars addresses in this essay is the Humean one that can find in statements of laws of nature, expressed in alethic modal vocabulary that lets us say what is and is not necessary and possible, “nothing but” expressions of matter-of-factual regularities or constant conjunctions (though he claims explicitly that considerations corresponding to those he raises for causal modalities are intended to apply to logical and deontological modalities as well).11 His arguments are directed against the view that holds modal vocabulary semantically unintelligible, on grounds of inability to specify what it is saying about what the world is like, how it is describing things as being, insofar as by using it we are asserting something that goes beyond endorsing the existence of nonmodally characterizable universal descriptive generalizations. Hume found that even his best understanding of actual observable empirical facts did not yield an understanding of rules relating or otherwise governing them. Those facts did not settle which of the things that actually happened had to happen (given others), that is, were (at least conditionally) necessary, and which of the things that did not happen nonetheless were possible (not ruled out by laws concerning what did happen). The issue here concerns the justifiability and intelligibility of a 9. As in EPM (and even, though to a lesser extent, in “Phenomenalism”), in this essay Sellars describes himself not as denying empiricism, but rather as correcting it, protecting its core insights from the damage done by their overextension. But he also makes it clear that the result of such rectification is a Kantian view that gives equal weight to rationalist insights, when they are suitably reconstructed. So, for instance, he says: It is my purpose to argue that the core truth of Hume’s philosophy of causation is not only compatible with, but absurd without, ungrudging recognition of those features of causal discourse as a mode of rational discourse on which the ‘metaphysical rationalists’ laid such stress, but also mis-assimilated to describing. (CDCM §82)

And the final sentence of the essay invokes the “profound truth” of Kant’s conception of reason, “which empiricism has tended to distort.” 10. CDCM §103. 11. Ibid.

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certain kind of inference: modally robust, counterfactual-supporting inferences, of the kind made explicit by the use of modal vocabulary. Hume (and, following him, Quine) took it that epistemologically and semantically fastidious philosophers face a stark choice: either show how to explain modal vocabulary—the circumstances of application that justify the distinctive counterfactual-supporting inferential consequences of application—in nonmodal terms, or show how to live without it, to do what we need to do in science without making such arcane and occult supradescriptive commitments. This demand was always the greatest source of tension between empiricism and naturalism, especially the scientific naturalism that Sellars epitomized in the slogan: “In the dimension of description and explanation, Science is the measure of all things, of those that are, that they are, and of those that are not, that they are not.”12 For modern mathematized natural science shorn of concern with laws, counterfactuals, and dispositions—in short of what is expressed by alethic modal vocabulary—is less than an impotent Samson; it is an inert, unrecognizable, fragmentary remnant of a once-vital enterprise. Sellars’s general recommendation for resolving this painful tension (felt particularly acutely by, and one of the principal issues dividing, the members of the Vienna Circle) is to relax the exclusivism and rigorism he traces to empiricism’s semantic descriptivism: [O]nce the tautology ‘The world is described by descriptive concepts’ is freed from the idea that the business of all non-logical concepts is to describe, the way is clear to an ungrudging recognition that many expressions which empiricists have relegated to secondclass citizenship in discourse are not inferior, just different.13 Sensitized as we now are by Sellars’s diagnoses of semantic autonomy claims as essential to various empiricist constructive and reconstructive projects, both in EPM and in the “Phenomenalism” essay, and familiar as we now are with his criticisms of them based on the inferentially articulated doings required to use or deploy various candidate base vocabularies, it should come as no surprise that his objections to critical empiricist suspicions of and hostility toward modality follow the same pattern. For the Humean-Quinean empiricist semantic challenge to the legitimacy 12. EPM, §41, p. 83. 13. CDCM §79.

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of modal vocabulary is predicated on the idea of an independently and antecedently intelligible stratum of empirical discourse that is purely descriptive and involves no modal commitments, as a semantically autonomous background and model with which the credentials of modal discourse can then be invidiously compared. In this case, as in the others, the argument turns both on the pragmatism that looks to what one is doing in deploying the candidate base vocabulary—here “purely descriptive” vocabulary—and on the nature of the inferential articulation of that vocabulary necessary for such uses to play the expressive role characteristic of that vocabulary. The argument in this case is subtler and more complex than the others, however. For one thing, I take it that Sellars does not deny the intelligibility-in-principle of purely descriptive discourse that contains no explicitly modal vocabulary.14 For another, there are special difficulties involved in, and corresponding delicacies required for, working out the general pragmatistinferentialist strategy so as to apply it to this case, by specifying the relation between the expressive role distinctive of modal vocabulary, on the one hand, and what one is doing (in particular, the inferential commitments one is undertaking) in using ordinary, nonmodal, descriptive vocabulary itself, on the other. The pragmatic dependency relation that lies at the base of Sellars’s argument is the fact that 14. Sellars is, frustratingly but characteristically, not explicit about his attitude toward the pragmatic autonomy in principle of such purely descriptive discourse. He says: The idea that the world can, in principle, be so described that the description contains no modal expression is of a piece with the idea that the world can, in principle, be so described that the description contains no prescriptive expression. For what is being called to mind is the ideal of statement of ‘everything that is the case’ which, however, serves through and through only the purpose of stating what is the case. And it is a logical truth that such a description, however many modal expressions might properly be used in arriving at it or in justifying it, or in showing the relevance of one of its components to another, could contain no modal expression. (CDCM §80)

Sellars’s view about this ideal is complex: there is a sense in which it is intelligible, and a sense in which it is not. Such a discourse would be unreflective and unselfconscious in a way ours is not. For reasons that will emerge, it would belong to what at the end of the essay he calls the stage of human language “when linguistic changes had causes, but not reasons, [before] man acquired the ability to reason about reasons.” (CDCM §108)

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although describing and explaining (predicting, retrodicting, understanding) are distinguishable, they are also, in an important sense, inseparable. It is only because the expressions in terms of which we describe objects, even such basic expressions as words for perceptible characteristics of molar objects, locate these objects in a space of implications, that they describe at all, rather than merely label. The descriptive and explanatory resources of language advance hand in hand.15 Descriptive uses of vocabulary presuppose an inferentially articulated “space of implications,” within which some descriptions show up as reasons for or explanations of others. Understanding those descriptions requires placing them in such a space. This pragmatist claim about what else one must be able to do—namely, infer, explain, treat one claim as a reason for another—in order for what one is doing to count as describing connects to the use of modal vocabulary via the principle that [t]o make first hand use of these [modal] expressions is to be about the business of explaining a state of affairs, or justifying an assertion.16 That is, what one is doing in using modal expressions is explaining, justifying, or endorsing an inference. So what one is doing in saying that As are necessarily Bs is endorsing the inference from anything’s being an A to its being a B. The first sort of difficulty I previously alluded to stems from the fact that there are other ways of endorsing such a pattern of inference besides saying that all As are necessarily Bs. One’s endorsement may be implicit in other things one does, the reasoning one engages in and approves of, rather than explicit in what one says. So from the fact (assuming, as I shall, that it is a fact) that the activity of describing is part of an indissoluble pragmatic package that includes endorsing inferences and the fact that what one is doing in making a modal claim is endorsing an inference, it does not at all follow that there can be no use of descriptive vocabulary apart from the use of modal vocabulary. The second difficulty stems from the fact that although Sellars may be right that what one is doing in mak15. CDCM §108. 16. CDCM §80.

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ing a modal claim is endorsing a pattern of inference, it is clear that one is not thereby saying that an inference is good. When I say “Pure copper necessarily conducts electricity,” and thereby unrestrictedly endorse inferences from anything’s being pure copper to its conducting electricity, I have nevertheless said nothing about any inferences, explanations, justifications, or implications—indeed, have said something that could be true even if there had never been any inferences or inferrers to endorse them, hence no describers or discursive practitioners at all.17 These two observations set the principal criteria of adequacy both for Sellars’s positive working-out of the pragmatist-inferentialist treatment of modal vocabulary and for his argument that the purely descriptive base vocabulary invoked by the empiricist critic of the semantic credentials of modal vocabulary lacks the sort of discursive autonomy the empiricist criticism presupposes and requires. Sellars’s central rhetorical strategy in this essay is to address the issue of what is expressed by modal claims about necessary connections by offering a sympathetic reconstruction of the controversy in the form of a debate between a Mr. C (for Constant Conjunction) and a Mr. E (for Entailment) who develop and qualify their views in such a way as to bring them to the growing edge of the problem.18 Officially, he is even-handed in his treatment of the vices and virtues of the empiricist, who denies that the use of modal vocabulary can express any legitimate semantic content beyond that expressed by a descriptive, extensional universal generalization, and of the rationalist, who understands that content in terms of entailments expressing rules of reasoning. In fact, however, as becomes clear when he launches into his own account, he is mainly concerned to develop a version of the rationalist account. As the second half of the essay develops, Sellars marks his abandonment of the disinterested pose by an uncharacteristically explicit

17. Sellars connects this obvious fact with the observation that [i]dealism is notorious for the fallacy of concluding that because there must be minds in the world in order for us to have reason to make statements about the world, therefore there is no sense to the idea of a world which does not include minds. (CDCM §101)

18. CDCM, introduction.

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expository shift: “It is now high time that I dropped the persona of Mr. E, and set about replying to the challenge with which Mr. C ended his first critique of the entailment theory.”19 Doing that requires careful investigation of the differences between and relations among four different sorts of item: • Practical endorsement of the propriety of an inference from things being A to their being B • The explicit statement that one may infer the applicability of ‘B’ from the applicability of ‘A’ • The statement that A physically entails B • The statement that As are necessarily Bs. The first is the sort of thing Sellars takes to be pragmatically presupposed by the activity of describing, that is, deploying descriptive vocabulary. The second fails to capture such practical endorsements, because of the possibility of asserting such statements regarding the expressions ‘A’ and ‘B’ without understanding what they express.20 The third sort of statement expresses Mr. E’s initial stab at an analysis of the fourth. It is the answer to the question: what sort of entailment is it that modal statements are supposed to express? Mr. E has a ready answer. . . . it might . . . be called ‘natural’ or ‘physical’ entailment, for while any entailment is a logical relation, 19. CDCM §85. In fact, Sellars’s ‘defense’ of Mr. C (see the passage from §82 quoted in note 3) consists of showing what concessions he needs to make to Mr. E. This proceeds first by Mr. C’s qualification that “ ‘A causes B’ says that (x)[Ax ⊃Bx] and implies that the latter is asserted on inductive grounds” (CDCM §62), followed by the necessity of conceiving “of induction as establishing principles in accordance with which we reason, rather than as major premises from which we reason.” (CDCM §83) As will appear, the former concession, introducing the notion of what is contextually implied by contrast to what is explicitly said, is then dialectically made available to be pressed into service by Mr. E. This bit of dialectic is a pretty rhetorical flourish on Sellars’s part, but I doubt that in the end it reflects any deep feature of the confrontation between the empiricist and rationalist approaches to modality. 20. As Sellars says: But one can know that Turks, for example, ought to withdraw ‘. . . ’ when they commit themselves to ‘—-’ without knowing the language, whereas the statement that ‘p entails q’ contextually implies that the speaker not only knows the language to which ‘p’ and ‘q’ belong, but, in particular, knows how to use ‘p’ and ‘q’ themselves. (CDCM §81) 100

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we can distinguish within the broad class of entailments between those which are, and those which are not, a function of the specific empirical contents between which they obtain. The latter are investigated by general or formal logic (and pure mathematics). Empirical science, on the other hand, to the extent that it is a search for laws, is the search for entailments of the former kind. (Putative) success in this search finds its expression in statements of the form ‘It is (inductively) probable that A physically entails B.’21 The virtue of statements like “A physically entails B” is that they do plausibly codify the practical endorsement of an inference that is implicit in what one does in the form of something one can explicitly say, without bringing in irrelevant commitments concerning particular expressions, the activity of inferring, or discursive practitioners. The remaining difficulty is that they seem plainly not to have the same content, not to say the same thing, as explicitly modal statements of objective necessity. Sellars’s response to this problem is to acknowledge that modal statements do not say that some entailment holds, but to distinguish between what is said by using a bit of vocabulary and what is ‘contextually implied’ by doing so. Sellars says very little about this latter notion, even though it bears the full weight of his proposed emendation of the rationalist account. It is recognizably the same distinction he had appealed to earlier, in “Inference and Meaning,” as the distinction between what one says by making a statement and what one thereby conveys. There his example is that in asserting “The sky is clear today,” I say that the sky is clear today, but convey that I believe that it is clear.22 That otherwise uninterpreted example suggests to me that what Sellars has in mind is the distinction between semantic and pragmatic inferences. That is the distinction between inferences underwritten by the contents of what is said or asserted, on the one hand, and inferences underwritten by what one is doing in saying them, on the other. The inference from “The sky is clear” to “It is not raining” is of the first sort; the inference from my asserting “The sky is clear” to “Brandom believes the sky is clear” is of the second sort. Inferences of these two kinds may generally be distinguished by the FregeGeach embedding test: look to see whether those who make the inference 21. CDCM §56. 22. Sellars, “Inference and Meaning,” in Pure Pragmatics and Possible Worlds: The Early Essays of Wilfrid Sellars, ed. J. Sicha (Reseda, CA: Ridgeview, 1980), pp.  280/332. 101

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in question also endorse the corresponding conditional. “If the sky is clear, then it is not raining” is generally true, while “If the sky is clear, then Brandom believes it is clear” is not generally true. (Compare the inference from my saying “That is an ugly tie you are wearing” to “Bob is annoyed with me.”)

V. Kantian Pragmatism about Modality If that is in fact the distinction Sellars is after, then it seems to me that the view he is expounding and defending can be put less paradoxically if we do not take a detour through entailment statements, but concern ourselves directly with the relation between the endorsement of patterns of inference and modal statements. The underlying rationalist insight is a pragmatist-inferentialist one: what one is doing in making a modal claim is endorsing a pattern of inference. Modal vocabulary makes possible new kinds of sayings that have the pragmatic effect of endorsing inferences. To say that is not yet to say what they say, it is only to say what one is doing by saying them. But it does settle the pragmatic significance of such modal claims, in the sense of their appropriate circumstances and consequences of application.23 If one practically endorses the pattern of inference that treats classifying or describing anything at all as an A as 23. It is the attempt to specify this peculiar and distinctive sort of pragmatically mediated relation between vocabularies that leads Sellars to say things like the following: It is sometimes thought that modal statements do not describe states of affairs in the world, because they are really metalinguistic. This won’t do at all if it is meant that instead of describing states of affairs in the world, they describe linguistic habits. It is more plausible if it is meant that statements involving modal terms have the force of prescriptive statements about the use of certain expressions in the object language. Yet there is more than one way to ‘have the force of’ a statement, and failure to distinguish between them may snowball into a serious confusion as wider implications are drawn. (CDCM §81)

and Shall we say that modal expressions are metalinguistic? Neither a simple ‘yes’ nor a simple ‘no’ will do. As a matter of fact, once the above considerations are given their proper weight, it is possible to acknowledge that the idea that they are metalinguistic in character oversimplifies a fundamental insight. For our present purposes, it is sufficient to say that the claim that modal expressions are ‘in the metalanguage’ is not too misleading if the peculiar force of the expressions which occur alongside them (represented by the ‘p’ and the ‘q’ of our example) is recognized, in particular, that they have ‘straightforward’ translation into other languages, and if it is also recognized that they belong not only 102

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sufficient grounds (“all on its own,” as Sellars says, in order to capture the way the pattern of inferences in question is counterfactually robust) for concluding that it is a B, then one is committed to the claim that all As are necessarily Bs. And commitment to that claim is commitment to practically ratify that pattern of inference. Assuming, as Sellars has claimed, that using ordinary, nonmodal, descriptive vocabulary requires practically endorsing such patterns of inference (“situating descriptions in a space of implications”), anyone who has the practical ability to deploy “purely descriptive” vocabulary already knows how to do everything he needs to know how to do to deploy modal vocabulary as well. He need not actually do so, since practically undertaking those inferential commitments does not require that one have available a language with vocabulary permitting one to do that by saying something. But all a practitioner lacks in such a circumstance is the words to hook up to discriminative and responsive abilities he already possesses. In this precise sense, the ability to deploy modal vocabulary is practically implicit in the ability to deploy nonmodal descriptive vocabulary. Sellars has claimed that the activity of describing is unintelligible except as part of a pragmatic package that includes also not just the making of inferences, but the making of counterfactually robust inferences: the sort of inferences involved in explanation, and licensed by explicitly modal statements of laws. He sums up the claim admirably in the title of another one of his early papers: “Concepts as Involving Laws, and Inconceivable without Them.”24 Grasp of a concept is mastery of the use of a word, Sellars says. And for descriptive concepts, that use includes not only sorting inferences (however fallibly and incompletely) into materially good and materially bad ones, but also, among the ones one takes to be materially good, to distinguish (however fallibly and incompletely) between counterfactual circumstances under which they do, and counterfactual circumstances under which they do not, remain good. Part of taking an inference to be materially good is having a view about which possible ‘in the metalanguage’, but in discourse about thoughts and concepts as well. (CDCM §82)

and We must here, as elsewhere, draw a distinction between what we are committed to concerning the world by virtue of the fact that we have reason to make a certain assertion, and the force, in a narrower sense, of the assertion itself. (CDCM §101)

24. In Pure Pragmatics and Possible Worlds, ed. Jeffrey Sicha (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1980), pp.  87–124. 103

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additional collateral premises or auxiliary hypotheses would, and which would not, infirm it. Chestnut trees produce chestnuts—unless they are immature, or blighted. Dry, well-made matches strike—unless there is no oxygen. The hungry lioness would still chase the antelope if it were Tuesday or the beetle on the distant tree crawled slightly further up the branch, but not if the lioness’s heart were to stop beating. The point is not that there is any particular set of such discriminations that one must be able to make in order to count as deploying the concepts involved. It is that if one can make no such practical assessments of the counterfactual robustness of material inferences involving those concepts, one could not count as having mastered them. Against the background of this pragmatist-inferentialist claim about what is involved in the ordinary descriptive use of concepts, Sellars’s claim, as I am reading him, is that explicitly modal “lawlike” statements are statements that one is committed or entitled to whenever one is committed or entitled to endorse such patterns of counterfactually robust inference, and commitment or entitlement to which in their turn commit or entitle one to the corresponding patterns of inference. Saying that about them settles what one needs to do to use such modal statements. It does not say how one is thereby describing the world as being when one does. It does not, in particular, describe a pattern of inference as good (though that saying does, in its own distinctive way, express endorsement of such a pattern). It does not do those things for the simple reason that the use of modal expressions is not in the first instance descriptive.25 It codifies explicitly, in the form of a statement, a feature of the use of descriptive expressions that is indissolubly bound up with, but not identical to, their descriptive use. Nonetheless, in knowing how to use vocabulary descriptively, one knows how to do everything one needs to know how to do in order to use modal vocabulary. And that is enough to show that one cannot actually be in the Humean predicament presupposed by the empiricist challenge to the intelligibility of modal vocabulary. For one cannot know how to use vocabulary in matter-of-factual descriptions (“The cat is on the mat”) and not have any grip on how to use modal, counterfactual, and dispositional vocabulary (“It is necessary for live cats to breathe,” “The cat could still 25. Sellars says: [Mr. E.] conceives of induction as establishing principles in accordance with which we reason, rather than as major premises from which we reason. (CDCM §83) 104

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be on the mat if the mat were a slightly different shade of blue, but not if it turned into soup,” “The cat would leave the mat if she saw a mouse”). Although explicitly modal vocabulary is an in-principle optional superstructure on practices of deploying descriptive vocabulary, what it expresses cannot be mysterious in principle to those who can engage in those base-level practices. In taking this line, Sellars quite properly sees himself as reviving a central idea of Kant’s. The ability to use empirical-descriptive terms such as ‘mass’, ‘rigid’, and ‘green’ already presupposes grasp of the kind of properties and relations made explicit by modal vocabulary. It is this insight that leads Kant to the idea of ‘pure’ concepts or ‘categories’, including the alethic modal concepts of necessity and possibility that articulate causal laws, which must be available a priori because and in the sense that the ability to deploy them is presupposed by the ability to deploy ordinary empirical-descriptive concepts. The categories, including modality, are concepts that make explicit what is implicit in the empirical, descriptive use of any concepts at all. Though the details of which laws, the statements of which express counterfactually robust patterns of inference, actually obtain is an empirical one, that empirical descriptions are related by rules in the form of laws, which do support counterfactually robust inferences, is not itself an empirical matter, but a truth about the framework of empirical description. I want to call the underlying insight “the Kant-Sellars thesis about modality.” It is the claim that in being able to use nonmodal, empirical-descriptive vocabulary, one already knows how to do everything one needs to know how to do in order to deploy modal vocabulary, which accordingly can be understood as making explicit structural features that are always already implicit in what one does in describing.

VI. Conclusion Articulating and justifying his version of the Kant-Sellars thesis about modality is Sellars’s constructive response to the empiricist tradition’s “nothing-but-ism” about modality: its demand that what is expressed by modal claims either be shown to be expressible in nonmodal terms, or be dispensed with entirely by semantically fastidious philosophers and scientists. This complements and completes his demonstration, in the “Phenomenalism” essay, that this critical consequence of an overambitious empiricism is in any case incompatible with any constructive empiricist 105

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effort to reconstruct or replace the use of target vocabularies such as objective-descriptive vocabulary, primary-quality vocabulary, and theoretical vocabulary in terms of the favored empiricist base vocabularies, if that effort is subject to even the most minimal criteria of material adequacy. Together, these arguments show what Sellars eventually made of his early intuition that the soft underbelly of empiricism, in both its traditional and its twentieth-century logistical form, is its semantic treatment of modality. My overall aim in this chapter has been to place the arguments against empiricism presented in the first half of “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” in the larger context opened up by laying them alongside the further battery of arguments aimed at the same target that derive from consideration of that tradition’s views about modality. And I have been concerned to show that the methodological strategies that guide all of these discussions are Sellars’s pragmatist insistence on looking at what one must be able to do in order to deploy empirical-descriptive vocabulary, and his rationalist commitment to the necessary inferential articulation of the concepts expressed by the use of such vocabulary. I think that even fifty years on, there is still a lot of juice to be squeezed out of these ideas. But I want to close with another, perhaps more frivolous suggestion. Every sufficiently engaged reading becomes a rewriting, and I have been offering here, inter alia, the outline of a different narrative strategy that Sellars could have adopted in the late 1950s. Under some such title as The Limits of Empiricism, he could have re-presented the material that in fact appeared first as roughly the first half of “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” and the second halves of each of “Phenomenalism” and “Counterfactuals, Dispositions, and Causal Modalities,” organized around and introduced in terms of the themes I have traced here. It is interesting to speculate about how his reception might have been different—and about where we would find ourselves today—had this been the shape of Sellars’s first book.

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4 LINGUISTIC PRAGMATISM AND PRAGMATISM ABOUT NORMS

An Arc of Thought from Rorty’s Eliminative Materialism to His Pragmatism

I. Introduction Richard Rorty used to say that he was a perfect example of Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehog: he had really only ever had one idea. Considering the vast range and diversity of the topics Rorty addressed—encompassing epistemology, metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, the whole history of philosophy and of the culture more generally, literature, politics, and more— such a claim might seem literally unbelievable. But I think there is a core of truth to it. For there is an almost ballistic trajectory described by his thought from very early on—well before Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature—that brought him to the mature form of his pragmatism.1 The later work can be seen as the result of an extended meditation on the lessons that could be drawn from the earlier work. Rorty relentlessly followed out the logic of his argument, no matter where it led, continuing to draw consequences long after the switch on most thinkers’ internal compasses would have flipped from the modus ponens to the modus tollens position. Indeed, one trait he shared with his Princeton colleague David Lewis is the frequency with which they, more than almost any other philosophers of their generation, found it necessary to remind their audiences that “an incredulous stare is not an argument,” as Lewis memorably put it. Of course, the sort of intense, resolute, ruthless single-mindedness that regularly provokes that kind of stare has been the source of some of our greatest philosophical high adventures—one need only think of Baruch Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes, and George Berkeley, or of Kant, Hegel, and Friedrich Nietzsche. 1. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981; Thirtieth Anniversary Edition, 2008). Hereafter, PMN. 107

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We have a pretty good idea where Rorty eventually got to.2 He thought that the biggest contribution philosophers had ever made to the culture more generally was the Enlightenment. What was important about that conceptual sea-change is that we gave up the idea of the norms governing human conduct having their source in something nonhuman (their being something imposed on us by a divine will) and came to see that we ourselves need to take responsibility for those norms—that we need to deliberate with each other and decide what sort of beings we want to be, and so what we ought to do. Rorty was finally led to call for a second Enlightenment: one that would extend to our theoretical conception of knowledge the same insight that animated the first Enlightenment’s constructive criticism of traditional ways of construing the practical sphere. Here, too, Rorty thinks, we need to find ways to free ourselves from the picture of humans as responsible to something nonhuman. On the theoretical side the nonhuman putative authority to which we find ourselves in thrall is not God, but objective Reality. Of course, no reconceptualization can free us from the friction of what Dewey called “problematic situations.” But we should understand that constraint as a feature of our practices, not something external to them, binding us from the outside. We need collectively to deliberate and decide what we should say in very much the same way the first Enlightenment taught us we need collectively to deliberate and decide what we should do. And the reason is the same in both cases: anything else is unworthy of our dignity as self-determining creatures. This is Rorty’s late twentieth-century neopragmatist version of the turn-of-the-century classical pragmatist Enlightenment discussed in Chapter 1.

II. Eliminative Materialism and Pragmatism about Norms What line of thought drove Rorty to this astonishing conclusion? Here is my hypothesis: I conjecture that it starts with the ideas behind the eliminative materialism he had arrived at already by 1970. Red-diaper baby that he had been, Rorty was always going to be a conceptual revolutionary. His first target was the philosophy of mind, where he single-handedly came up with a genuinely new response to the hoary mind-body prob2. I am thinking of the line of thought Rorty presented under the title “AntiAuthoritarianism in Epistemology and Ethics” in his 1996 Ferrater Mora Lectures at the University of Girona, Spain. 108

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lem.3 Picking up a trope from Hegel, Nietzsche had famously announced that God is dead. What was novel about this was not its atheism; far from it. It was rather its commitment to there having been a God, but one whose very existence depended on our thought and practices. When we moderns began to live, act, and believe in different ways, God went out of our lives—and so, the radical thought went, out of existence entirely. Just so, Rorty claimed (as against, for instance, Wittgensteinian behaviorists) that we do have Cartesian minds. But that ontological fact depends on our social practices. It is intelligible—and even, perhaps, advisable— that we should change those practices in ways that would entail that we “lose our minds.” Rorty takes Descartes to have introduced a distinctively modern conception of the mind (as part of the “subjective turn” that preceded our “linguistic” one). The genus of Cartesian ‘pensées’ that subsumes phenomena otherwise as diverse as thoughts and sensations as species is defined by “Incorrigibility as the Mark of the Mental”—as the title of Rorty’s classic essay has it. No one else is in a position to override my sincere, contemporaneous first-person reports of my occurrent mental events. (This is, of course, the very feature that led Wittgenstein to deny the intelligibility of construing any of our utterances as reports of things that exhibit this peculiar sort of privacy.) The thought that is decisive for Rorty is double-barreled. Its first element is the idea that incorrigibility in this sense is a normative phenomenon: a matter of the incontestable authority of certain reports. The second is a social pragmatist idea he credits originally already to the Enlightenment: that normative statuses such as authority are always instituted by social practices. It is (contra Wittgenstein) perfectly intelligible that some of our utterances should both be reports and incontestably authoritative. That is not, however, because of the antecedent intrinsic metaphysical or ontological character of what they are reports of. It is because we can say just what we have to do in order to treat a class of our utterances as incontestably authoritative reports: as incorrigible. So treating them institutes that kind of normative status. But it is our creature. Rorty thinks the ancient Greeks did not have Cartesian minds. And what we have given, by arranging our practices so as to institute norms with this distinctive character, we can take away, if we but change those practices so as to allow other sorts of evidence to have probative evidential weight in contesting the reports previously treated as 3. Contrast functionalism, which had many fathers. 109

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incorrigible. Ironically and radically, Rorty here makes the Cartesian’s ownmost, innermost sanctum subject to the plastic power sometimes claimed for it over other things, for instance, by God-appointed Berkeley that proved all things a dream, That this pragmatical, preposterous pig of a world, its farrow that so solid seem, Must vanish on the instant if the mind but change its theme; as Rorty’s favorite poet Yeats put it.4 The Cartesian mind is real, but it is a contingent, optional product of our mutable social practices. I think that at this point Rorty began an extended investigation of the relation between what he came to call “vocabularies,” on the one hand, and ontology, on the other—a relation that the example of eliminative materialism had shown is far too complex to be captured by talk of a “theoretical direction of fit,” according to which how things anyway objectively are has authority over what we should say about it. His way forward was guided by looking at ontology through normative lenses and understanding normativity in a social pragmatist way. From the vantage point afforded by those strategic methodological commitments, a threesorted ontology appears. Subjective (Cartesian) things are those over which each individual knowing-and-acting subject has incontestable authority. Social things are those over which communities have incontestable authority. So one cannot intelligibly claim, say, that the Kwakiutl are wrong about what an acceptable greeting gesture in their tribe is. There are no facts about that sort of social propriety over and above their collective practical attitudes of taking or treating some gestures as greetings. Finally, objective things are those over which neither individuals nor communities have incontestable authority, but which themselves exercise authority over claims that in the normative sense that speakers and thinkers are responsible to them count as being about those things.

III. From Pragmatism about the Subjective to Pragmatism about the Objective I am now in a position to formulate more carefully my principal thesis about the argumentative thread that led Rorty from his early to his later thought. I think he came to apply essentially the same considerations, 4. “Blood and the Moon,” in The Winding Stair (London: Macmillan, 1933). 110

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mutatis mutandis, that he had made for the subjective province of this threefold ontology to the objective province. For once ontological distinctions have been drawn in normative terms of authority and responsibility, social pragmatism about norms means according a certain substantial categorial privilege to the ontological category of the social. The pragmatist takes it that the normative statuses that distinguish the three ontological categories—the structures of authority and responsibility characteristic of each—are themselves things that fall under the category of the social. The rules and practices for making and contesting various kinds of claim belong to the linguistic communities that deploy the vocabularies in question. So among the ontological kinds of the individualsubjective, the social-intersubjective, and the objective, the social is primus inter pares. (Compare the judiciary, which at least since Marbury v. Madison, has been taken to exercise the ultimate authority to determine what falls within the proper purview of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the U.S. government.) What sort of position does one end up in, if one tries to make the same move with respect to the category of the objective that Rorty made for the subjective with his eliminative materialism? I think he actually oscillates between two positions. Here it is important to remember that some of Rorty’s views are more outrageous than others—but none are less. The more outrageous view is that the structure of authority and responsibility that constitutes objectivity is actually incoherent. When we think from a pragmatist point of view about what it would require, we see that it is not possible for us to institute such a structure. For it requires granting authority to something nonhuman, something that is merely there, to intrinsically normatively inert things that belong in a box with Wittgenstein’s “sign-post considered just as a piece of wood.” A fair amount of Rorty’s rhetoric seems to commit him to a view of this stripe. What is intelligible is a cognitive theoretical consensus on various points (contingent, partial, and temporary though it may be). But the idea of something that cannot enter into a conversation with us, cannot give and ask for reasons, somehow dictating what we ought to say is not one we can in the end make sense of. It is the idea that we are subject (responsible) to an ultimately irrational authority—one whose cognitive contentfulness is, just because of that irrationality, unintelligible. Reality as the modern philosophical tradition has construed it (“just as a piece of wood”) is the wrong kind of thing to exercise rational authority. That is what we do to each other. 111

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That is the lesson we ought to have learned about God from the first Enlightenment, and it will take a second Enlightenment to teach us how to apply that lesson to Objective Reality: the successor candidate for our subjection proposed not now by the Church, but by Science. Rorty often consoled himself after attacks on his intellectual character forwarded by those who saw in such views a dangerous irrationalism (as though rejecting the idea of external nonhuman constraint meant we could no longer make sense of the idea of constraints manifested in our giving and asking each other for reasons) with the thought of those philosophes the first time around who were confidently condemned as immoralists on the grounds that they maintained that matter contained its own principles of motion.5 We eventually learned, after all, that the sort of atheism involved in demoting that function from the divine to the mundane sphere need not lead to running-wild-in-the-streets immoralism. Perhaps someday we could also learn to put aside our initial terror and learn to live with a reconstrual of the features of our practice that the normative structure of objectivity was originally postulated to explain.

IV. An Alternative Application of Social Pragmatism about Norms But this is not the only way to apply earlier lessons to the case at hand. Perhaps it is a cultural advance for us to find it unintelligible that a mere fact—even the fact (supposing it to be a fact), that God created us, along with everything else—should suffice to give Him moral authority over us, to determine who we should be and how we should live our lives. How, after all, in a postfeudal age, are we supposed to understand the connection between the two that is curled up tightly in the conception of our Lord? But if we look not to the original Enlightenment, but to eliminative materialism for our model, it seems a different lesson emerges. For the claim was precisely not that the structure of individual subjective authority that instituted mental events as incorrigible was unintelligible. On the contrary: we can understand exactly how we must take or treat each other in order to institute that structure and so the ontological category of things that exercise authority of that kind. The claim was rather that that struc5. Cf. Jonathan Israel’s wonderful book about Spinoza, The Radical Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

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ture is contingent and optional, and that it is accordingly possible, and under conceivable circumstances even advisable, to change our practices so as to institute a different structure of authority. What if one took up that attitude toward the normative structure that constitutes objectivity? On this line, one would not deny that the notion of objectivity makes sense. One would rather investigate what structure of social practices deserves to count as one where we have instituted a special dimension of normative appraisal of our performances such that authority over whether they are correct along that dimension has been deferred to some (in general) nonhuman things, which we then in this normative sense count as talking or thinking about. One would look to see whether this normative social structure of practices, once identified, can be seen to be optional, in the sense that it has alternatives that are at least intelligible. And one would then consider whether there are any considerations or circumstances that could make it attractive, advisable, or effective to alter or discard practices exhibiting that structure, in favor of some that have quite another shape. The key point is that the social pragmatist claim that normativity is always instituted by our practices and practical attitudes—that normative statuses are ultimately social statuses—does not entail that only the humans who institute those statuses can exhibit or possess them. The notion of responsibility to some nonhuman authority is not in principle undercut by the Enlightenment pragmatist insight that any such status depends on human attitudes of taking or treating something as authoritative. Consider oracles. Early Chinese shamans ceremoniously put tortoise shells in the fire, and then inspected the resulting cracks for similarities to ideographic characters, searching for authoritative answers to weighty factual questions about the future. In Europe, comets and the sightings of rare birds were on occasion invested with tremendous normative significance and purport. Insofar as normative significance is up to us, we can put it where we like—however unwisely. The question, it seems to me, is not whether we can invest authority in nonhuman things: take ourselves in practice to be responsible to them in a way that makes us responsible to them. Of course we can. It is rather how we can institute a dimension of assessment of our sayings and doings that is properly understood as granting semantic and epistemic authority over their correctness, to how it is with the things that we then, in that distinctive normative sense, count as thinking and talking about. What structure or constellation of

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social practical attitudes amounts to taking or treating some things as representings, in the sense that assessments of their correctness depend on (must appeal to, are responsible to) objects and facts that are thereby represented by them? There will be as many answers to that question as there are senses of ‘representation’. If we have learned anything since Descartes put that concept at the center of modern philosophical attention, it is that there are many such senses. We can then ask of each of them, to what extent acknowledging the responsibility of some of our states, for their correctness in that sense, to various aspects of the world (including our fellow discursive practitioners) is a contingent, optional affair. What sort of expressive impoverishment would we condemn ourselves to if we gave up acknowledging (and so instituting) the distinctively semantic structure of authority and responsibility to largely nonhuman things and facts characteristic of the referential species of representation? I think we still have a long way to go (well into the fourth century since Descartes) in delineating that species of normative status, and so in answering the critical question Rorty is asking about it. For what it is worth, my own answer in Making It Explicit is that once it is properly understood, we can see that the referential representational dimension of semantic content is a central, essential, and unavoidable aspect of the game of giving and asking for reasons distinctive of discursive practice as such. It is a transcendental feature of talking in that it is a necessary condition of the possibility of interlocutors navigating across the inevitable (and productive) differences in background commitments between speaker and hearer, so that we can use each other’s assertions as premises in our own inferences. It is constitutive of the notion of information that can be conveyed by making claims to each other. On this reading, Rorty’s two principal theses are compatible with acknowledging the existence of an objective, representational structure of semantic authority. For, first, the referential, representational, denotational dimension of intentionality is understood as a normative structure. What we are talking or thinking about, what we refer to or represent, is that to which we grant a characteristic sort of authority over the correctness of our commitments, along a distinctive dimension of normative assessment we institute by adopting those practical attitudes of making ourselves responsible to what we in that sense count as making commitments about. And, second, we understand doing that, making ourselves responsible to nonhuman things, acknowledging their authority, as something we do—as 114

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conferring on them a distinctively semantic kind of normative status by our adoption of social-practical normative attitudes. The only question that remains is one of social engineering: what shape do our practices need to take in order to institute this kind of normative status? That is a Deweyan question that Rorty would have welcomed.

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Synthesizing Naturalism and Historicism

I. Rorty on Vocabularies The concept of a vocabulary plays a pivotal role in the philosophical worldview—and the vocabulary articulating it—that Rorty developed over the last three decades of his career. His use of this trope has its roots in Quine’s critique of attempts by Carnap and other logical positivists to divide the explanatory labor addressed to linguistic practice between meanings and beliefs. At issue was the Kantian strategy of sharply distinguishing between the activity of instituting conceptual norms (fixing meanings) and the activity of applying those norms (forming and expressing beliefs). The idea was, first, that it is entirely up to us what we could and would mean by our words—here no ‘should’ gets a grip, beyond the subjective ‘should’ that reflects our convenience or arbitrary preference. But, second, once we have committed ourselves in this regard by free stipulation of meanings, the world imposes itself on us, constraining what we should believe, what meaningful sentences we should endorse. For in the context of a settled association of meanings with linguistic expressions, how it is with the things the meanings fix it that we are talking about determines which sentences are objectively correct, in the sense of true. Our talk is to be explained by factoring it as the product of our free meaning-creating activity and the world’s brute, stubborn actuality—again following Kant, what we can know a priori because we have made it, and what we can know only a posteriori, because it can only be found. Quine pointed out that this model overdescribes actual linguistic practice. For we simply do not see sharp differences between changes of meaning and changes of belief of the sort that model predicts. Both on the side of what motivates such changes, and on the side of what follows 116

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from them, changes in linguistic practice seem rather to be arrayed along a continuous dimension accordingly as we are more or less sure how to go on, as the norms already in play seem to have a firmer or a looser grip on the case at hand, as we are more or less inclined to say that we are going on in the same way or changing how we do things. We can present this dimension, if we like, at most as having a change-of-belief pole at the less radical end and a change-of-meaning pole at the more radical end. (In much the same way, I want to say, Hegel responded to the Kantian precursor of this positivist explanatory structure by insisting that all our discursive activity can be construed both as the application of previously constituted conceptual norms—phenomenal activity—and as the institution of new ones—transcendental activity. There is no such thing either as the mere application of a previously determinate conceptual content nor as the institution of a wholly novel conceptual content. Every application of a concept develops its content. More on the significance of this thought later.) If Quine is right, then we should not commit ourselves to a way of talking about our linguistic practices that distinguishes between languages, as structures of meanings, and theories, as structures of beliefs. ‘Vocabulary’ is Rorty’s suggestion for a successor notion to do the work for which the positivists appealed to those concepts. Thus where before taking Quine’s point on board we would have had to distinguish change of language or meaning from change of theory or belief, in Rorty’s recommended idiom we can just talk about change of vocabulary. Of course, to say this much is not yet to outline a view, it is only to point to a task: the task of articulating and teaching us how to use the idiom of vocabularies, of exploring its utility for organizing our thinking about our cognitive and practical activity as knowers and agents. A great deal of Rorty’s philosophical work can usefully be seen as responding to this challenge. Indeed, I think that one of the major reasons underlying the deep affinity Rorty feels with Davidson’s thought is that Davidson is the other major philosopher whose work is oriented in large part by this particular Quinean legacy.

II. Eliminative Materialism Rorty originally came to public prominence as a philosopher (and not coincidentally, to Princeton as it was becoming the premiere department of its time) in the late 1960s, as the author of the first genuinely new response 117

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to the traditional mind-body problem that anyone had seen in a long time: eliminative materialism.1 Just as Nietzsche had overleaped the classical alternatives of theism and atheism by suggesting that at one time God did exist, but that he had died—indeed, that we had killed him by coming to talk and think differently, without thereby ceasing to be us— Rorty transcended the classical alternatives of materialism and dualism by suggesting that although at one time we did (and still now do) genuinely have minds, we can make sense of changes in our vocabulary that would have the effect of destroying them, so that afterwards we would no longer count as having minds, also without thereby ceasing to be us. The argument, characteristically, grew out of a reading of the history of philosophy informed by a reading of contemporary work. Puzzling over the question of why the mind-body problem becomes urgent for modern philosophy in a way that it was not for ancient philosophy, Rorty came to a new way of thinking about one of Descartes’ central innovations: his definition of the mind in epistemic terms. Descartes defined the mind in terms of its relation to our knowledge of it; it is what is best known to itself. Indeed, the mental is defined by its perfect epistemic accessibility; it is the realm where error and ignorance are impossible—what is happening in one’s own mind is exactly whatever one thinks is going on. Rorty called this defining epistemic feature ‘incorrigibility’. Adapting some of Sellars’s ideas, Rorty construed incorrigibility in normative terms as a structure of authority, as according some representations a distinctive sort of epistemic privilege. And he went on to understand this special sort of normative status in social terms: we treat sincere 1. This terminology has since been kidnapped (shades of Peirce’s complaints about James) and pressed into service as the label for a distinct position it inspired— one that addresses propositional attitudes such as beliefs and desires, rather than the occurrent mental events that were Rorty’s target. Although the later pretender to the title is also an interesting philosophical position, and although both trace their ancestries in significant ways to Sellars, the confusion that inevitably results from the adoption of this terminology is a shame. One of its effects, I think, has been to distract attention from the most interesting issues about the relations between vocabularies and what they are about that Rorty’s version raises. For those issues are raised precisely by the radical suggestion that materialism could become true upon our changing our vocabulary in determinate ways. Those issues do not arise for the successor notion of eliminative materialism about beliefs and desires. For if that view is correct, materialism was always true—what a change in vocabulary gets us is only a change from a worse to a better vocabulary, given how things always already were. 118

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first-person claims about the contemporaneous contents of consciousness as incorrigible by agreeing to count nothing as overriding them, that is, as providing decisive evidence against them. So long as we deploy a vocabulary that accords some reports the status of having the right sort of incorrigibility, we are incorrigible and do have minds. If, as Rorty further argued, it is coherent to conceive of circumstances in which we alter our vocabulary to allow sincere first-person reports of mental happenings to be overruled, say by the deliverances of cerebroscopes, then by doing so we are conceiving of circumstances in which we would have come not to have minds in the specifically Cartesian sense. Since this process need not affect our capacity to deploy the vocabulary of psychological states about which no one these days takes us to be incorrigible— beliefs, desires, intentions, and so on—to envisage the loss of mind in this sense need have no impact on our sense of ourselves as intelligent or rational, that is, as sapient. Nor need it affect our capacity to understand ourselves as sentient: as sharing that characteristic sort of responsiveness to environing stimuli that we evidently share at least with other mammals—as even the Cartesians admitted, while they still withheld the attribution of genuine mentality to such nondiscursive creatures, on the grounds that they were incapable of knowledge, indeed, of the sort of conceptually articulated judgments of which incorrigible ones form an epistemically limiting case. This rich and original line of thought is developed in the form of a single sustained argument, each of whose steps involves conceptual moves that are potentially controversial. It has set off significant reverberations in many different quarters, but I do not think we are yet in a position to see to the bottom and assess its significance and success once and for all. One aspect of the argument, which has not been much remarked upon, is, I think, particularly important for understanding the subsequent course of Rorty’s intellectual development. For that argument purports to portray a particular case in which a change of vocabulary— from one that accords incorrigibility to some reports to one that does not—brings with it a change in the objects talked about. And the point of the eliminativist alternative is that this change should not be assimilated to more familiar cases in which what there is to talk about remains the same, but with a change in vocabulary, we stop talking about some bits of it and start talking about some other bits. The claim is not just that we could stop talking about our minds. The claim is that our having minds in the first place is a function of speaking a vocabulary that incorporates 119

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a certain sort of epistemic authority structure. That structure is optional, and speakers of a different sort of idiom simply would not have minds to talk about. If the idea of eliminative materialism is coherent, then we must reconceive the possible relations that vocabularies can stand in to what they enable us to talk about. That is just what Rorty sets out to do.

III. Pragmatism and Representation The way of thinking about the relations between vocabularies and the world in which they are deployed that has been standard since Descartes takes representation as its master concept. Beginning with Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty embarks on an extended investigation of the possibility and advisability of moving beyond that model.2 The point is not to surrender the idea that vocabularies answer to things that are not vocabularies, but to reconstrue that idea in terms other than the representational. Rorty’s development of this line of thought has both a critical and a constructive phase. I think it is useful to see the critique of representational models of vocabularies as centering on a particularly pregnant idea that is implicit already in the work on eliminative materialism: his pragmatism about norms, paradigmatically epistemic ones. By this I mean the thought that any normative matter of epistemic authority or privilege—even the sort of authority exercised on what we say by what we talk about—is ultimately intelligible only in terms of social practices that involve implicitly recognizing or acknowledging such authority. On the constructive side, Rorty began to explore the consequences of replacing the representational model by modeling the use of vocabularies on the use of tools. This idea, common to the classical American pragmatists and Wittgenstein, is what I have called “instrumental pragmatism.” The first move in the critique of representationalism about the semantic and epistemic functioning of vocabularies concerns the notion of epistemically privileged representations. This takes the form of a brilliant rational reconstruction of what was progressive in American philosophy in the late fifties and early sixties, epitomized by the work of Sellars and Quine. Rorty sees those thinkers as spearheading a pragmatist dissolution of neo-kantian positivism. For he reads them as undermining the foundationalist picture of justificatory regresses as halted on the side of 2. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979, hereafter cited as PMN.

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premises by the pure contribution of the constraining world in the form of what is given in perception, and as halted on the side of inferences by the pure contribution of the unconstrained mind in the form of its chosen meanings. The point of attributing special sorts of epistemic authority to the perceptual given and to inferences underwritten by meaning-analytic connections among concepts must, on the pragmatist line, be to explain features of the use of linguistic expressions—the deploying of a vocabulary—in which such authority is acknowledged in practice. But our linguistic practices turn out not to exhibit the sorts of features that would express such implicit acknowledgment: the perceptually given cannot coherently be understood as cognitively significant apart from its role in an inferentially articulated practice of applying empirical concepts, and inferences supposedly underwritten by connections among meanings alone are no more immune to revision in the face of recalcitrant experience than are those evidently underwritten by general matters of fact. Although Rorty did not put the point just this way, I take it that it is specifically pragmatism about epistemic norms that structures this diagnosis of the conceptual bankruptcy of epistemological foundationalism. The target is philosophical invocations of representations supposed to be epistemically privileged solely by their relations to certain kinds of things—perceptible facts and meanings—apart from the role those things play in practices of acknowledging them as authoritative. So regarded, the Sellarsian and Quinean critiques belong in a box with the later Wittgenstein’s investigations of the kind of social practical background against which alone items such as sentences, mental images, and consciously framed intentions can be understood as normatively binding on our activity, in the sense of determining what according to them it would be correct to go on to do. The real issue concerns what sort of larger practical context we are presupposing when we think of something as (functioning as) a representation. For to treat something as a representation is to treat it as subject to a distinctive sort of normative evaluation as correct or incorrect. On this conception of representation, pragmatism about norms has immediate and important consequences. One lesson of the rational reconstruction of Sellarsian and Quinean critiques of the notion of intrinsic epistemic authority uncritically relied upon by foundationalist epistemologists is that the idea that the world by itself, or a mental act by itself, engendering norms determining the correct use of vocabulary is a radical mistake. This lesson is the opening salvo in an assault on the

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usefulness of the Kantian project of factoring the norms governing our deployments of our vocabularies into those due to the way the world is and those due to the activity of the mind. The role of this discussion in the larger project of reconceptualizing the constellation of freedom and constraint characteristic of vocabularies was obscured, I think, by its occasioning a series of casually incendiary metaphilosophical speculations about its significance for the shape and future of the discipline of philosophy: that without that Kantian project, philosophy would find itself with nothing to do. This line of thought was always at best tangential to the central philosophical thrust of the argument of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature—a dispensable peripheral frill one could take or leave according to taste without prejudice to the main point. Distracted by all the metaphilosophical dust and dazzle in the air, however, it was all too easy to dismiss the discussion of privileged representations with the observation that semantic representationalism does not, after all, entail epistemological foundationalism, and to console oneself accordingly with the thought that a critique of the latter falls far short of a critique of the former. Indeed it does, but this is the move that opens the argument, not the one with which it closes.

IV. Norms and Causes Rorty’s master strategy in the book is to use a Kantian conceptual tool to undermine a (broadly) Kantian representationalist picture. That tool is the distinction between causal considerations and justificatory considerations. Kant accused his predecessors of running together causal and conceptual issues, largely through insufficient appreciation of the normative character of the “order and connection of ideas.” It is one thing, he says to Locke, to exhibit the grounds for our ideas or beliefs by saying where they come from, that is, what matter-of-factual processes in fact give rise to them. It is quite another to exhibit grounds for those beliefs by saying what reasons justify them. Rorty appeals to this Kantian distinction to enforce a strict separation between the foreign and domestic affairs of vocabularies. Under the banner “Only a belief can justify another belief”—epitomizing a view he shares with Sellars and Davidson— Rorty insists that inferential or justificatory relations obtain only between items within a vocabulary (that is, between different applications of a vocabulary). The relations between applications of a vocabulary and the environing world of things that are not applications of a vocabulary 122

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must be understood exclusively in nonnormative causal terms. The application of any empirical vocabulary is indeed constrained by the world in which it occurs, but that constraint should be understood as a kind of causal constraint, not a kind of normative constraint. In a nutshell, this is how I think Rorty’s critique of semantic representationalism goes: Normative relations are exclusively intravocabulary. Extravocabulary relations are exclusively causal. Representation purports to be both a normative relation, supporting assessments of correctness and incorrectness, and a relation between representings within a vocabulary and representeds outside of that vocabulary. Therefore, the representational model of the relation of vocabularies to their environment should be rejected. For those—evidently not readers of such canonical texts as “NineteenthCentury Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism”3—who have been pleased to think of Rorty as a kind of linguistic idealist, burdening him with the worst excesses of some of the literary theorists he has the audacity to write about, it may come as a surprise that his critique of representationalism is founded not on denying or ignoring the causal context in which our talk takes place and to which it ultimately answers, but precisely on a hard-headed insistence and focus upon the significance of that context. What distinguishes his view is rather his claim that the sense in which the talk answers to its environment must be understood solely in causal terms, and his determination to follow out the consequences of that claim wherever they lead. Why should one think that? Rorty reads Sellars in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” as enforcing this point. Failure to observe the sharp distinction between epistemic, inferential, normative relations, on the one hand, and causal ones, on the other, leads to the Myth of the Given: the idea, most broadly, that some thing, a mere occurrence or process, could by itself, intrinsically, have normative (specifically, epistemic) significance, bind us, oblige us, or entitle us to do something. This is the idea I have called pragmatism about norms: only in the context of a set of social practices—within a vocabulary—can anything have authority, induce responsibility, or in general have a normative significance for us. More specifically, the key idea is that justification is an inferential affair. What justifies a claim or a belief must be another claim or belief, for only those have the right conceptual shape to serve as premises from which it could be inferred. The world consists of things 3. In Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp.  139–159. 123

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and their causal relations, and they can only cause and not justify a claim or a belief—cannot make it correct or incorrect. It might seem that a crucial distinction is being ignored here. It might be acknowledged that a worldly fact could not, by itself anyway, justify a claim or belief, and so make it correct in the sense of justificatory entitlement. But it need not follow that the fact could not make a claim or belief correct in the sense of true. The representational model, after all, does not purport to tell us about justification (at least, not directly); its claim is that the use of our empirical vocabularies stands in normative semantic relations to the world, in that how things are determines the correctness of our claims in the sense of their truth. This is indeed a point at which some misgivings are warranted, but the distinction in question is not simply being overlooked. Rorty strenuously resists the possibility of the radical decoupling of the concept of truth from practices of justification that is implicitly being put in play at this point.4 His pragmatism about epistemic norms is not restricted to norms of justification, but extends to the norms invoked in appeals to truth and correctness of representation. The question is why we should not think of our claims as standing in normative relations to facts, which make them correct or incorrect in the sense of true or false. Rorty rejects the idea of facts as worldly items that make our claims true or false. Once again, this is not because he ignores or denies the existence of everything other than vocabularies. Precisely not. It is rather a consequence of his anti-idealist commitments to the world of causally interacting things that causally constrains our applications of vocabulary not having a conceptual structure. It is because to talk of facts is to talk of something that is conceptually structured, propositionally contentful, something, that is, with the right shape to stand in inferential and hence justificatory relations. And that is a shape something can only be given by a vocabulary. Conceptual norms are creatures of vocabularies: no vocabularies, no conceptual norms. Rorty can explain our talk of facts: to treat a sentence as expressing a fact is just to treat it as true, and to treat a sentence as true is just to endorse it, to make the claim one would make by asserting the sentence. But he rejects the idea of facts as a kind of thing that makes claims true. This is why he endorses the argument he sums up in the following: “Since truth is a 4. This is a theme that Putnam has been much concerned to develop, and a deep point of affinity between these two thinkers—though it would take us too far afield to pursue the point here. 124

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property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths.”5 Before there were humans, there were no truths, so no true claims, so no facts.

V. A Bridge Too Far? Now I think that at this point something has gone wrong with the argument. But before saying what, I want to stress that Rorty ends up saying these odd things just because they seem to him to be required in order to secure his prosaic, never-questioned commitment to the existence of a world of causally interacting things that existed before there were vocabularies, that was not in any sense constituted by our vocabularymongering, and that goes its way in large part independently of our discursive activity (sometimes regrettably so). I think one can understand facts as true claims, acknowledge that claiming is not intelligible apart from vocabularies, and still insist that there were true claims, and hence facts, before there were vocabularies. For we should distinguish between two senses of ‘claim’: on the one hand, there is the act of claiming, and on the other, there is what is claimed or claimable. I want to say that facts are true claims in the sense of what is claimable rather than in the sense of true claimings. With this distinction on board, there is nothing wrong with also saying that facts make claims true—for they make claimings true. This sense of ‘makes’ should not be puzzling: it is inferential. “John’s remark that ⎡p⎤ is true because it is a fact that p,” just tells us that the first clause follows from the second (assuming that the singular term in the first has a referent). There were no true claimings before there were vocabularies, because there were no claimings at all. But it does not follow that there were no true claimables. In fact, we can show that we ought not to say that. Here is an argument that turns on the grammatical transformations that “It is true that . . .” takes.

5. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p.  21, hereafter CIS. See also “Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth,” in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp.  126–150. Davidson (I think injudiciously) also says things like this in his Dewey Lectures on truth. 125

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Physics tells us that there were photons before there were humans (I read a lot about them in Stephen Weinberg’s account of the early history of the universe, The First Three Minutes, for instance).6 So if before time V there were no humans, so no vocabularies, we do not want to deny that 1. “There were (at time pre-V) photons.” We can move the tense operator out front and paraphrase this as 2. “It was the case (at time pre-V) that [there are photons].” By the basic redundancy property of ‘true’, we can preface this with “It is true that . . .”: 3. “It is true that [It was the case (at time pre-V) that [there are photons]].” Now we can move the tense operator out to modify the verb in “It is true that . . .”: 4. “Was[It is true (at time pre-V) that [there are photons]].” This is the key move. It is justified by the observation that all sentential operators can be treated this way, as a result of deep features of the redundancy of ‘true’. Thus one can transform “It is true that Not[p],” into “Not[It is true that p],” “It is true that Possibly[p],” into “Possibly[It is true that p],” and “It is true that Will-be[p],” into “Will-be[It is true that p].” But now, given how the tense operators work, it is straightforward to derive 5. “It was true (at time pre-V) that [there are photons].” And again invoking the features that make ‘true’ redundant, we get 6. “It was the case (at time pre-V) that [It is true that [there are photons]].” These uniformities involving the interaction of ‘true’ with other sentential operators tell us we are committed by our use of those expressions to either deny that there were photons before there were people—which is to deny well-entrenched deliverances of physics—or to admit that there were truths about photons before there were people to formulate them. Taking the latter course is entirely compatible with acknowledging that the notion of a fact (true claimable) is only intelligible relative to a that of a vocabulary.7 6. New York: Basic Books, 1988. 7. I explain in detail how I think this story goes in Making It Explicit (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), hereafter MIE. 126

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That old semanticist and modal logician Abraham Lincoln asked “If we agreed to call the tail a ‘leg’, how many legs would horses have?” His answer was “Four, because you can’t change how many legs horses have by changing the way we use words.” This is surely the right response. One cannot change the nonlinguistic facts, in the unloaded sense, by changing linguistic ones. In the counterfactual situation envisaged, the words “Horses have five legs,” would be true, but only because it would not say that horses have five legs, and so would not conflict with the fact that horses would still have four legs. When we specify a counterfactual situation and go on to reason about it, our suppositions should not be thought of as altering the meaning of the words we use now to talk about it. The right thing to say using our concept of photon is that these things would have been there even if no language users had ever existed to undertake commitments regarding them. For facts are true claims in the sense of what is claimed, not in the sense of claimings. If we had never existed, there would not have been any true claimings, but there would have been facts (truths) going unexpressed, and in our situation, in which there are claimings, we can say a fair bit about what they would have been.

VI. Social Pragmatism about Knowledge If this is right, then we are not, as Rorty claims, precluded from talking about facts making our claimings true. We can only understand the notion of a fact by telling a story that makes reference to vocabularies— though notice, it is a consequence of the Quinean point with which we began that we can also only understand the notion of a vocabulary as part of a story that includes facts. But this does not entail that there were no facts before there were vocabularies. We can understand those true claimables as (when things go right) making our claimings true. But what about the original point that only beliefs can justify beliefs, and its generalization to the claim that we should only see causal, and not normative, relations between the causal order and our applications of vocabularies? This is a complex issue. Here I can only outline some of the considerations that bear on it. The crux of the matter, I think, is to enforce what Sellars calls the ‘ing’/‘ed’ distinction that was invoked in the previous section, now as applied to ‘belief’. Subjective idealism of the Berkeleyan sort resulted from failure to observe this distinction with the term ‘experience’, thereby underwriting a slide from the true, or at least not obviously false, “All we know is what is experienced (‘experience’)” to the false “All we know is 127

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experiencings (‘experience’).” Believings can justify other believings, and believables can justify other believables. These two senses of ‘justify’ are different, but intimately related. (Just how they should be understood to be related, and which is more usefully regarded as prior in the order of explanation, are deep and interesting questions.) But can believables (which, if true, are facts) justify believings? To ask that question is to ask whether something that is not the application of a vocabulary can justify (and not merely cause) the application of a vocabulary. This Rorty and Davidson deny. I want to suggest one way in which one might take issue with the claim that only causal relations, and not also normative relations of justification, ought to be admitted to obtain between items that are and items that are not applications of vocabularies8: a) There are facts, that is, conceptually structured truth-makers; b) applications of vocabulary must answer to those facts in a not strictly causal but also in an inferential-justificatory sense; and c) in a central range of favored cases of perceptual experience, the facts are the reasons that entitle perceivers to their empirical beliefs. I indicated in the previous section how someone who shared Rorty’s basic commitments might come to be committed and entitled to (a). (b) is just the denial of the general thesis in question, which distinguishes vocabularies’ extramural and intramural relations as causal and normative respectively. (c) then specifies the sense in which justificatory relations are to be discerned in addition to causal ones. I claim that one can main8. One of the central tasks McDowell sets himself in the opening chapters of his pathbreaking book Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996) is to take issue with this claim in a far more radical way than I sketch here. McDowell, like Sellars, is an internalist about justification: to be justified one must be able to justify, to offer reasons oneself for one’s beliefs. The view I am sketching attempts to split the difference between this sort of internalism and the sort of justificatory externalism of which epistemological reliabilism is a paradigm. He and I explore some of these issues (as well as what is involved in not decoupling truth and justification) in his “Knowledge and the Internal” and my “Knowledge and the Social Articulation of the Space of Reasons,” both in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 40, no. 4 (1995). McDowell and I are both concerned, as Rorty is, to avoid the Myth of the Given and to abide by the larger lessons Sellars’s discussion of it teaches.

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tain all of these consistently with pragmatism about norms (and hence without falling into the Myth of the Given). Consider what I am doing when I attribute knowledge to someone. I am, first of all, attributing a propositionally contentful commitment— a taking-true—to the candidate knower. One cannot be taken to know what one does not take to be true. This corresponds to the belief condition on the classical conception of knowledge as justified true belief (the JTB conception). Second, I am attributing some sort of epistemic entitlement to that commitment. Unwarranted or merely accidentally correct takings-true do not count as knowledge. This corresponds to the justification condition on the classical conception, though I am purposely using the somewhat broader notion of epistemic entitlement so as not to prejudge the issue (contentious between epistemological internalists and externalists) of whether one can be justified in holding a belief without being able to justify the belief. What about the truth condition on knowledge, the demand that the belief correspond to or express a fact? In taking the candidate knower’s belief to amount to knowledge, I am taking it to be true. That is, I take it to be an expression of a fact: a true claim (in the sense of what is claimed or claimable). Doing that is not attributing anything to the knower above and beyond the propositionally contentful commitment and epistemic entitlement to it already mentioned. It is doing something else. It is endorsing the claim, undertaking the commitment myself. The standard of correctness I apply is just correspondence to (in the sense of expression of) the facts as I take them to be. Of course, I may be wrong, as the putative knower may. But the meaning of the truth condition on knowledge, the sense of ‘correct’ in which the correctness of a belief is being assessed (by contrast to the sense of correctness assessed by attributions of epistemic entitlement), derives ultimately from this comparison between commitments attributed to another, and those undertaken oneself.9 9. It does not follow from this claim that ‘true’ just means ‘whatever I believe.’ It evidently does not mean that, or I could not wonder about whether all my beliefs are true. It takes a bit of work to develop the view forwarded in the text so as to avoid commitment to such an unwelcome consequence. I show how this can be done in MIE, especially chapters 5 and 8. These discussions culminate in the objectivity proofs (pp.  601–607), which show that the view does not identify the facts with anyone’s commitments or dispositions to apply vocabulary—not with mine, not with all of ours, not with those of any ideal community.

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Such a story underwrites assessments of normative relations obtaining between applications of vocabulary—claims that are candidate expressions of knowledge—and facts with respect to which they are true or false. But it does not violate the claims of pragmatism about norms. How things are is allowed to have normative significance for the correctness of someone’s sayings and believings only in the context of someone else’s attitudes toward how things are, that is, only as filtered through the takingstrue of the one assessing the knowledge-claim. The facts are caught up in social practices by being endorsed by the one attributing knowledge. So there is in this picture no contact between naked, unconceptualized reality and someone’s application of concepts. The sort of semantic correctness involved in truth assessments can be made intelligible as comparisons of one application of vocabulary (by the candidate knower) with another (by the one assessing the candidacy). Surely such an account satisfies the scruples that motivates Rorty’s rejection of normative word-world relations, in spite of its invocation of facts and its underwriting of talk of ‘makingtrue’ and ‘correspondence’.

VII. Social Pragmatism about Reliability But it is one thing to produce a sanitized notion of the correctness of claims being settled by the facts where ‘correct’ is understood in the sense of true. It is a taller order to produce a corresponding notion of correctness of claims as being settled by the facts, where ‘correct’ is understood in the sense of justified. This is what is at issue in claims (b) and (c) in the previous section; it is what Sellars’s arguments against the Myth of the Given in terms of the confusion of nonnormative causal with normative inferential-justificatory relations apparently militates against; and it is what the principle that only a belief can justify a belief directly rules out. In fact, the same strategy applied previously to domesticate epistemic correctness as truth can be extended to domesticate epistemic correctness as justification or warrant. We can see the facts as standing in normative relations of justification to our claimings as well as in causal relations of triggering them. Indeed, we can see them as standing in the normative relations precisely because and insofar as they stand in the causal relations. Epistemological externalists claim that it can be appropriate to attribute the sort of epistemic entitlement required to distinguish mere true beliefs from true beliefs that amount to knowledge even in cases where

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the candidate knower cannot offer reasons justifying her belief. A paradigm case is where the belief is in fact, whether the believer knows it or not, the output of a reliable belief-forming mechanism. Thus someone who is being trained to distinguish Toltec from Mayan potsherds by eye may in fact acquire the reliable differential responsive dispositions required for her noninferential reports of Toltec fragments to count as perceptual knowledge before she realizes that she is reliable. She may at that point be inclined to call something Toltec, without being able to give any reason for that inclination. If she is in fact sufficiently reliable in distinguishing Toltec from Mayan bits, reliabilist epistemologists argue that when she is right, she genuinely knows she is looking at a Toltec bit, even though she cannot justify that claim, even by an appeal to her own reliability as a noninferential reporter. After all, beliefs acquired in this way are not merely accidentally true. This sort of epistemological reliabilism, it seems, is a paradigm case of what Rorty is committed to treat as the mistaking of a causal relation for a justificatory one. For what counts as justifying the reporter’s belief (and so qualifying it as knowledge, if it is true) is the merely causal relation of reliable noninferential triggering of response (classification as Toltec) by stimulus (Toltec potsherds). But if we look at things from the point of view of the one attributing knowledge (as we did before), this appearance vanishes. For what I am doing in taking the reporter to be reliable, attributing reliable differential responsive dispositions to produce noninferential reports, is precisely endorsing an inference myself. I am taking it that the inference from “S is disposed noninferentially to report that the pottery is Toltec” to “The pottery is (probably) Toltec” is a good one. This is an inference from a commitment attributed to the reporter to a commitment undertaken by the attributor. I can treat the report as expressing knowledge even though the reporter cannot offer reasons for it because I can offer reasons for it. Although she cannot invoke her reliability, I can—and if I could not, I could not, even by the reliabilist externalist’s lights, attribute knowledge. The causal relation can underwrite a justification just because and insofar as those assessing knowledge claims take it as making good a kind of inference. Nonnormative causal relations between worldly facts and someone’s claims do not exclude normative epistemic justificatory relations between them, since others can take the causal relations as reasons for belief, by endorsing reliability inferences. This story about assessments of epistemic entitlement, like the one about

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truth assessments, is couched entirely in terms of discursive commitments and entitlements. It shows how the difference in social perspective between assessor and assessed can bring relations between the vocabulary and the causal environment in which it is applied within the scope of the vocabulary itself. I said previously that basing the sharp separation of the foreign and domestic relations of vocabularies by distinguishing exclusively causal external relations from normative justificatory internal relations, on the principle that only a belief could justify a belief, runs the risk of seeming to ignore the distinction between two sorts of correctness-assessments of beliefs for which the facts might be invoked. To say that a worldly fact could not justify a claim or belief, and so make it correct in the sense of justificatory entitlement, is not to say that the fact could not make a claim or belief correct in the sense of true. I pointed out that Rorty would not accept a radical decoupling of justification and truth—to justify a claim is, after all, to give reasons to think it is true. I have now sketched a story about assessments of truth and assessments of reliability (and hence epistemic entitlement) that respects the pragmatism about norms that I see as underlying Rorty’s scruples, that does not decouple truth radically from giving and asking for reasons, and that shows how causal relations between applications of vocabulary and the facts to which those applications answer (in both the sense of ‘answer’ given by assessments of truth and that given by assessments of entitlement or justification) can support conceptually structured inferential relations between facts and claims. This story denies that we must understand the relations between vocabularies and the world they address in exclusively causal terms, restricting normative talk of semantic and epistemic assessment to relations within the vocabulary. At the same time, it accepts a version of the principle that only beliefs can justify (or make true, in the sense of giving inferential grounds for) beliefs. It does so by distinguishing what is believed (or believable) from believings, and appealing to the distinction of social perspective between attributing commitments and inferences, on the one hand, and endorsing commitments and inferences, on the other. Together, these moves let us talk about facts, as true believables, in favored cases both justifying believings and making them true. I have been urging, in the spirit of friendly amendment, that Rorty’s scruples (which lead him properly to insist that semantic and epistemic, as opposed to causal, relations are intelligible only when thought of as

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obtaining between relata that all have conceptual shape) can be satisfied without our having to deny that our claims answer normatively to the facts—both for their truth and for their justification—as well as being causally conditioned by them. The key is to look more closely at the social articulation of our linguistic practices of making and assessing claims, of giving and asking for reasons. However, even if this reconstruction is successful, Rorty may well still think that attempting to tame such dangerous idioms as “truth as correspondence to the facts” and “reliable causal connections providing reasons” is a foolish task to take on: no matter how docile training may seem to have made them, they are always liable to reassert their wild nature and turn on their supposed master. At any rate, the remainder of this discussion will not presuppose the acceptability of these suggestions.

VIII. The Vocabulary Vocabulary A dualism is a distinction drawn in such a way as to make unintelligible the relation between the two sorts of thing one has distinguished. Rorty distinguishes vocabularies, within which various distinctive sorts of normative assessment are in order, from things like photons and butterflies, which interact with each other only causally. Things of this kind do not normatively constrain each other’s activities; they are not in the business of obliging and entitling themselves or each other to do things one way rather than another. A distinction of this sort is recognizably central in the thought of figures otherwise as diverse as Kant, Frege, Wittgenstein, and Sellars. Does Rorty’s use of ‘vocabulary’ commit that great foe of dualisms to a dualism of norm and cause? I do not think so. But pursuing the issue opens up some interesting avenues through his thought. If we take a step back, we can say that there is the vocabulary of causes, and there is the vocabulary of vocabularies (that is, of implicitly normative discursive practices). What can we say about the relations between them? First of all, they are different vocabularies. It may be that all Rorty needs of the Kantian distinction between the order of causation and the order of justification is this fact: these ‘orders’ are specified in different vocabularies.10 It would be a mistake to confuse, conflate, or 10. If we were to try to be even a little more careful about pinning this general distinction on Kant, we would have to acknowledge that causation is itself a

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run them together. But they are not just different. For one thing, the vocabulary of causes is a vocabulary. It is something we can discuss in the metavocabulary of vocabularies. We can ask such questions as how the vocabulary of Newtonian causes arose, and how it differs from the vocabulary of Aristotelian causes in the questions it prompts us to ask about ourselves and our activities. Rorty himself often pursues such questions and thereby affirms his practical commitment to historicism. But developing and applying vocabularies is something that we, natural creatures, do. Our doing of it consists in the production of causally conditioned, causally efficacious performances. That is to say that using vocabularies is one among many other things that is describable in the vocabulary of causes. Rorty never loses sight of this fact. In his insistence on reminding us of the causal relations between our applications of vocabulary and the world in which we apply it, he affirms his practical commitment to naturalism.11 The fact that we can use the vocabulary metavocabulary to discuss the causal vocabulary (its emergence, peculiarities, practical virtues and vices, and so on), and the causal metavocabulary to discuss vocabularies (the role of reliable differential responsive dispositions in empirical vocabularies, the practical capacities they enable, and so on) shows that the distinction between the vocabulary of causes and the vocabulary of vocabularies is not drawn in terms that make relations between them unintelligible. So it is thoroughly normative (rule-governed) affair for Kant—indeed, explaining the significance of this fact is an absolutely central task of the first Critique. But the distinction between things that act only according to rules and things that act according to conceptions or representations of laws, the realm of nature, and the realm of freedom, will do pretty well. Rorty sometimes (e.g., in “The World Well Lost”) distinguishes these two by saying that what it is for us in practice to treat something as belonging to the first realm, is to see its antics as fit to be explained (which is the cash value of adopting the causal vocabulary), while to treat something as belonging to the second realm is to see its antics as fit to be translated (which is the cash value of adopting the vocabulary vocabulary). 11. Recall Rorty’s observation in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp.  166–167, that near the end of the nineteenth-century philosophy was left with two approaches, historicism and naturalism, neither of which gave philosophical understanding any special dispensation. Russell and Husserl, each in his own way, responded to this situation by coming up with something for philosophy to be apodeictic about in the Kantian manner. It has taken us the better part of a century to see through their fascinating fantasies and work our way back to historicism and naturalism. 134

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not playing the functional expressive role of a dualism. From the point of view of this question, when we have remarked on the complementary perspectives these metavocabularies provide on each other, we have said everything there is to say—at any rate, everything we need to say—about the relations between the two. Rorty’s positive suggestion is that we can make sense of normative evaluations of vocabularies on the model of assessing tools as more or less useful in pursuit of certain goals or purposes. One of the cardinal benefits he sees stemming from the adoption of the vocabulary of instrumental pragmatism is the discursive pluralism that idiom encourages. It makes sense to make normative comparisons of tools once a task is specified. Hammers are better than wrenches for driving nails. But it makes no sense to ask whether hammers or wrenches are better, simply as tools. Assessment of tools is always relative to a purpose; to describe something as a tool is only to say that it has a purpose, not to specify some particular purpose. Similarly, Rorty wants to teach us not to ask whether one vocabulary is better than another simply as a vocabulary. We can say that the causal vocabulary is the better one to apply if one’s purpose is to predict which way one billiard ball will move when struck by another, or to get someone to say “Ouch.” And we can say that the vocabulary vocabulary is probably better if we want instead to discuss the relations between Blake’s poetry and Wordsworth’s.12 One of the main indictments of the metavocabulary of representation is that it tempts us to think that we can make sense of the question “Which vocabulary is better as a representation?” without having to specify a further purpose.13 “Mirroring the world” is intelligible as such a purpose only as an element of some larger practical context. The root commitment of the representational metavocabulary as a metavocabulary is the idea that “representing the world” specifies a purpose that all vocabularies share—or at least a purpose to which they could all be turned, a dimension along which they could all be compared. But insofar as this is true, the purpose in question is devoid of any content common to the motley of vocabularies with which we are familiar. It is an empty formal 12. Though that is not to say that causal vocabularies are useless in this case, since we can learn a lot about the vocabularies of these poets by studying the social and political influences to which they were subject, the effects of their early familial experiences, and so on. 13. See, for instance, the discussion that culminates at CIS, p.  21. 135

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compliment that can be paid to any set of practices that deserve to be called ‘linguistic’, in virtue simply of some performances counting within them as having the significance of assertions. The compliment is empty because promiscuous. It affords no grounds for comparison, for assessments of better and worse.14 For assertions just are claims about how things are. That is, we derive our practical grip on the notion of “representing how things are” from our practical mastery of assertion: representing how things are is what we are doing when we make claims. So Rorty’s purpose in introducing the vocabulary vocabulary is not to recommend it as a replacement for or competitor of the causal vocabulary. It is introduced as useful for some purposes, and not for others. It is intended to replace the metavocabulary of representations. For that one turns out, Rorty argues, to have outlived its usefulness for the purposes for which philosophers introduced it: understanding how vocabularies work in general (and in particular the relationship between the causal vocabulary of modern physics and the intentional vocabulary of everyday life). My purpose in the remainder of the essay is not further to examine that critical argument, but rather further to explore the instrumental pragmatism Rorty recommends to replace the representationalism of our philosophical fathers.

IX. Vocabularies as Tools If we should think of vocabularies instrumentally, as tools, what should we think of them as tools for doing? The purposes with respect to which we assess vocabularies as better and worse, more and less successful, come in two flavors. For we can think of purposes either as they come into view from the perspective of the naturalist or as they come into view from the perspective of the historicist. Vocabularies can be viewed as evolutionary coping strategies. As determinately embodied organisms, we come with interests in survival, adaptation, and reproduction. Vocabularies can be useful tools for pursuing those inbuilt ends—particularly 14. Of course, to say this is not to say that there is no point in coming up with some more limited theoretical notion of representation of things that applies to some vocabularies and not others, specifying a more specific purpose to which some but not all can be turned. But such a notion is not Rorty’s target, for it does not aspire to being a metavocabulary—a vocabulary for talking about all vocabularies, the essence of what being a vocabulary is.

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the causal vocabularies that enable prediction and secure control over the natural environment. Broadening the focus somewhat, whatever it is that we find ourselves wanting or pursuing—whether rooted in our biology, in the determinate historical circumstances under which we reproduce our social life, or in idiosyncrasies of our individual trajectories through the world—deploying vocabularies can be a useful means for getting what we want. This thought is the lever with which classical American pragmatism sought to move the conceptual world. To think of vocabularies this way is really to think of them in the terms of the metavocabulary of causes (of already describable effects). But vocabularies can do more than just help us get what we already want. They also make it possible to frame and formulate new ends.15 Rorty says: The Wittgensteinian analogy between vocabularies and tools has one obvious drawback. The craftsman typically knows what job he needs to do before picking or inventing tools with which to do it. By contrast, someone like Galileo, Yeats, or Hegel (a “poet” in my wide sense of the term—the sense of “one who makes things new”) is typically unable to make clear exactly what he wants to do before developing the language in which he succeeds in doing it. His new vocabulary makes possible, for the first time, a formulation of its own purpose.16 No nineteenth-century physicist could have the goal of determining whether neutrinos have mass. No ancient Roman governor, however well intentioned, could resolve to respect the human rights of the individuals over whom he held sway. No medieval poet could set out to show the damage wrought on an individual life by the rigidity of gender roles inscribed by an archetypal family romance. In fact, pragmatism itself is a prime example: Raymond Williams points out that the words ‘problem’ and ‘solution’ had only such rare and specialized uses (in mathematics) at the time that they do not even occur in the King James version of the Bible. (Nor, indeed, does ‘happiness’.) Can we post-Deweyans so much 15. Of course, the development of nonlinguistic tools can also make new purposes possible, though it is seldom possible to separate this phenomenon firmly from the discursive context in which it takes place. 16. CIS, pp.  12–13.

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as understand the way of being in the world natural to ones whose personal, professional, and political activities are not structured by the seeing of problems and the seeking of solutions to them? And as purposes wax, so they wane. No physician can any longer so much as try to isolate the choleric humor in a feverish patient. No statesman can aim, like Klemens Metternich, to reestablish recognition of the divine right of kings. And it would be a rare contemporary poet who could adopt John Milton’s goal and write so as “to justifye the wayes of God to man.” A distinctive feature of Rorty’s discursive pragmatism is how seriously he takes this historicist point about the role of alterations of vocabulary in altering the purposes accessible to us—both by engendering novel ones and by rendering familiar ones obsolete or irrelevant. To think of vocabularies this way is to think of them in terms of the metavocabulary of vocabularies, rather than the metavocabulary of causes. For to do so is to focus on bringing about new descriptions, rather than new effects. This insight provides another reason to reject the monolithic representationalist answer to the question: What are vocabularies for—that is, what purpose do they serve as vocabularies? For the representationalist response is that vocabularies are tools for representing how things always already in any case are. It entails that vocabularies can be partially ordered depending upon whether they do that job better or worse. Such a response is at least intelligible so long as we restrict our attention to the role of vocabularies in pursuing the sort of goals that come into view from the broadly naturalistic perspective. Insofar as the point of vocabularies is conceived as helping us to survive, adapt, reproduce, and secure antecedently specifiable wants and needs, limning the true vocabularyindependent structure of the environment in which we pursue those ends would evidently be helpful. It is much less clear what the representationalist picture has to offer if we broaden our attention to include the role of vocabularies in changing what we want, and even what we need. From the historicist perspective, insofar as it makes sense to talk about what all vocabularies are for, simply as such, the answer must give prominent place to the observation that they are for engendering new purposes. This function of vocabularies is simply not addressed by representationalist totalitarianism.17 17. Notice that this point is independent of, and less radical than, the lesson I suggested at the outset Rorty learned from his treatment of the mind in terms of incorrigibility. That case is different from the engendering of new (and obsolescing 138

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These two sorts of purposes—those that loom largest from the perspective provided by the commitments implicit in the naturalist’s preferred vocabulary, and those that loom largest from the perspective provided by the commitments implicit in the historicist’s preferred vocabulary—fund structurally different sorts of assessments of more and less successful vocabularies, and consequently structurally different notions of conceptual or discursive progress. Assessments of the relative success of various vocabularies at achieving purposes of the first kind are at least in principle available prospectively. Assessments of the relative success of vocabularies at achieving purposes of the second kind are in principle only available retrospectively. Interests rooted in fundamental features of our embodiment and activities as social creatures transcend more parochial features of our vocabularies. They put even practitioners of discarded vocabularies in a position to assess with some authority the relative success of different attempts at pursuing them. Thus Aristotle would not, without complete reeducation, be able to appreciate much of the conceptual progress we have made in physics since his time. But he would immediately be able to appreciate our greater facility at making large explosions, constructing tall buildings, traveling and transporting cargo by air, and so on. For our techniques are simply and evidently better at doing things he could already perfectly well understand wanting to do—in a way that more accurately measuring the charge on an electron is not something he could already understand wanting to do. We owe the preservation of the bulk of classical Greek philosophy and literature—the repository of their vocabularies—to the admiration of the early Arabs for the practical achievements of Greek medicine. Greek doctors could save warriors from the effects of battlefield wounds and diseases the Arabs knew would otherwise be fatal. That gave them a reason to treasure and translate works of Greek theory that would otherwise have left them unmoved. For the medical practice answered to interests the Arabs shared, while the theory— which the Greeks insisted was inseparable from the practice—answered to interests formulable only in an alien vocabulary. In cases like these, of old) purposes, because it purports to show how representeds can be brought into and out of existence by changes in vocabulary. It would accordingly be an even more extreme variety of alteration that could be wrought by changes in vocabulary. On Rorty’s view, for us to have minds just is for us to use vocabulary that incorporates a certain structure of authority. 139

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progress in achieving ends can be visible even from the point of view of those speaking a less successful vocabulary. By contrast, the sophisticated interests that are intelligible only as products of particular vocabularies give rise to assessments of success and progress that are essentially available only retrospectively. From the privileged vantage point of (what we take to be) a mature atomic theory of the nature of matter, we can retrospectively discern (indeed, in an important sense, constitute) a progressive path trodden by Democritus, Lucretius, John Dalton, and Ernest Rutherford, and contrast it with the mistakes of the fans of infinitely divisible cosmic goo. Nineteenth-century realist painters, having won their way clear to the purpose of conveying in a picture exactly the visual information available to an observer from a point of view fixed in space and time could then rewrite the history of art Whiggishly, seeing it as structured by such epoch-making events as the discovery of the laws of perspective; medieval painters would not and could not have seen the later productions as doing better what they were trying to do. Assessments of progress in realism of portrayal are essentially retrospective.18 Assessments of technological and theoretical progress are evaluations of the relative success of different vocabularies at achieving a fixed constellation of goals. Such evaluation requires that the goals be specified in some vocabulary. The structural difference I am pointing to reflects the difference between goals that are specifiable in all the vocabularies being evaluated and those that are specifiable only in a privileged subset—in the limit, in one of them. Naturalistic pragmatism allows vocabularies to be evaluated only with respect to their utility for accomplishing the first sort of end. Historicist pragmatism allows vocabularies to be evaluated also with respect to their utility for accomplishing the second sort of end. Naturalistic pragmatism courts the dangers of reductionism and philistinism—as though we could safely dismiss romantic poetry by asking what contribution it has made to the adaptability and long-term survivability of human beings. Historicist pragmatism courts the dangers of smugness and empty self-satisfaction. For it is far too easy to tell Whiggish retrospective stories, rationally reconstructing one’s tradition as a mono18. I’m waving my hands here at the story Ernst Gombrich tells in his magisterial Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Presentation (London: Phaidon, 1968).

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tonic approach to the pinnacle of one’s current vocabulary. We can all too easily imagine our scientific institutions falling into the hands of theological fanatics who can describe in excruciating detail just how the revolutionary change from present-day science to their loopy theories represent decisive progress along the essential dimension of pleasingness to God—a purpose unfortunately and pitiably no more available from within the impoverished vocabulary of twentieth-century natural science than that of measuring the charge of electrons was from within Aristotle’s vocabulary. Once these two sorts of purposes have been distinguished, it is obviously important to try to say something about how they ought to be understood to be related. It is a central and essential feature of Rorty’s developing philosophical vocabulary that it strives to keep both the perspective of the naturalist and the perspective of the historicist fully in view at all times. The reductive naturalist must be reminded that she is leaving out of her story an absolutely crucial practical capacity that vocabularies give us: the capacity to frame genuinely novel purposes, and so in a real sense to remake ourselves. The uncritical historicist must be sprung from the dilemma of flabby relativism, on the one hand, and selfsatisfied parochialism, on the other, by the reminder that there are purposes that transcend vocabularies and permit us to make comparative assessments. The theological fanatics should not be permitted to claim theoretical progress over traditional natural science until and unless that progress can be certified technologically as well. The question is, can they on the basis of their theories both keep the machines running and continue to make the sort of progress at securing common practical ends that would have convinced Aristotle of our greater prowess, and ought to convince contemporary scientists that their successors had indeed made corresponding progress? Pragmatism ought to be seen as comprising complementary vocabularies generated by the perspectives of naturalism and historicism, of common purposes and novel purposes, rather than as restricting itself to one or the other.

X. Vocabularies and the Public/Private Split One arena in which Rorty explicitly confronts this challenge may seem initially surprising: political theory. A distinctive feature of Rorty’s thought is his conviction that adopting a philosophical vocabulary that

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treats people as incarnated vocabularies has specifically political implications.19 This shared conviction is one of the deep underpinnings of his identification with Dewey and a warrant for the assertion of kinship implicit in adopting and transforming the tag ‘pragmatism’, even in the face of the many important differences between the two thinkers’ use of it. Again, this commitment marks a significant point of contact with Jürgen Habermas. Though both philosophers are quick to insist on the magnitude and import of the issues that divide them, they are each concerned to extract substantive political conclusions from a philosophical investigation of language. It is easy to see how an intellectual whose research as a philosopher has led him to view philosophy as one form of writing among others—distinguished by the vocabularies it has inherited and the texts to which it owes allegiance rather than by a distinctive task or timeless essence—should address himself to its relations to other sorts of literature and criticism. Seeking to situate one’s research area in and to develop its significance for the culture more generally is, after all, the distinctive calling of the intellectual as such. It is perhaps more difficult to see how the vocabulary vocabulary could be thought to teach us lessons concerning our relations to institutions that articulate power, traditionally distinguished from mere talk. But for Rorty, it is vocabularies all the way down. Many of the lessons he extracts are critical, by way of ground-clearing: for example, do not think that the propriety and the utility of the vocabulary of rights, or of obligations, must be grounded in the existence of a distinctive kind of thing (rights, obligations), which another vocabulary must be getting wrong, or at least ignoring, insofar as it leads us to speak otherwise. After all, for Rorty mindedness turned out to consist in an authority structure instituted by an optional vocabulary, rather than in an antecedent structure of facts specifiable in a causal vocabulary. But the most basic positive suggestion that Rorty makes in this area is that political wisdom begins with a sharp distinction between the public and private use of vocabularies.20 The vocabularies in which we conduct our 19. “Private Irony and Liberal Hope,” in CIS, pp.  73–95. 20. It should be clear throughout the discussion that Rorty’s talk of ‘private’ uses of vocabulary does not fall afoul of the considerations advanced in Wittgenstein’s arguments against the intelligibility of private languages. Rorty’s private vocabularies are private only relatively and de facto, not absolutely, or de jure.

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public business with each other must be shared. They answer to the goals of minimizing cruelty, humiliation, and injustice, and of creating a space in which individuals can pursue their private ends with as little interference from others as is compatible with minimizing cruelty, humiliation, and injustice. Our private vocabularies need not be shared. They answer to the goals of recreating ourselves individually by redescribing ourselves—transforming our inherited vocabularies in novel and unpredictable ways and pursuing idiosyncratic personal goals that come into view through the medium of those new vocabularies. Aristotle, Locke, Karl Marx, Mill, Dewey, John Rawls, and Habermas are theorists, practitioners, and admirers of the kinds of public vocabularies whose job it is to sustain and perfect communities, making possible the formulation and pursuit of shared goals and projects. Henry David Thoreau, Søren Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Charles Baudelaire, Heidegger, Marcel Proust, and Vladimir Nabokov are theorists, practitioners, and admirers of the kinds of private vocabularies whose job it is to transform and perfect individual selves, making possible the formulation and pursuit of novel personal goals and projects. Public vocabularies articulate the norms that govern our answering to each other; private vocabularies articulate the norms that govern our each answering to ourselves. Rorty sees the distinction between public and private discourse as a special case of the distinction between thought and talk that takes place within a stable, shared vocabulary, on the one hand, and thought and talk that transcends such a vocabulary by creating a new, individualized vocabulary, on the other. Community-constitutive acts of forming ‘we’ intentions, and the giving and asking for reasons that such acts are embedded in, are made possible by the shared norms and commitments implicit in our use of a public vocabulary. Poets and revolutionary scientists break out of their inherited vocabularies to create new ones, as yet undreamed of by their fellows. The creation of novel vocabularies is an activity we can all partake in to one degree or another, but we should recognize the incommensurability of the vocabulary in which we publicly enact our concern for the development of the ‘we’ and that in which we privately enact our concern for the ‘I’. Rorty says: There is no way to bring self-creation together with justice at the level of theory. The vocabulary of self-creation is necessarily private, unshared, unsuited to argument. The vocabulary of justice

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is necessarily public and shared, a medium for argumentative exchange. He recommends that we begin to think of the relation between writers on autonomy and writers on justice as being like the relation between two kinds of tools—as little in need of synthesis as are paintbrushes and crowbars. One sort of writer lets us realize that the social virtues are not the only virtues, that some people have actually succeeded in re-creating themselves. We thereby become aware of our own halfarticulate need to become a new person, one whom we as yet lack words to describe. The other sort reminds us of the failure of our institutions and practices to live up to the convictions to which we are already committed by the public, shared vocabulary we use in daily life. The one tells us that we need not speak only the language of the tribe, that we may find our own words, that we may have a responsibility to ourselves to find them. The other tells us that that responsibility is not the only one we have. Both are right, but there is no way to make both speak a single language . . . The demands of self-creation and human solidarity [are] equally valid, yet forever incommensurable.21 Here the tool metaphor is brought in to make intelligible the practical compatibility of both undertaking the shared commitments implicit in deploying the vocabulary of liberal community and adopting the attitudes of ironic detachment and playful creativity expressed in deploying idiosyncratic vocabularies that bring novel possibilities and purposes into view. These two forms of life are equally near and dear to Rorty’s heart and central to his wider vision of our situation as incarnated vocabularies. We can lead these two lives if we keep a strict separation between the vocabularies of public and private life. The vocabulary that construes vocabularies as tools is Rorty’s primary tool for construing that split coherently and nondualistically. For if there is no one thing that vocabularies as vocabularies are for—for instance, mirroring nature, representing how the things, from which we should read off our responsibilities, really are—then we can simply see tradition-sustaining and 21. CIS, pp. xiv–xv.

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tradition-transforming vocabularies as serving different purposes, and hence as not competing. What more can we say about the relationship between these two discursive aspects of our lives, beyond the observation that they are distinct and do not compete with one another? I think they can be understood as expressions of the two dimensions of pragmatism noted in the previous section: public discourse corresponding to common purposes, and private discourse to novel purposes. The novel vocabularies forged by artists for private consumption make it possible to frame new purposes and plans that can be appreciated only by those initiated into those vocabularies. The recreation of the individual they enable makes possible a distinctive sort of assessment of success that is essentially retrospective— because prospectively, in the terms of the vocabulary that has been transformed and transcended, one cannot in general so much as understand the ends toward which one’s efforts are now bent. By contrast, the overarching goals that structure and orient the public vocabulary Rorty envisages are common to, or at least intelligible in the terms of, a wide variety of vocabularies. Minimizing cruelty is an aim rooted ultimately in our biological encoding of pain as the mark of harm for creatures like us. A baseline or default abhorrence of the infliction of pain on one of us (though possibly not on one of those others) is accordingly one of the most basic attitudes instituting and sustaining an us. And just as pain is the paradigm of felt harm to an essentially biological creature, so is humiliation the paradigm of felt harm to an essentially social one. These are just the sort of vocabulary-transcendent common purpose highlighted by the pragmatist-as-naturalist. Can the same be said of the other common civic aims that Rorty, as liberal theorist, insists should be basic to our public discourse? On the face of it, the aspiration to justice, in the sense that those affected by plans for communal action should have a voice in the deliberation that leads to the adoption of those plans, and the aspiration to freedom, in the sense of ensuring to each individual appropriate behavioral and discursive space in which to pursue purely private ends (where that pursuit does not infringe on the corresponding space of others) have a different status. These aims evidently are not shared by inhabitants of all political vocabularies— either historically or on the contemporary scene. And Rorty is constitutionally suspicious of the heroic efforts of thinkers like Rawls and Habermas (following such models as Locke, Kant, and Hegel) to exhibit

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commitments to goals like these as always already implicit in giving and asking for reasons in a vocabulary at all. For him, the practical efficacy of appeals to this sort of concern is always relative, not only to our embodiment and social nature, but also to our historical circumstance. That we cannot and need not insist that these considerations can be shown to be pressing from the vantage point provided by every possible vocabulary whatsoever is the upshot of the realization of the contingency of the conditions that make even a liberal polity possible. Nonetheless, though the goals of justice and freedom in these minimal senses may not move all those to whom we would in our actual circumstances, and with our actual traditions, like to address political claims in a public vocabulary, those goals are evidently intelligible to them. The problems posed by the collision of the aims of justice and freedom with the ruthless public pursuit of private interest by an arbitrarily privileged few, whether in Athens or in Washington, is not that the parties to the dispute cannot understand one another’s goals. They understand each other all too well. The problems are rather practical: the wrong side too often wins. Disagreements of this sort do not belie a shared public vocabulary. (Indeed, a striking feature of contemporary political discourse—and not only in the developed, prosperous part of the world—is the extent to which debates are framed in terms of the opposition between justice and freedom in these minimal senses, on the one hand, and the ruthless public pursuit of private interest by an arbitrarily privileged few, on the other. The disputants just disagree about who is who.)

XI. Discursive Practice Lining up the public/private split in this way with the two sorts of purposes pragmatists can appeal to—those that are most salient from the perspective of the naturalist, who starts out employing the metavocabulary of causes, and those that are most salient from the perspective of the historicist, who starts out employing the metavocabulary of vocabularies— suggests a way of using the vocabulary vocabulary to conceptualize the complementary relation between these perspectives. For this way of thinking about them emphasizes the divide between routine purposes and novel ones, and hence between shared, tradition-sustaining norms and idiosyncratic, tradition-transforming performances. And the way in which these two presuppose and involve one another is of the essence of specifically linguistic practices. 146

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For the characteristic feature distinguishing vocabularies from nondiscursive tools is their function in generating novel claims, and hence novel purposes. Forty years ago Chomsky made the epochal observation that novelty is the rule, rather than the exception, in human languages. In fact, almost every sentence uttered by an adult native speaker is new— not only in the sense that that speaker has never uttered it before, but more surprisingly, also in the sense that no one has ever uttered it before. A relatively few hackneyed sentences may get a lot of play: “Have a nice day,” “I’m hungry,” “You’ll be sorry,” and so on. But it is exceptionally unlikely that an unquoted sentence chosen at random from an essay such as this one will ever have been uttered before. Nor is this preponderance of novelty a feature special to the special vocabularies and complex sentences of professor-speak. Even the chit-chat we use to organize routine enterprises in our everyday lives consists largely of strings of words that have never before appeared together in just that order. Almost surely, no one has ever before said exactly “If it rains, we’ll have to take both the baseball equipment and the picnic stuff out of the trunk of the car, because it leaks.” That is, even where the sentiment is routine, the expression of it seldom is. (How much more unlikely is it that anyone before Sam Johnson had ever described an acquaintance as “obscurely wise and coarsely kind”!) This phenomenon has been repeatedly confirmed empirically, by searches of large corpora of spoken and written sentences. And it is easily deduced almost from first principles by a comparison of the number of sentences of, say, twenty words or fewer, generated by simple grammatical constructions from the very limited five thousandword vocabulary of Basic English (readers of this essay probably not only passively understand, but actively use an order of magnitude more English words than that), with the number of sentences there has been time for all human beings to utter in the history of the world, even if they all always spoke nothing but English and did nothing but utter sentences. Now some of this novelty is conceptually trivial—a matter of there being many ways to convey (what we want to call) essentially the same thought. But a great deal of it is not. As one moves away from the careless imprecision that can be perfectly in order in casual conversation, either in the direction of literature (with poems as the textual pole defining the dimension I mean to be pointing at) or in the direction of a technical discipline such as metallurgy (with equations couched in the mathematical language of fundamental physics as the textual pole defining that dimension), one finds more and more that to use a different string of words 147

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is to say something importantly different. The more specialized the vocabulary, the more likely it is that lexical or syntactic differences carry with them substantial differences in inferential behavior, and hence conceptual significance. Far more often than not, the uttering of novel sentences is the making of novel claims. The difference between ordinary and specialized idioms in this regard is only one of degree: intensified, the phenomenon that is already evident in everyday life becomes more striking still in more specialized disciplinary idioms. Novel claims have novel inferential consequences, are subject to novel challenges, and require novel justifications. The game of giving and asking for reasons largely consists in the entertainment of the possibilities for such novel commitments, and the exploration both of their consequences and of what would be required in order to become entitled to them. We spend most of our time on untrodden inferential ground. Although what else a novel claim would commit one to, what it would be incompatible with, and what would entitle one to it must in some sense be controlled by shared norms that antecedently govern the concepts one deploys in making such a claim; in the sense that the inferential moves are answerable for their correctness to those norms, it is simply a mistake to think of the antecedent norms as determining the process. In exploring the inferential significance of novel claims, we are not simply tracing out paths determined in advance. For the inferential norms that govern the use of concepts are not handed down to us on tablets from above; they are not guaranteed in advance to be complete or coherent with each other. They are at best constraints that aim us in a direction when assessing novel claims. They neither determine the resultant vector of their interaction, nor are they themselves immune from alteration as a result of the collision of competing claims or inferential commitments that have never before been confronted with one another. Philosophy proper was born when Plato took as an explicit topic of understanding and explanation the Socratic procedure of exploring, querying, and grooming our concepts by eliciting novel claims and producing novel juxtapositions of commitments his interlocutors were already inclined to undertake so as to expose their potentially incompatible consequences. Socrates showed how it was possible for us to investigate the cotenability, by our own lights, of our various commitments, and indeed, of the coherence of concepts we deploy. Engaging in these characteristic exercises in Socratic rationality typically changes our dispositions to endorse claims and make inferences. Where these changes are substantial, 148

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the result is a change in the conceptual norms to which one acknowledges allegiance: a change in vocabulary. Such changes can be partially ordered along a dimension that has something that looks like change of meaning at one end, and something that looks like change of belief at the other. Dummett points to the (now happily archaic) expression ‘Boche’ as a useful paradigm of inappropriate pejoratives: its circumstances of appropriate application are that someone is of German nationality, and its consequences of application include being barbarous or more prone to cruelty than other Europeans.22 Using the word, applying the concept, commits one to accepting the propriety of the inference from the circumstances to the consequences of application. If, once Socratic exploration of the inferential and doxastic potential of this concept has made this implicit inferential commitment explicit, one does not endorse that inference, then one must relinquish the concept and refuse to apply the term at all. This is most like a change of meaning—but notice that it is occasioned by confronting that meaning with substantive beliefs, perhaps about the Germany of J. S. Bach, J. W. von Goethe, and Kant. Again, I may be committed to the inference from something’s tasting sour to its being an acid, and also to the inference from something’s being acid to its turning litmus paper red. If I then run across something that tastes sour and turns litmus paper blue, I have a problem. Whether what I do should count as a change of belief about acids or a change in what I mean by acid is just not clear. My discovery that not all green tractors are made by John Deere and not all red ones by International Harvester presumably belongs pretty close to the change-of-belief end of the spectrum. But as we saw in Section I, the vocabulary vocabulary was originally introduced precisely to express our acknowledgment of the practical inadequacy of the theoretical vocabulary of meaning and belief that committed us to answering one way or the other to the question: change of meaning or change of belief? So Quine’s original point should be developed further. Every claim and inference we make at once sustains and transforms the tradition in which the conceptual norms that govern that process are implicit. The vocabulary vocabulary that replaces meaning-belief talk must incorporate and express our realization that applying conceptual norms and transforming 22. Frege: Philosophy of Language, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p.  454. See also the related discussion in chapter 2 of MIE. 149

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them are two sides of one coin. (This is the point of Hegel’s talk about the “restless negativity of the Concept.”) The only practical significance of conceptual norms lies in the role they play in governing the use and application of those concepts, in concert with their fellows. That use consists largely in making novel claims and novel inferences. And doing that leads inexorably to changes, not just in the claims we are disposed to make, but thereby in the concepts themselves. To use a vocabulary is to change it. This is what distinguishes vocabularies from other tools. I mentioned in the previous section that in employing the vocabulary vocabulary as he does to distinguish the public from the private dimension of our discourse, Rorty is placing himself in a tradition whose most influential contemporary practitioner is Habermas. It is a tradition that pursues a Kantian project with more contemporary tools—a tradition that seeks at least to explicate (and in its stronger versions, which Rorty does not endorse, even to justify) the fundamental commitments of its political theory in terms of an account of the specifically linguistic practices that structure our discursive activity. The considerations advanced previously provide the raw materials for a pragmatist in Rorty’s sense to develop this project along lines he has not pursued. For perhaps the fundamental challenge of traditional (Enlightenment) political philosophy is to explain exactly why it is rational (if it is rational) for an individual to surrender any freedom of action by constraining herself by communal norms.23 What, it is asked, is in it for her? The most 23. Of course the terms of this question are infinitely contentious. They remain so even when it is not taken to presuppose that this is an issue anyone ever actually faces, but merely a hypothetical whose answer can illuminate the normative status of political institutions. It is not obvious that the validity of political claims depends on their being an answer to any question analogous to this one. It is not clear why it should be norms of rationality that are taken to undergird political norms (though that is the thought of those who adopt the strong version of the Kantian tradition I am discussing). Nor, even supposing that, does it go without saying that the rational norms in question should be assimilated to the model of instrumental or means-end reasoning (though that is an orienting commitment of the pragmatist tradition that Rorty shares with Dewey). Again, the idea that the default position is one in which individuals possess maximal freedom of action, their surrendering, relinquishing, or renouncing of which deserves to be classified either as recompensed or unrecompensed presupposes a very specific Enlightenment picture of the human situation—one that we ought to be chary of root and branch. All these challenges I think are well taken. Nonetheless, it is instructive to see how the considerations assembled in the foregoing permit a novel response to 150

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natural answers all seem to justify only the conclusion that it would be in her interest for most or all others to do so. But our discussion of what is distinctive of vocabularies as tools—their essential self-transcendence as systems of norms that maintain themselves only by the generation of novelty that transforms them, their status, in short as engines that generate and serve the novel, idiosyncratic purposes highlighted by the historicist, as well as the familiar, common ones highlighted by the naturalist— suggests that things will look different if the communal norms in terms of which we address the challenge are modeled on linguistic norms. For when the question “What purpose of the individual would be served by trading away some freedom for constraint by communal norms?” is asked, it has usually been assumed that the purpose in question must be one that is antecedently envisageable by the individual: security, access to collective means, the sentimental rewards of engagement in a common enterprise, and so on. This is to view community, with its normative demands on the behavior of individuals, as a tool subserving purposes that come into view from the standpoint of the naturalist. Linguistic norms are special, in that being constrained by them gives us a distinctive sort of freedom. Subjecting oneself to linguistic norms by embracing a vocabulary is undeniably a form of constraint. It involves the surrender of what Isaiah Berlin calls negative freedom—that is, freedom from constraint. Not just anything one does counts as making a move in the language game. But since it also enables one to make and understand an indefinite number of novel claims, formulate an indefinite number of novel concepts, frame an indefinite number of novel purposes, and so on, subjecting oneself to constraint by the norms implicit in a vocabulary at the same time confers unparalleled positive freedom—that is, freedom to do things one could not only not do before, but could not even want to do. As Sellars says: “Clearly human beings could dispense with all discourse, though only at the expense of having nothing to say.”24 The point of speaking the common language of the tribe, binding oneself by the shared norms of a public vocabulary, is not limited to the capacity to pursue shared public goals. It consists largely in the private (in the sense of novel and idiosyncratic) uses to which the vocabulary can the question of the nature of the authority of political norms even in the broad classical form in which not only Hobbes but Kant can be seen to be addressing it. 24. “A Semantical Solution to the Mind-Body Problem,” in Pure Pragmatics and Possible Worlds, ed. Jeffrey Sicha (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1980), p.  152. 151

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be put. Not the least of these is the capacity to generate new specialized vocabularies, the way in which private sprouts branch off of the public stem. Likening the point of constraining oneself by political norms to the point of constraining oneself by linguistic norms25 opens up new theoretical possibilities for a response to the traditional challenge of political philosophy—possibilities that come into view only from the perspective of the historicist pragmatist. This model promises a different way of pursuing what I called in Section III of this chapter “the larger project of reconceptualizing the constellation of freedom and constraint characteristic of vocabularies.” I am inclined to extract more specific political claims from this observation by following the model of Kant and Habermas. Doing that is thinking of our moral value—in terms of which the purpose and limitations of political institutions and activities are to be understood—as deriving from our nature as essentially discursive creatures: vocabularymongers. What matters about us morally, and so ultimately politically, is not in the end to be understood in terms of goals available from the inevitably reductive perspective of the naturalist: paradigmatically, the avoidance of mammalian pain. It is the capacity each of us discursive creatures has to say things that no one else has ever said, things furthermore that would never have been said if we did not say them. It is our capacity to transform the vocabularies in which we live and move and have our being, and so to create new ways of being (for creatures like us). Our moral worth is our dignity as potential contributors to the Conversation. This is what our political institutions have a duty to recognize, secure, and promote. Seen from this point of view, it is a contingent fact about us that physiological agony is such a distraction from sprightly repartee and the production of fruitful novel utterances. But it is a fact, nonetheless. And for that reason pain, and like it various sorts of social and economic deprivation, have a secondhand, but nonetheless genuine, moral significance. And from that moral significance, these phenomena inherit political significance. Pragmatist political theory has a place for the 25. We need not think it is so much as coherent to conceive of this as a choice anyone ever actually confronts—no nonlinguistic creature would be in a position to weigh the various considerations. But—as was pointed out previously in discussing the perspective of the historicist—that does not mean that the costs and benefits of such a ‘decision’ cannot sensibly be assessed retrospectively, from the point of view of someone who can frame the purposes that only become available along one path. 152

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concerns of the naturalist, which appear as minimal necessary conditions of access to the Conversation. Intrinsically they have no more moral significance than does the oxygen in the atmosphere, without which, as a similar matter of contingent fact, we also cannot carry on a discussion. What is distinctive of the contemporary phase of pragmatism that Rorty has ushered in, however, is its historicist appreciation of the significance of the special social practices whose purpose it is to create new purposes: linguistic practices, what Rorty calls ‘vocabularies’. There is no reason that the vocabulary in which we conduct our public political debates and determine the purposes toward which our public political institutions are turned should not incorporate the aspiration to nurture and promote its citizens’ vocabulary-transforming private exercises of their vocabularies. The vocabulary vocabulary brings into view the possibility that our overarching public purpose should be to ensure that a hundred private flowers blossom, and a hundred novel schools of thought contend.

XII. Pragmatist Metaphysics I have been urging that the public, tradition-sustaining and the private, tradition-transforming sorts of practices that Rorty discusses are two aspects of all discursive activity, neither intelligible apart from the other. This is to say that we should not think of the distinction between routine speaking of the language of the tribe and creative discursive recreation of the individual—pursuit of old purposes and invention of new purposes—in terms of the distinction between discourse that takes place within the boundaries of a vocabulary and discourse that crosses those boundaries and enters a new vocabulary. For that way of putting things owes its force to nostalgia for the distinction between deliberating about what we ought to believe, within a set of rules fixed by what we mean, on the one hand, and creating a new set of meanings, on the other. And that is the very picture the vocabulary vocabulary was introduced to overcome. Every use of a vocabulary, every application of a concept in making a claim, both is answerable to norms implicit in communal practice—its public dimension, apart from which it cannot mean anything (though it can cause something)—and transforms those norms by its novelty—its private dimension, apart from which it does not formulate a belief, plan, or purpose worth expressing. To propose this sort of friendly amendment to Rorty’s use of the vocabulary vocabulary is not to deny that it makes sense to talk about different 153

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vocabularies: that there is no difference between two conversations’ being conducted in (and so liable to assessment according to the norms implicit in) some one vocabulary, and their being conducted in different vocabularies. Although to treat something as a vocabulary is to treat it as a fit object to be translated (as to adopt the causal vocabulary is to treat it as fit to be in a distinctive way explained), this claim does not entail that any two vocabularies must be intertranslatable. Rorty argues forcefully and to my mind convincingly that any two, as we might call them, fundamental vocabularies—autonomous language games that one could play though one played no other, vocabularies in which one pursues the common interests that come into view from the perspective of the naturalist— must be at least largely intertranslatable.26 But parasitic vocabularies need not: the vocabulary of quantum mechanics and the vocabulary T. S. Eliot puts in play in “The Wasteland” are not in any recognizable sense intertranslatable. Remarks made or conversations conducted in these idioms simply come from different discourses. The purposes they subserve, the norms they answer to, are internal to those vocabularies; they are of the sort that come into view only from the perspective of the historicist. It makes perfect sense to call such vocabularies ‘incommensurable’, if by that we mean just this: they are not intertranslatable and not evaluable as alternative means to a common end, tools adapted to some one purpose specifiable from outside them both. It does not follow, however, that they are incommensurable in the sense that “there is no way to bring them together at the level of theory,” as Rorty claims in one of the passages quoted previously in Section X. That is, it does not follow that they cannot be articulated in some one metavocabulary. I have been arguing that public and private vocabularies are not incommensurable in this sense. To pick two examples not entirely at random: either the causal vocabulary or the vocabulary vocabulary can be used to encompass both sorts of vocabulary. Though one surely does not learn everything about them by doing so, one can sensibly discuss the social and economic conditions that causally occasioned and conditioned, say, Wordsworth’s poetry or Dalton’s atomic theory, and the effects those new vocabularies then had on other things. And we need not see two vocabularies as serving the same purposes in order to see them as serving some purposes in the way distinctive of vocabularies. Indeed, one of the cardinal virtues of Rorty’s vocabulary vocabulary is precisely that 26. See “The World Well Lost,” in Consequences of Pragmatism, pp.  3–18. 154

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it lets us talk about vocabularies—including both the differences and the intimate relations between their public and their private aspects—in just such a general way. This claim raises the issue of just what status what I have called the ‘vocabulary vocabulary’ has for Rorty. The characterization I have offered of the role it is intended to play—as an overarching metavocabulary— may well be one he is inclined to resist. For that way of putting things seems to place this idiom in the context of a sort of metaphysical project that Rorty explicitly and strenuously rejects as a matter of deep methodological and metaphilosophical principle. I would like to close by attempting to resolve this contradiction by the traditional irenic scholastic method of making a distinction. Systematic metaphysics is a peculiar literary genre, to be sure. It may be thought of as distinguished by its imperialistic, even totalitarian discursive ambition. For the task it sets itself is to craft by artifice a vocabulary in which everything can be said. This enterprise can be interpreted in two ways: modestly or maniacally. On the maniacal reading, the project is to limn the boundaries of the sayable. What cannot be formulated in its preferred vocabulary is to be rejected as nonsensical. Thought of this way, metaphysics has two characteristics that are seen as objectionable from the point of view of the more modest reading. First, it aims at sculpting a vocabulary adequate to what can be said in every possible vocabulary. Second, it arrogates to itself a distinctive sort of privilege: the authority to determine (on the basis of translatability into its favored terms) what is genuinely sayable, and hence thinkable, and what would be shamsaying and the mere appearance of thought. Now it is the first lesson of historicist pragmatism that the notion of “all possible vocabularies” is one to which we can attach no definite meaning. Every new vocabulary brings with it new purposes for vocabularies to serve. These purposes are not in general so much as formulable in the antecedently available vocabularies. They are the paradigm of something that Rorty claims (I suggested at the outset, as a lesson drawn from his eliminative materialism) we should not think of as part of the furniture of the world patiently awaiting our discovery of them, but as genuinely created by our new ways of speaking. As such, there is no way to throw our semantic net over them in advance of developing the languages in which they can be expressed. Further, to be a pragmatist about norms is to insist that every claim to authority or privilege be grounded in concrete practices of articulating and acknowledging that authority or 155

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privilege—that no normative status at all is conferred simply by things, not even by the whole universe, apart from their uptake into and role in some determinate vocabulary. That principle, rooted in Sellars’s critique of the ideology of givenness, expands for Rorty into a view of metaphysics (in the maniacal sense) as the pursuit of theology by other means. He has relentlessly pointed out how pervasive are metaphysical claims that some vocabulary possesses a special sort of cognitive authority stemming from ontology alone. On the modest reading of metaphysics, by contrast, the task of this genre of creative nonfiction writing is still understood as the engineering of a vocabulary in which everything can be said. But, first of all, the quantifier is understood differently. The modest metaphysician aims only to codify the admittedly contingent constellation of vocabularies with which her time (and those that led up to it) happens to present her—to capture her time in thought. She sees her task as that of constructing a vocabulary that will be useful for the purposes of the contemporary intellectual: the one who by definition is concerned with seeing the culture whole, trying to make the vocabularies it now seems useful to employ to get various sorts of practical grips on how things hang together. As Rorty has pointed out in another connection, one should distinguish the enterprise of such intellectuals from the enterprise of various sorts of researchers, who work within definite disciplinary matrices, pushing back the frontiers of their particular portion of the culture, without in general needing to be concerned with how their area relates to the rest. The special research interest of the metaphysician, I am suggesting, is to build vocabularies useful for the purposes of intellectuals. The only authority such vocabularies can claim is derived from the success of the various vocabularies they address, and the illumination it can provide concerning them. Insofar as there are vocabularies that are practically successful but not codifiable in a particular metaphysical vocabulary, it has failed. And here the measure of success is not only achievement of the sort of goals to which the naturalist draws our attention, but also of those to which the historicist does. But the sortings of vocabularies into those that fit smoothly into the regimented form and those that fit less well can still be valuable. In the past such reorganizations have taught us a lot, even in cases where the metaphysical vocabulary generating those sortings patently fails to fulfill its imperialist ambitions. Once the metaphysician renounces the adoption of an exclusionary or dismissive attitude toward nonconforming vocabularies, the project of metaphysics modestly understood repre156

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sents one potentially useful discursive tool among others for getting a grip on our multifarious culture. This is not an enterprise that the enlightened pragmatist ought to resist. Indeed, I have been claiming that that is precisely the enterprise on which the most prominent and accomplished such pragmatist has in fact been successfully embarked for the past three decades.27 27. I discuss various versions of metaphysics further in the afterword to Between Saying and Doing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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Meaning-Use Analysis

Within the Anglophone tradition, pragmatism has often appeared as a current of thought that stands apart from, and indeed runs in opposition to, the mainstream of analytic philosophy. This is true whether one uses ‘pragmatist’ in a narrow sense tailored to the triumvirate of Peirce, James, and Dewey (here one might think of Russell’s dismissive responses to the latter two), or in a more capacious sense that includes the early Heidegger, the later Wittgenstein, and more recently, neopragmatists such as Rorty and Putnam. There are good reasons on both sides for adopting somewhat adversarial stances, but I think that when we examine them more closely it becomes possible to see the outlines of a common project, in the service of which the two camps might find themselves joining forces. In my 2006 John Locke Lectures, entitled Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism, I explore in more detail one way of pursuing such a project.1 In this chapter I want to offer a sketch of the basic understanding of the principal aims of the two movements that motivates that more extended discussion and to indicate in general terms the sort of pragmatic semantic analysis (not, I will be insisting, an oxymoron) that might emerge from unifying their only apparently disparate concerns. The intended spirit is irenic, synthetic, and constructive.

I. The Classical Project of Analysis I think of analytic philosophy as having at its center a concern with semantic relations between what I will call ‘vocabularies’. Its characteristic form of question is whether and in what way one can make sense of the 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 158

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meanings expressed by one kind of locution in terms of the meanings expressed by another kind of locution. So, for instance, two early paradigmatic projects were to show that everything expressible in the vocabulary of number theory, and again, everything expressible using definite descriptions, is expressible already in the vocabulary of first-order quantificational logic with identity. The nature of the key kind of semantic relation between vocabularies has been variously characterized during the history of analytic philosophy as analysis, definition, paraphrase, translation, reduction of different sorts, truth-making, and various kinds of supervenience—to name just a few contenders. In each case, however, it is characteristic of classical analytic philosophy that logical vocabulary is accorded a privileged role in specifying these semantic relations. It has always been taken at least to be licit to appeal to logical vocabulary in elaborating the relation between analysandum and analysans—target vocabulary and base vocabulary. I will refer to this aspect of the analytic project as its commitment to ‘semantic logicism’.2 If we ask which were the vocabulary-kinds whose semantic relations it was thought to be important to investigate during this period, at least two core programs of classical analytic philosophy show up: empiricism and naturalism. These venerable modern philosophical traditions in epistemology and ontology, respectively, were transformed in the twentieth century, first by being transposed into a semantic key, and second by the application of the newly available logical vocabulary to the self-consciously semantic programs they then became. As base vocabularies, different species of empiricism appealed to phenomenal vocabulary, expressing how things appear, or to secondary-quality vocabulary, or less demandingly, to observational vocabulary. Typical target vocabularies include objective vocabulary formulating claims about how things actually are (as opposed to how they merely appear); primary-quality vocabulary; theoretical vocabulary; and modal, normative, and semantic vocabularies. The generic challenge is to show how what is expressed by the use of such target vocabularies can be reconstructed from what is expressed by the base vocabulary, when it is elaborated by the use of logical vocabulary. 2. In this usage, the logicism about mathematics characteristic of Frege’s Grundgesetze and Russell and Whitehead’s Principia is semantic logicism about the relations between mathematical and logical vocabularies. 159

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As base vocabularies, different species of naturalism appealed to the vocabulary of fundamental physics, or to the vocabulary of the natural sciences (including the special sciences) more generally, or just to objective descriptive vocabulary, even when not regimented by incorporation into explicit scientific theories. Typical targets include normative, semantic, and intentional vocabularies.

II. The Pragmatist Challenge What I want to call the “classical project of analysis,” then, aims to exhibit the meanings expressed by various target vocabularies as intelligible by means of the logical elaboration of the meanings expressed by base vocabularies thought to be privileged in some important respects—epistemological, ontological, or semantic—relative to those others. This enterprise is visible in its purest form in what I have called the “core programs” of empiricism and naturalism, in their various forms. In my view the most significant conceptual development in this tradition—the biggest thing that ever happened to it—is the pragmatist challenge to it that was mounted during the middle years of the twentieth century. Generically, this movement of thought amounts to a displacement from the center of philosophical attention of the notion of meaning in favor of that of use: in suitably broad senses of those terms, replacing concern with semantics by concern with pragmatics. The towering figure behind this conceptual sea-change is, of course, Wittgenstein. In characterizing it, however, it will be useful to approach his radical and comprehensive critique by means of some more local, semantically corrosive argumentative appeals to the practices of deploying various vocabularies rather than the meanings they express. Wilfrid Sellars (one of my particular heroes) criticizes the empiricist core program of the classical project of analysis on the basis of what one must do in order to use various vocabularies, and so to count as saying or thinking various things. He argues that none of the various candidates for empiricist base vocabularies are practically autonomous, that is, could be deployed in a language game one played though one played no other. For instance, no discursive practice can consist entirely of making noninferential observation reports. For such reliably differentially elicited responses qualify as conceptually contentful or cognitively significant only insofar as they can serve as premises from which it is appropriate to draw conclusions, that is, as reasons for other judgments. Drawing such con-

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clusions is applying concepts inferentially—that is, precisely not making noninferential observational use of them.3 Quine offers an even broader pragmatist objection, not only to the empiricist program, but to essential aspects of the whole analytic semantic project. For he attacks the very notion of meaning it presupposes. Quine is what in Chapter 2 I called a “methodological” pragmatist. That is, he takes it that the whole point of a theory of meaning is to explain, codify, or illuminate features of the use of linguistic expressions. He, like Dummett, endorses the analogy: meaning is to use as theory is to observation. And he argues that postulating meanings associated with bits of vocabulary yields a bad theory of discursive practice. If there were such things as meanings that determine how it would be correct to use our expressions, then those meanings would at least have to determine the inferential roles of those expressions: what follows from applying them, what applying them rules out, what is good evidence for or against doing so. But what follows from what depends on what else is true—on laws of nature and obscure contingent facts—that is, on what claims can serve as auxiliary hypotheses or collateral premises in those inferences. If we look at what practical abilities are required to deploy various bits of vocabulary—at what one has to be able to do in order to count as saying something with them—we do not find any special set of these whose practical significance can be understood as pragmatically distinctive of semantically necessary or sufficient conditions. Quine thought one could save at least the naturalist program by retreating semantically to the level of reference and truth-conditions. James and Dewey appeal to the same sort of methodological pragmatism in support of more sweeping sorts of semantic revisionism—pursuing programs that Rorty, for instance, argues should be understood as more rejectionist than properly revisionist. And under the banner “Don’t look to the meaning, look to the use,” Wittgenstein further radicalizes the pragmatist critique of semantics. Pointing out to begin with that one cannot assume that uses of singular terms have the job of picking out objects, 3. This argument occupies roughly the first half of his classic Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, reprinted with an introduction by Richard Rorty and a study guide by Robert Brandom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). His critique of the phenomenalist version of empiricism can be found in “Phenomenalism,” in In the Space of Reasons, ed. Kevin Scharp and Robert Brandom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp.  303–349.

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nor that declarative sentences are in the business of stating facts, he goes on to deny, in effect, that such uses even form a privileged center, on the basis of which one can understand more peripheral ones. (“Language,” he says, “has no downtown.”) I take it that Wittgenstein also takes the home language game of the concept of meaning to be explanation of how expressions are correctly used. And he is profoundly skeptical about the utility or applicability of the model of postulation, explanation, and theoretical systematization in the case of discursive practices—about the possibility of systematically deriving aspects of correct use from assigned meanings. Seen from this perspective, the idea of the classical project of analysis is to codify, using logical vocabulary, the meanings expressed by one vocabulary—from which we are to derive proprieties of its use—from the meanings expressed by some other vocabulary—from which we can derive proprieties of its use. One idea, I think, is that this enterprise makes sense only if we think of the uses as species of a genus—of them all being the same general kind of use, say describing, stating facts, or representing states of affairs. This may seem plausible if we focus on a very restricted set of uses—just as, in the case of tools, we might be impressed to notice that nails and hammer, screws and screwdriver, glue and brush all have the function of attaching more-or-less flat things to one another. So we can think of declarative sentences as stating empirical, physical, normative, modal, and intentional facts, making claims about such states of affairs (even if we then find ourselves metaphysically puzzled about the nature of the fact-kinds to which we have thereby committed ourselves). But if we think of the uses as very different, if we think also about the carpenter’s level, pencil, and toolbelt, if we think of linguistic practice as a motley, of uses as not coming in a simple, or systematic, or even determinate variety, then the very idea that there is such a thing as meanings that permit the codification of proprieties of quite disparate kinds of use—even with liberal use of logical elaboration of the meanings—becomes contentious and in need of justification both in general and in each particular case. More specifically, Wittgenstein uses the image of “family resemblances” to urge that the kinds into which linguistic practices and the vocabularies caught up in them are functionally sorted—what belong together in boxes labeled ‘game’, ‘name’, ‘description’, ‘assertion’, ‘observation’, and so on—do not typically admit of specification in terms of underlying principles specifiable in other vocabularies, whether by genus and differentia(e) or any other kind of explicit rule or definition. It is easy to understand this line of thought 162

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as entailing a straightforward denial of the possibility of semantic analysis in the classical sense. I think that one thought underlying these observations about the unsystematic, unsurveyable variety of kinds of uses of expressions and about the uncodifiable character of those kinds concerns the essentially dynamic character of linguistic practice. I think Wittgenstein thinks that an absolutely fundamental discursive phenomenon is the way in which the abilities required to deploy one vocabulary can be practically extended, elaborated, or developed so as to constitute the ability to deploy some further vocabulary, or to deploy the old vocabulary in quite different ways. Many of his thought experiments concern this sort of process of pragmatic projection of one practice into another. We are asked to imagine a community that uses proper names only for people, but then extends the practice to include rivers. There is no guarantee that interlocutors can master the extended practice, building on what they can already do. But if they can, then they will have changed the only sessences proper-name usage could be taken to have had.4 In the old practice it always made sense to ask for the identity of the mother and father of the named item; in the new practice, that question is often senseless. Again, we are asked to imagine a community that talked about having gold or silver in one’s teeth, and extends that practice to talk about having pain in one’s teeth. If as a matter of contingent fact the practitioners can learn to use the expression ‘in’ in the new way, building on but adapting the old, they will have fundamentally changed the smeanings of ‘in’. In the old practice it made sense to ask where the gold was before it was in one’s tooth; in the new practice asking where the pain was before it was in the tooth can lead only to a distinctively philosophical kind of puzzlement.5 At every stage, what practical extensions of a given practice are possible for the practitioners can turn on features of their embodiment, lives, environment, and history that are contingent and wholly particular to them. And which of those developments actually took place, and in what 4. Cf. Quine’s remark (in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”): “Meaning is what essence becomes when it is detached from the thing and attached to the word.” I distinguish sscare quotess from regular quotes by using superscripted ‘s’s. My official theory of such quotation, as the conceptual converse of de re ascriptions of propositional attitude, can be found in Making It Explicit, pp.  545–547 and 588–590. 5. I am indebted for this way of thinking of Wittgenstein’s point to Hans Julius Schneider’s penetrating discussion in his Phantasie und Kalkul (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992). 163

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order can turn on any obscure fact. The reason vocabulary-kinds resist specification by rules, principles, definitions, or meanings expressed in other vocabularies is that they are the current time slices of processes of development of practices that have this dynamic character—and that is why the collection of uses, that is, the current cumulative and collective result of such developments-by-practical-projection, is a motley.6 If that is right, then any codification or theoretical systematization of the uses of those vocabulary-kinds by associating with them meanings that determine which uses are correct will, if at all successful, be successful only contingently, locally, and temporarily. Semantics on this view is an inherently Procrustean enterprise, which can proceed only by theoretically privileging some aspects of the use of a vocabulary that are not at all practically privileged, and spawning philosophical puzzlement about the intelligibility of the rest.7 On this conception, the classical project of analysis is disease that rests on a fundamental, if perennial, misunderstanding—one that can be removed or ameliorated only by heeding the advice to replace concern with meaning by concern with use. The recommended philosophical attitude to discursive practice is accordingly descriptive particularism, theoretical quietism, and semantic pessimism.

III. Extending the Project of Analysis: Pragmatically Mediated Semantic Relations On this account Wittgenstein is putting in place a picture of discursive meaningfulness or significance that is very different from that on which the classical project of analysis is predicated. In place of semantics, we are encouraged to do pragmatics—not in the sense of David Kaplan and Robert Stalnaker, which is really the semantics of token-reflexive expressions, 6. A patient and detailed investigation of the mechanisms of this phenomenon in basic descriptive and scientific concepts and an extended argument for its ubiquity can be found in Mark Wilson’s exciting and original Wandering Significance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 7. I would be happy if those who dance with his texts find affinities here with Hegel’s insistence that the metaconceptual categories of Verstand must be replaced by those of Vernunft. It is characteristic of his philosophical ambition that Hegel draws the opposite of Wittgenstein’s conclusions from an appreciation of the dynamics of conceptual development and its sensitivity to arbitrary contingent features of the practitioners, devoting himself to elaborating what he insists is the logic of such processes and the conceptual contents they shape. 164

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nor again in the sense of Grice, which addresses conversational heuristics in terms that presuppose a prior, independent, classical semantics—but ‘pragmatics’ in the sense of the study of the use of expressions in virtue of which they are meaningful at all. To the formal, mathematically inspired tradition of Frege, Russell, Carnap, and Tarski, culminating in modeltheoretic and possible-worlds semantics, is opposed an anthropological, natural-historical, social-practical inquiry aimed both at demystifying our discursive doings and at deflating philosophers’ systematic and theoretical ambitions regarding them. I think that contemporary philosophers of language have tended to draw this opposition in the starkest possible terms, treating these approaches as mutually exclusive, hence as requiring that a choice be made between them, thereby marking out a substantial sociological fault line in the discipline. Those who are moved by the pragmatist picture generally accept the particularist, quietist conclusions Wittgenstein seems to have drawn from it. And those committed to some version of the project of semantic analysis have felt obliged to deny the significance of pragmatics in this sense, or at the least to dismiss it as irrelevant to properly semantic concerns. In the most extreme cases, the attitudes of antipragmatist philosophers of language to Wittgenstein’s picture verges on that of the Victorian lady to Darwin’s theory: one hopes that it is not true, and that if it is true, at least that it not become generally known. But I do not think we are obliged to choose between these approaches. They should be seen as complementing rather than competing with one another. Semantics and pragmatics, concern with meaning and concern with use, ought surely to be understood as aspects of one, more comprehensive, picture of the discursive. Pragmatist considerations do not oblige us to focus on pragmatics to the exclusion of semantics; we can deepen our semantics by the addition of pragmatics. If we extract consequences from the pragmatists’ observations somewhat more modestly and construe the analytic project somewhat more broadly, the two will be seen not only as compatible, but as mutually illuminating. If we approach the pragmatists’ observations in an analytic spirit, we can understand pragmatics as providing special resources for extending and expanding the analytic semantic project, from exclusive concern with relations among meanings to encompass also relations between meaning and use. In its most ambitious form, as in the present project, such an enterprise would aspire to articulate something like a logic of the relations between meaning and use. If we leave open the possibility that the use of some vocabulary may be illuminated by taking it to express some sort of meaning or content—that 165

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is, if we do not from the beginning embrace theoretical semantic nihilism— then the most important positive pragmatist insight will be one complementary to the methodological pragmatism I have already identified. The thought underlying the pragmatist line of thought is that what makes some bit of vocabulary mean what it does is how it is used. What we could call semantic pragmatism is the view that the only explanation there could be for how a given meaning gets associated with a vocabulary is to be found in the use of that vocabulary: the practices by which that meaning is conferred or the abilities whose exercise constitutes deploying a vocabulary with that meaning. To broaden the classical project of analysis in the light of the pragmatists’ insistence on the centrality of pragmatics, we can focus on this fundamental relation between use and meaning, between practices or practical abilities and vocabularies. We must look at what it is to use locutions as expressing meanings—that is, at what one must do in order to count as saying what the vocabulary lets practitioners express. I am going to call this kind of relation “practicevocabulary sufficiency”—or usually, “PV-sufficiency” for short. It obtains when engaging in a specified set of practices or exercising a specified set of abilities is sufficient for someone to count as deploying a specified vocabulary.8 Of course it matters a lot how we think about these content-conferring, vocabulary-deploying practices or abilities. The semantic pragmatist’s claim that use confers meaning (so talk of practices or the exercise of abilities as deploying vocabularies) reverts to triviality if we are allowed to talk about “using the tilde to express negation,” “the ability to mean red by the word ‘red’,” or “the capacity to refer to electrons by the word ‘electron’,” (or, I think, even intentions so to refer). And that is to say that the interest of the PV-sufficiency of some set of practices or abilities for the deploying of a vocabulary is quite sensitive to the vocabulary in which we specify those practices-or-abilities. Talk of practices-or-abilities has a definite sense only insofar as it is relativized to the vocabulary in which those practices-or-abilities are specified. And that means that besides PV-sufficiency, we should consider a second basic meaning-use relation: 8. For the purposes of the present project, I will maintain a studied neutrality between these options. The apparatus I am introducing can be noncommittal as to whether we understand content-conferring uses of expressions in terms of social practices or individual abilities.

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“vocabulary-practice sufficiency,” or just “VP-sufficiency,” is the relation that holds between a vocabulary and a set of practices-or-abilities when that vocabulary is sufficient to specify those practices-or-abilities.9 VPsufficient vocabularies that specify PV-sufficient practices let one say what it is one must do to count as engaging in those practices or exercising those abilities, and so to deploy a vocabulary to say something. PV-sufficiency and VP-sufficiency are two basic meaning-use relations (MURs). In terms of those basic relations, we can define a more complex relation: the relation that holds between vocabulary V' and vocabulary V when V' is VP-sufficient to specify practices-or-abilities P that are PV-sufficient to deploy vocabulary V. This VV-relation is the composition of the two basic MURs. When it obtains I will say that V' is a pragmatic metavocabulary for V. It allows one to say what one must do in order to count as saying the things expressed by vocabulary V. We can present this relation graphically in a meaning-use diagram (MUD) such as Figure 6-1. The conventions of this diagram are the following: • Vocabularies are shown as ovals, practices-or-abilities as (rounded) rectangles. • Basic meaning-use relations are indicated by solid arrows, numbered and labeled as to kind of relation. • Resultant meaning-use relations are indicated by dotted arrows, numbered, and labeled as to kind and the basic MURs from which they result. The idea is that a resultant MUR is the relation that obtains when all of the basic MURs listed on its label obtain. Being a pragmatic metavocabulary is the simplest species of the genus I want to introduce here. It is a pragmatically mediated semantic relation between vocabularies. It is pragmatically mediated by the practices-or-abilities that are specified by one of the vocabularies (which say what counts as doing that) and that deploy or are the use of the other vocabulary (what one says by doing that). The semantic relation 9. Somewhat more precisely: some theory (a set of sentences), formulable in the vocabulary in question, is such that if all those sentences are true of some interlocutor, then it thereby counts as exercising the relevant ability, or engaging in the relevant practices.

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V

V :V

1,2 1:PV-suff

s1

Re

V′

Figure 6-1

2:VP-suff

P

Meaning-use diagram illustrating a pragmatic metavocabulary

that is established thereby between the two vocabularies is of a distinctive sort, quite different from, for instance, definability, translatability, reducibility, and supervenience. My basic suggestion for extending the classical project of analysis so as to incorporate as essential positive elements the insights that animate the pragmatist critique of that project is that, alongside the classical semantic relations between vocabularies that project has traditionally appealed to, we consider also pragmatically mediated ones—of which the relation of being a pragmatic metavocabulary is a paradigm. Under what circumstances would this simplest pragmatically mediated semantic relation be philosophically interesting, when considered in connection with the sorts of vocabularies that have traditionally been of most interest to classical analysis? At least one sort of result that could be of considerable potential significance, I think, is if it turned out that in some cases pragmatic metavocabularies exist that differ significantly in their expressive power from the vocabularies for the deployment of which they specify sufficient practices-or-abilities. I will call that phenomenon “pragmatic expressive bootstrapping.” If one vocabulary is strictly weaker in expressive power than the other, I will call that strict expressive bootstrapping. We are familiar with this sort of phenomenon in ordinary semantics, where sometimes a semantic metalanguage differs substantially in expressive power from its object language—for instance, where we can produce an extensional metalanguage for intensional languages, as in the case of possible worlds semantics for modality. One example of a claim of this shape in the case of pragmatically mediated semantic relations—though of course it is not expressed in terms of the machinery I have been introducing—is Huw Price’s pragmatic normative

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naturalism.10 He argues, in effect, that although normative vocabulary is not reducible to naturalistic vocabulary, it might still be possible to say in wholly naturalistic vocabulary what one must do in order to be using normative vocabulary. If such a claim about the existence of an expressively bootstrapping naturalistic pragmatic metavocabulary for normative vocabulary could be made out, it would evidently be an important chapter in the development of the naturalist core program of the classical project of philosophical analysis. It would be a paradigm of the sort of payoff we could expect from extending that analytic project by including pragmatically mediated semantic relations. (Later on I will discuss briefly a claim of this shape concerning indexical vocabulary.) The meaning-use diagram of the pragmatically mediated semantic relation of being a pragmatic metavocabulary illustrates a distinctive kind of analysis of that relation. It exhibits that relation as the resultant, by composition, of the two basic meaning-use relations of PV-sufficiency and VP-sufficiency. A complex MUR is analyzed as the product of operations applied to basic MURs. This is meaning-use analysis. The same analytic apparatus applies also to more complex pragmatically mediated semantic relations. Consider one of the pragmatist criticisms that Sellars addresses to the empiricist core program of the classical analytic project. It turns on the assertion of the pragmatic dependence of one set of vocabulary-deploying practices-or-abilities on another. Because he thinks part of what one is doing in saying how things merely appear is withholding a commitment to their actually being that way, and because one cannot be understood as withholding a commitment that one cannot undertake, Sellars concludes that one cannot have the ability to say or think how things seem or appear unless one also has the ability to make claims about how things actually are. In effect, this Sellarsian pragmatist critique of the phenomenalist form of empiricism consists in the claim that the practices that are PV-sufficient for ‘is’-ϕ talk are PP-necessary for the practices that are PV-sufficient for ‘looks’-ϕ talk.11 That pragmatic 10. See his “Naturalism without Representationalism,” in Naturalism in Question, ed. Mario de Caro and David Macarthur, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp.  71–90. Price calls his view “subject naturalism,” as opposed to the more traditional (and more metaphysical) “object naturalism.” I discuss it further in the next chapter. 11. I discuss this argument in greater detail in the final chapter of Tales of the Mighty Dead (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2004).

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Vlooks-ϕ

Res1:VV 1,2,3

3:PV-suff

Plooks-ϕ

Vis-ϕ

1:PV-suff

2:PP-nec

Pis-ϕ

Figure 6-2 An instance of pragmatically mediated semantic presupposition Vobservational

Res1:VV 1,2,3

3:PV-suff

Pobservational

Vinferential

1:PV-suff

2:PP-nec

Pinferential

Figure 6-3 Another instance of pragmatically mediated semantic presupposition

dependence of practices-or-abilities then induces a resultant pragmatically mediated semantic relation between the vocabularies. The meaning-use diagram for this claim is shown in Figure 6-2. The resultant MUR is a kind of complex, pragmatically mediated, VV-necessity, or semantic presupposition. In fact, although Sellars’s argument for the crucial PP-necessity relation of pragmatic dependence of one set of vocabulary-deploying practicesor-abilities on another is different, his argument against the observational version of empiricism—the claim that purely noninferential, observational uses do not form an autonomous discursive practice, but presuppose inferential uses—has exactly the same form (see Fig. 6-3). For these cases, we can say something further about the nature of the pragmatically mediated semantic relation that is analyzed as the resultant MUR in these diagrams. For instead of jumping directly to this VV resultant MUR, we could have put in the composition of the PP-necessity and second PV-sufficiency relation, yielding a kind of complex pragmatic presupposition (see Fig. 6-4). 170

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Vlooks-ϕ

3:PV-suff

Plooks-ϕ

Figure 6-4

Re

s2

:P

V

1:PV-suff

2,3

2:PP-nec

Pis-ϕ

Composition of meaning-use relations

Vlooks-ϕ

3:PV-suff

Plooks-ϕ

Figure 6-5

Vis-ϕ

Retraction of 1 through Res2

Re s2

:P

V

Vis-ϕ

1:PV-suff

2,3

2:PP-nec

Pis-ϕ

Composition and retraction of meaning-use relations

If this diagram were completed by an arrow from Vis-ϕ to Vlooks-ϕ such that the same diagonal resultant arrow could represent both the composition of relations 2 and 3 and the composition of relation 1 and the newly supplied one, then category theorists would say that the diagram commutes. And the arrow that needs to be supplied to make the diagram commute they call the retraction of relation 1 through the composition Res2, as shown in Figure 6-5. After composition, then, the next most complex form of resultant MUR is retraction. Analyzing the structure of Sellars’s pragmatist arguments against empiricism requires recognizing the pragmatically mediated semantic relation he claims holds between phenomenal and objective vocabulary as the retraction of a constellation of more basic meaning-use relations.

IV. Automata: Syntactic PV-sufficiency and VP-sufficiency Now this is all extremely abstract. To make it more definite, we need to fill in (at least) the notions of vocabulary, practice-or-ability, PV-sufficiency, 171

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and VP-sufficiency, which are the fundamental elements that articulate what I am calling the “meaning-use analysis” of resultant meaning-use relations—in particular, the pragmatically mediated semantic relations between vocabularies that I am claiming we must acknowledge in order to pursue the classical project of philosophical analysis in the light of what is right about the pragmatist critique of it. We can begin to do that by looking at a special case in which it is possible to be unusually clear and precise about the things and relations that play these metatheoretic roles. This is the case where ‘vocabulary’ takes a purely syntactic sense. Of course, the cases we eventually care about involve vocabularies understood in a sense that includes their semantic significance. But besides the advantages of clarity and simplicity, we will find that some important lessons carry over from the syntactic to the semantic case. The restriction to vocabularies understood in a spare syntactic sense leads to correspondingly restricted notions of what it is to deploy such a vocabulary and what it is to specify practices-or-abilities sufficient to deploy one. Suppose we are given an alphabet, which is a finite set of primitive sign types—for instance, the letters of the English alphabet. The universe generated by that alphabet then consists of all the finite strings that can be formed by concatenating elements drawn from the alphabet. A vocabulary over such an alphabet—in the syntactic sense I am now after—is then any subset of the universe of strings that alphabet generates. If the generating alphabet is the English alphabet, then the vocabulary might consist of all English sentences, all possible English texts, or all and only the sentences of Making It Explicit.12 What can we say about the abilities that count as deploying a vocabulary in this spare syntactic sense?13 The abilities in question are the capacity to read and write the vocabulary. In this purely syntactic sense, ‘reading’ it means being able practically to distinguish within the universe generated by 12. Computational linguists, who worry about vocabularies in this sense, have developed metalanguages for specifying important classes of such vocabularies: the syntactic analogues of semantic metalanguages in the cases we will eventually address. So, for instance, for the alphabet {a,b}, ‘anbn’ characterizes the vocabulary that comprises all strings of some finite number of ‘a’s followed by the same number of ‘b’s. ‘a(ba)*b’ characterizes the vocabulary that comprises all strings beginning with an ‘a,’ ending with a ‘b,’ and having any number of repetitions of the substring ‘ba’ in between. 13. Here we can safely just talk about abilities, without danger of restricting the generality of the analysis. 172

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a

1

h

2

o

3

!

4

h

Figure 6-6 The laughing Santa automaton

the alphabet, strings that do, from those that do not, belong to the specified vocabulary. And ‘writing’ it means practically being able to produce all and only the strings in the alphabetic universe that do belong to the vocabulary. We assume as primitive abilities the capacities to read and write, in this sense, the alphabet from whose universe the vocabulary is drawn—that is, the capacity to respond differentially to alphabetic tokens according to their type, and to produce tokens of antecedently specified alphabetic types. Then the abilities that are PV-sufficient to deploy some vocabularies can be specified in a particularly simple form. They are finite-state automata (FSAs). As an example, suppose we begin with the alphabet {a, h, o, !}. Then we can consider the laughing Santa vocabulary, which consists of strings such as ‘hahaha!’, ‘hohoho!’, ‘hahahoho!’ ‘hohoha!’, and so on.14 Figure 6-6 is a graphical representation of a laughing Santa finite-state automaton, which can read and write the laughing Santa vocabulary. The numbered nodes represent the states of the automaton, and the alphabetically labeled arcs represent state-transitions. By convention, the starting state is represented by a square (State 1), and the final state by a circle with a thick border (State 4). As a reader of the laughing Santa vocabulary, the task of this automaton is to process a finite string and to determine whether or not it is a licit string of the vocabulary. It processes the string one alphabetic character at a time, beginning in State 1. It recognizes the string if and only if (when and only when) it arrives at its final state, State 4. If the first character of the string is not an ‘h’, it remains stuck in State 1 and rejects the string. If the first character is an ‘h’, it moves to State 2 and processes the next character. If that character is not an ‘a’ or an ‘o’, it remains stuck in State 2 and rejects the string. If the character is an ‘a’ or an ‘o’, it moves to State 3. If 14. In the syntactic metalanguage for specifying vocabularies previously mentioned in the notes, this is the vocabulary (ha|ho)*! 173

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the next character is an exclamation point, it moves to State 4 and recognizes the string ‘ha!’ or ‘ho!’—the shortest ones in the laughing Santa vocabulary. If instead the next character is an ‘h’, it goes back to State 2 and repeats itself in loops of ‘ha’s and ‘ho’s any number of times until an exclamation point is finally reached, or it is fed a discordant character. As a writer of the laughing Santa vocabulary, the task of the automaton is to produce only licit strings of that vocabulary, by a process that can produce any and all such strings. It begins in its initial state, State 1, and emits an ‘h’ (its only available move), changing to State 2. In this state, it can produce either an ‘a’ or an ‘o’—it selects one at random15— and goes into State 3. In this state, it can either tack on an exclamation point and move into its final state, State 4, finishing the process, or emit another ‘h’ and return to State 2 to repeat the process. In any case, whenever it reaches State 4 and halts, the string it has constructed will be a member of the laughing Santa vocabulary. I hope this brief rehearsal makes it clear how the constellation of nodes and arrows that makes up this directed graph represents the abilities to read and write (recognize and produce arbitrary strings of) the laughing Santa vocabulary.16 What it represents is abilities that are PV15. As a matter of fact, it can be shown that every vocabulary readable/writable by a nondeterministic finite-state automaton—such as the laughing Santa automaton—is also readable/writable by a deterministic one. M.   O. Rabin and D. Scott, “Finite Automata and Their Decision Problems,” IBM Journal of Research and Development 3, no. 2 (1959), pp.  115–125. 16. For practice, or to test one’s grip on the digraph specification of FSAs, consider what vocabulary over the same alphabet that produces the laughing Santa is recognized/produced by the automaton in this figure.

2

o

h

o 1

4

a a

h 3 o

The “I’ll have what she’s having” automaton 174

!

5

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Table 6-1

State-table representation of the laughing Santa automaton

a h o !

State 1

State 2

State 3

Halt 2 Halt Halt

3 Halt 3 Halt

Halt 2 Halt 4

sufficient to deploy that vocabulary—that is, read and write it, in the attenuated sense appropriate to this purely syntactic case. And the digraph representation is itself a vocabulary that is VP-sufficient to specify those vocabulary-deploying abilities. That is, the digraph representation of this finite-state automaton is a pragmatic metavocabulary for the laughing Santa vocabulary. The relation between the digraph vocabulary and the laughing Santa vocabulary is, then, a pragmatically mediated—not now semantic, but syntactic—relation between vocabularies. It may seem that I am stretching things by calling the digraph form of representation a ‘vocabulary’. It will be useful, as a way of introducing my final point in the vicinity, to consider a different form of pragmatic metavocabulary for the laughing Santa vocabulary. Besides the digraph representation of a finite-state automaton, we can also use a state-table representation. For the laughing Santa automaton (LSA), this representation is shown in Table 6-1. In read mode, the automaton starts in State 1. To see what it will do if fed a particular character, we look at the row labeled with that character. The LSA will Halt if the input string starts with anything other than an ‘h’, in which case it will change to State 2. In that state, the automaton specified by the table will halt unless the next character is an ‘a’ or an ‘o’, in which case it changes to State 3, and so on. (There is no column for State 4, since it is the final state and accepts/produces no further characters.) Clearly there is a tabular representation corresponding to any digraph representation of an FSA, and vice versa. Notice further that we need not use a two-dimensional table to convey this information. We could put the rows one after another, in the following form: aHalt3Halth2Halt2oHalt3Halt!HaltHalt4. This is just a string, drawn from a universe generated by the alphabet of the LSA, together with ‘Halt’ and the designations of the states of that 175

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VLaughing Santa

V

s

Re

:V 1

1,2

PLaughing Santa

VLSA StateTable

1:PV-suff

2:VP-suff

Automaton

3:PV-suff

PLSA State-Table Automaton

Figure 6-7 Specifying the automaton that deploys the laughing Santa vocabulary

automaton. The strings that specify finite-state automata that deploy vocabularies defined over the same basic alphabet as the LSA then form a vocabulary in the technical syntactic sense we have been considering. And that means we can ask about the automata that can read and write those state-table encoding vocabularies. The meaning-use diagram for this situation is then Figure 6-7.

V. The Chomsky Hierarchy: A Syntactic Example of Pragmatic Expressive Bootstrapping Restricting ourselves to a purely syntactic notion of a vocabulary yields a clear sense of ‘pragmatic metavocabulary’: both the digraph and the state-table vocabularies are VP-sufficient to specify practical abilities articulated as a finite-state automaton that is PV-sufficient to deploy—in the sense of recognizing and producing—the laughing Santa vocabulary, as well as many others. (Of course, it does that only against the background of a set of abilities PV-sufficient to deploy those vocabularies.) Perhaps surprisingly, it also offers a prime example of strict pragmatic expressive bootstrapping. For in this setting we can prove that one vocabulary that is expressively weaker than another can nonetheless serve as an adequate pragmatic metavocabulary for that stronger vocabulary. That is, even though one cannot say in the weaker vocabulary everything that can be 176

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Table 6-2 The Chomsky hierarchy Vocabulary

Grammar

Automaton

Regular Context-Free

A→aB A→a A→

Context-Sensitive

c1Ac2→c1c2

Recursively Enumerable

No Restrictions on Rules

Finite State Automaton Push-Down Automaton Linear Bounded Automaton Turing Machine (= 2 Stack PDA)

said in the stronger one, one can still say in the weaker one everything that one needs to be able to do in order to deploy the stronger one. Here the relevant notion of the relative expressive power of vocabularies is also a purely syntactic one. Already in the 1950s, Chomsky offered mathematical characterizations of the different sets of strings of characters that could be generated by different classes of grammars (that is, in my terms, characterized by different kinds of syntactic metavocabularies) and computed by different kinds of automata. The kinds of vocabulary, grammar, and automata lined up with one another, and could be arranged in a strict expressive hierarchy: the Chomsky hierarchy. It is summarized in Table 6-2. The point I want to make fortunately does not require us to delve very deeply into the information summarized in this table. A few basic points will suffice. The first thing to realize is that not all vocabularies in the syntactic sense we have been pursuing can be read and written by finite-state automata. For instance, it can be shown that no finite-state automaton is PV-sufficient to deploy the vocabulary anbn, defined over the alphabet {a,b}, which consists of all strings of any arbitrary number of ‘a’s followed by the same number of ‘b’s. The idea behind the proof is that in order to tell whether the right number of ‘b’s follow the ‘a’s (when reading) or to produce the right number of ‘b’s (when writing), the automaton must somehow keep track of how many ‘a’s have been processed (read or written). The only way an FSA can store information is by being in one state rather than another. So, it could be in one state—or in one of a class of states—if one ‘a’ has been processed, another if two have, and so on. But by definition, a finite-state automaton only has a finite number of states, and that number is fixed in advance of receiving its 177

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input or producing its output. Whatever that number of states is, and whatever system it uses to code numbers into states (it need not be oneto-one—it could use a decimal coding, for instance), there will be some number of ‘a’s that is so large that the automaton runs out of states before it finishes counting. But the vocabulary in question consists of arbitrarily long strings of ‘a’s and ‘b’s. In fact, it is possible to say exactly which vocabularies finite-state automata (specifiable by digraphs and state-tables of the sort illustrated previously) are capable of deploying. These are called the ‘regular’ vocabularies (or languages). The next point is that slightly more complex automata are capable of deploying vocabularies, such as anbn, that are not regular, and hence cannot be read or written by finite-state automata. As our brief discussion indicated, intuitively the problem FSAs have with languages like anbn is that they lack memory. If we give them a memory, we get a new class of machines: (nondeterministic17) push-down automata (PDAs). In addition to being able to respond differentially to and produce tokenings of the alphabetic types, and being able to change state, PDAs can push alphabetic values to the top of a memory-stack and pull such values from the top of that stack. PDAs can do everything that finite-state automata can do, but they can also read and write many vocabularies, such as anbn, that are not regular, and so cannot be read and written by FSAs. The vocabularies they can deploy are called “context-free.” All regular vocabularies are context-free, but not vice versa. This proper containment of classes of vocabularies provides a clear sense, suitable to this purely syntactic setting, in which one vocabulary can be thought of as “expressively more powerful” than another: the different kinds of grammar can specify, and the different kinds of automata can compute, ever larger classes of vocabularies. Context-free vocabularies that are not regular require more powerful grammars to specify them, as well as more powerful automata to deploy them. FSAs are special kinds of PDAs, and all the automata are special kinds of Turing machines. Recursively enumerable vocabularies are not in general syntactically reducible to context-sensitive, context-free, or regular ones. And the less capable automata cannot read and write all the vocabularies that can be read and written by Turing machines.

17. By contrast to FSAs, there need not in general be, for every vocabulary computable by a nondeterministic PDA, some deterministic PDA that reads and writes the same vocabulary. 178

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Nonetheless, if we look at pragmatically mediated relations between these syntactically characterized vocabularies, we find that they make possible a kind of strict expressive bootstrapping that permits us in a certain sense to evade the restrictions on expressive power enforced for purely syntactic relations between vocabularies. The hierarchy dictates that only the abilities codified in Turing machines—two-stack push-down automata—are PV-sufficient to deploy recursively enumerable vocabularies in general. But now we can ask: what class of languages is VP-sufficient to specify Turing machines, and hence to serve as sufficient pragmatic metavocabularies for recursively enumerable vocabularies in general? The surprising fact is that the abilities codified in Turing machines—the abilities to recognize and produce arbitrary recursively enumerable vocabularies—can quite generally be specified in context-free vocabularies. It is demonstrable that context-free vocabularies are strictly weaker in syntactic expressive resources than recursively enumerable vocabularies. The push-down automata that can read and write only context-free vocabularies cannot read and write recursively enumerable vocabularies in general. But it is possible to say in a context-free vocabulary what one needs to be able to do in order to deploy recursively enumerable vocabularies in general. The proof of this claim is tedious, but not difficult, and the claim itself is not at all controversial—though computational linguists make nothing of it, having theoretical concerns very different from those that lead me to underline this fact. (My introductory textbook leaves the proof as an exercise to the reader.18) General-purpose computer languages such as Pascal and C++ can specify the algorithms a Turing machine, or any other universal computer, uses to compute any recursively enumerable function, hence to recognize or produce any recursively enumerable vocabulary. And they are invariably context-free languages19—in no small part just because the simplicity of this type of grammar makes it easy to write parsers for them. Yet they suffice to specify the state-table, contents of the tape (or of the dual stacks), and primitive operations of any and every

18. Thomas Sudkamp, Languages and Machines, 2nd ed. (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997), chap. 10. 19. In principle. There are subtleties that arise when we look at the details of actual implementations of particular computer languages, which can remove them from qualifying as strictly context-free. 179

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VRecursively Enumerable

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Figure 6-8

Syntactic pragmatic expressive bootstrapping

Turing machine. Figure 6-8 is the MUD characterizing this pragmatically mediated relation between syntactically characterized vocabularies. I called the fact that context-free vocabularies can be adequate pragmatic metavocabularies for recursively enumerable vocabularies in general ‘surprising’, because of the provable syntactic irreducibility of the one class of vocabularies to the other. But if we step back from the context provided by the Chomsky hierarchy, we can see why the possibility of such pragmatic expressive bootstrapping should not, in the end, be surprising. For all the result really means is that context-free vocabularies let one say what it is one must do in order to say things they cannot themselves say, because the ability to deploy those context-free vocabularies does not include the abilities those vocabularies let one specify. Thus, for instance, there is no reason that an FSA could not read and write a vocabulary that included commands such as “Push an ‘a’ onto the stack,”—and thus specify the program of a PDA—even though it itself has no stack, and could not do what the vocabulary it is deploying specifies. A coach might be able to tell an athlete exactly what to do, and even how to do it, even though the coach cannot himself do what he is telling the athlete to do, does not have the abilities he is specifying. We ought not to boggle at the possibility of an expressively weaker pragmatic metavocabulary having the capacity to say what one must do in order to deploy an expressively stronger one. We should just look to see where this seems in fact to be possible for vocabularies we care about, and what we can learn from such relations when they do obtain. 180

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VI. Semantic Examples of Pragmatic Expressive Bootstrapping and Further Basic and Resultant Meaning-Use Relations Let us recall what motivated this rehearsal of some elements of automaton theory and introductory computational linguistics. I suggested that a way to extend the classical project of semantic analysis so as to take account of the insights of its pragmatist critics is to look analytically at relations between meaning and use. More specifically, I suggested focusing to begin with on two in some sense complementary relations: the one that holds when some set of practices-or-abilities is PV-sufficient to deploy a given vocabulary, and the one that holds when some vocabulary is VPsufficient to specify a given set of practices-or-abilities. The composition of these is the simplest pragmatically mediated semantic relation between vocabularies: the relation that holds when one vocabulary is a sufficient pragmatic metavocabulary for another. It is a paradigm of the infinite, recursively generable class of complex, pragmatically mediated semantic relations that I propose to lay alongside the other semantic relations between vocabularies that have been investigated by analytic philosophers (for instance, those who address the core programs of empiricism and naturalism): relations such as analyzability, definition, translation, reduction, truth-making, and supervenience. I suggested further that pragmatic metavocabularies might be of particular interest in case they exhibited what I called “expressive bootstrapping”—cases, that is, in which the expressive power of the pragmatic metavocabulary differs markedly from that of the target vocabulary, most strikingly, when the metavocabulary is substantially expressively weaker—a phenomenon Tarski has led us not to expect for semantic metavocabularies, which in general must be expressively stronger than the vocabularies they address. We have now seen that all of these notions can be illustrated with particular clarity for the special case of purely syntactically characterized vocabularies. The abilities that are PV-sufficient to deploy those vocabularies, in the sense of the capacity to recognize and produce them, can be thought of as various sorts of automata. There are several well-established, different-but-equivalent vocabularies that are known to be VP-sufficient to specify those automata. In this special syntactic case we can accordingly investigate the properties of pragmatic metavocabularies, and when we do, we find a striking instance of strict expressive bootstrapping in a pragmatically mediated syntactic relation between vocabularies. 181

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Of course, the cases we really care about involve semantically significant vocabularies. Are there any interesting instances of these phenomena in such cases? I have indicated briefly how some of Sellars’s pragmatist criticisms of various ways of pursuing the empiricist program can be understood to turn on pragmatically mediated semantic relations. And I mentioned Huw Price’s idea that although normative vocabulary is not semantically reducible to naturalistic vocabulary, naturalistic vocabulary might suffice to specify what one must do—the practices-or-abilities one must engage in or exercise—in order to deploy normative vocabulary. Here is another example that I want to point to, though I cannot develop the claim. For roughly the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, philosophers who thought about indexical vocabulary took for granted some version of the doctrine that a tokening n of an expression of the type ‘now’ was synonymous with, definable, or semantically analyzable as ‘the time of utterance of n’, and similarly for ‘here’ and ‘the place of utterance of h’, and so on. During the 1970s philosophers such as John Perry, David Lewis, and G. E. M. Anscombe, by focusing on the use of indexicals in modal and epistemic contexts, showed decisively that this cannot be right: what is expressed by indexical vocabulary cannot be expressed equivalently by nonindexical vocabulary. This fact seems so obvious to us now that we might be led to wonder what philosophers such as Russell, Carnap, and Hans Reichenbach could have been thinking for all those years. I want to suggest that the genuine phenomenon in the vicinity is a pragmatically mediated semantic relation between these vocabularies. Specifically, in spite of the semantic irreducibility of indexical to nonindexical vocabulary, it is possible to say, entirely in nonindexical terms, what one must do in order to be deploying indexical vocabulary correctly: to be saying essentially and irreducibly indexical things. For we can formulate practical rules such as the following: 1. If, at time t and place , speaker s wants to assert that some property P holds of , it is correct to say “P holds of me, here and now.” 2. If a speaker s at time t and place asserts “P holds of me, here and now,” the speaker is committed to the property P holding of . Nonindexical vocabulary can serve as an adequate pragmatic metavocabulary for indexical vocabulary. The fact that one nonetheless cannot say in nonindexical terms everything that one can say with in182

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dexical vocabulary just shows that these vocabularies have different expressive powers, so that the pragmatically mediated semantic relation between them is a case of strict pragmatic expressive bootstrapping. Here is another example. Besides pragmatically mediated semantic relations between vocabularies, there is another sort of pragmatic analysis, which relates one constellation of practices-or-abilities to another. It corresponds to another basic meaning-use relation: the kind of PP-sufficiency that holds when having acquired one set of abilities means one can already do everything one needs to do, in principle, to be able to do something else. One concrete way of filling in a definite sense of “in principle” is by algorithmic elaboration, where exercising the target ability just is exercising the right basic abilities in the right order and under the right circumstances. (Of course, this is just one species of the genus of practical projection that Wittgenstein brings to our attention.) As an example, the ability to do long division just consists in exercising the abilities to do multiplication and subtraction according to a particular conditional branched-schedule algorithm. The practical abilities that implement such an algorithmic PPsufficiency relation are just those exercised by finite-state automata (in general, Turing machines). Indeed, automata should be thought of as consisting in a definite set of meta-abilities: abilities to elaborate a set of primitive abilities into a set of more complex ones, which can accordingly be pragmatically analyzed in terms of, or decomposed into, the other.20 To get a usefully general concept of the PP-sufficiency of a set of basic abilities for a set of more complex ones, we need to move beyond the purely syntactic automata I have described so far. One way to do that is to replace their specialized capacities to read and write symbols—in the minimal sense of classifying tokens as to types and producing tokens of specified types—by more general recognitional and productive capacities. These are abilities to respond differentially to various in general nonsymbolic stimuli (for instance, the visible presence of red things), corresponding to reading, and to respond by producing performances of various in general nonsymbolic kinds (for instance, walking north for a mile), corresponding to writing. What practically implements the algorithmic elaboration of such a set of basic differential responsive abilities is a finite-state transducing automaton (and its more sophisticated push-down brethren) as shown in Figure 6-9. 20. There are various vocabularies that are VP-sufficient for specifying those meta-abilities. Specifying them in terms of the differentially elicitable capacities to change state and to store and retrieve symbols is just one of them. 183

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S4:R6 2

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Figure 6-9 A finite-state transducing automaton

This is a diagram of an FSTA that has an initial set of stimuli to which it can respond differentially and an initial set of responses it can differentially produce. And the diagram indicates that in its initial state, if presented with a stimulus of kind 1, it will produce a response of kind 7 and shift to state 2, and if presented instead with a stimulus of kind 7 it will produce no response, but will shift to state 3. It is important to note that although the recognitive and performative abilities that such an automaton algorithmically elaborates are to be considered as ‘primitive’ or ‘basic’ with respect to such elaboration, this does not mean that they are so in any absolute sense. The stimulus-response formulation by itself does not keep us from considering as ‘primitive’ capacities the abilities to keep ourselves at a suitable distance from a conversational partner, distinguish cubist paintings done by George Braque from those done by Pablo Picasso, drive from New York to San Francisco, or build a house. The notion of the algorithmic decomposability of some practices-orabilities into others suggests in turn a pragmatic generalization of the classical program of artificial intelligence (AI) functionalism—which, though a latecomer in the twentieth century, deserves, I think, to count as a third core program of classical semantic analysis, alongside empiricism and naturalism. AI functionalism traditionally held itself hostage to a commitment to the purely symbolic character of intelligence in the sense of sapience. But broadening our concern from automata as purely syntactic engines to the realm of transducing automata, we are now in a position to see automaton functionalism as properly concerned with the algorithmic decomposability of discursive (that is, vocabulary-deploying) practicesand-abilities. What I will call the ‘pragmatic’ thesis of artificial intelligence 184

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is the claim that the ability to engage in some autonomous discursive practice (a language game one could play though one played no other) can be algorithmically decomposed into nondiscursive abilities—where by “nondiscursive” abilities, I mean abilities each of which can in principle be exhibited by something that does not engage in any autonomous discursive practice. (Without that restriction on the primitive abilities out of which discursive ones are to be algorithmically elaborated, the claim would be trivial, since the null algorithmic decomposition is also a decomposition.) The capacity to talk-and-think as I am addressing it is the capacity to deploy an autonomous vocabulary. But unlike classical symbolic AI, the pragmatic thesis of artificial intelligence does not presume that the practical capacities from which some transducing automaton can algorithmically elaborate the ability to engage in an autonomous discursive practice must themselves consist exclusively of symbolmanipulating abilities, never mind ultimately syntactic ones.21 The algorithmic practical elaboration model of AI gives a relatively precise shape to the pragmatist program of explaining knowing-that in terms of knowing-how: specifying in a nonintentional, nonsemantic vocabulary what it is one must do in order to count as deploying some vocabulary to say something, hence as making intentional and semantic vocabulary applicable to the performances one produces. In particular, it offers a construal of the basic claim of AI functionalism as a pragmatic expressive bootstrapping claim about computer languages as pragmatic metavocabularies for much more expressively powerful autonomous vocabularies, namely natural languages. The arguments for and against this pragmatic version of AI functionalism accordingly look quite different from those arrayed on the opposing sides of the debate about the prospects of symbolic AI. Combining the notion of PP-sufficiency that holds between two constellations of practices-or-abilities when one can be algorithmically elaborated from the other with the two sorts of basic meaning-use relations out of which I previously constructed the notion of expressively bootstrapping pragmatic metavocabularies—namely, a set of practices-or-abilities being PV-sufficient to deploy a vocabulary and a vocabulary being VPsufficient to specify a set of practices-or-abilities—makes it possible to 21. For this reason, the frame problem, as it is often formulated, does not immediately arise for the pragmatic version of AI-functionalism. But as is explored in the third chapter of Between Saying and Doing, it does get a grip, at a different point. 185

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define further kinds of pragmatically mediated semantic relations. As my  final example, consider the relation between logical vocabulary— paradigmatically, conditionals—and ordinary, nonlogical, empirical descriptive vocabulary. I take it that every autonomous discursive practice must include performances that have the pragmatic significance of assertions and inferences (which I would argue come as an indissoluble package). I actually think this PP-necessary condition on any practices PV-sufficient for autonomously deploying a vocabulary can usefully be treated as sufficient as well—that is, as what distinguishes discursive practices as such. But nothing in what follows turns on that further commitment. To count as engaging in such practices, practitioners must exercise an ability, however fallible, to assess the goodness of material inferences: to sort them into those they accept and those they reject. This is part of what one must do in order to say anything. But it is easy to say how those recognitional and performative abilities, for these purposes counted as primitive, can be algorithmically elaborated into the capacity to use conditionals. An algorithm VP-sufficient to specify an automaton that practically implements such a pragmatic elaboration or PP-sufficiency relation is the following: 3. Assert the conditional ‘if p then q’ if one endorses the inference from p to q; 4. Endorse the inference from p to q if one asserts the conditional ‘if p then q’. These rules of usage codify introduction and elimination rules for the conditional. So the capacity to use conditionals can be algorithmically elaborated from the capacities to make assertions and assess inferences. This is the composition of a PP-sufficiency relation with a PV-sufficiency relation, and is expressed in the meaning-use diagram22 shown in Figure 6-10. The complex resultant meaning-use relation indicated by the dotted arrow at the top of the diagram is a further pragmatically mediated semantic relation. The diagram indicates exactly what constellation of subclaims about basic meaning-use relations must be justified in order to justify the claim that this relation obtains between two vocabularies, and hence the diagram graphically presents a distinctive kind of meaning-use analysis of that semantic relation. 22. I indicate PP-necessity relations by including the rounded rectangle for one set of practices-or-abilities in another. 186

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Vconditionals

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Figure 6-10 Elaborating conditionals

In fact, if we think further about this example, by filling in another basic meaning-use relation that obtains in this case, we can define an even more articulated pragmatically mediated semantic relation between vocabularies. For when conditionals are deployed with the practical circumstances and consequences of application specified in the algorithm stated above, they let practitioners say what otherwise they could only do; that is, they express explicitly, in the form of a claimable, hence propositional, content, what practitioners are implicitly doing in endorsing some material inferences and rejecting others. This is a VP-sufficiency relation: conditionals let one specify the practices of taking-or-treating inferences as materially good or bad. Adding in this explicating relation between conditionals and the practices-or-abilities they make explicit yields a new pragmatically mediated semantic relation that conditionals stand in to every autonomously deployable vocabulary. Its meaning-use diagram is shown in Figure 6-11. The practical capacity to deploy conditionals (that is, something PVsufficient for their use) both can be elaborated from practices PP-necessary for every autonomous discursive practice (ADP), and explicates those practices (in the sense of being VP-sufficient for them). It is elaboratedexplicative (LX) relative to every autonomous vocabulary (AV). We say, it is LX for every AV, hence, for every vocabulary (since the use of any vocabulary presupposes, and in that sense is parasitic on, the capacity to use some autonomous vocabulary). 187

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VAlgorithm Figure 6-11 Elaborated-explicating (LX) conditionals

I believe that this complex resultant pragmatically mediated semantic relation is important for understanding the distinctive semantic role played by logical vocabulary generally: not just conditionals, but also negation (which makes explicit a central feature of our practice of treating claims as materially incompatible), and even modal vocabulary (which makes explicit a central feature of our practice of associating ranges of counterfactual robustness with material inferences). In my initial characterization of the classical semantic project of philosophical analysis, I pointed to the special status that is accorded to logical vocabulary in that project. What I called “semantic logicism” is its commitment to the legitimacy of the strategy of using logical vocabulary to articulate the semantic relations between vocabularies that is its goal—paradigmatically in connection with the core projects of empiricism, naturalism, and functionalism. One interesting way to vindicate that commitment (that is, at once to explain and to justify it) would be to appeal to the fact that logical vocabulary is elaborated from and explicating of every autonomously deployable vocabulary whatsoever. For that means that the capacity to use logical vocabulary is both in this very clear and specific sense implicit in the capacity to use any vocabulary, and has the expressive function of making explicit something already present in the use of any vocabulary. I will not say anything more here about how such a vindication might proceed, contenting myself with the observation that insofar as there is anything to an account along these lines, supplementing the traditional philosophical analytical concern with semantic relations between the 188

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meanings expressed by different kinds of vocabulary by worrying also about the pragmatic relations between those meanings and the use of those vocabularies in virtue of which they express those meanings is not so much extending the classical project of analysis as unpacking it, to reveal explicitly a pragmatic structure that turns out to have been implicit in the analytic semantic project all along. For the conclusion will be that it is because some vocabularies are universal pragmatically elaborated and explicitating vocabularies that semantic analysis of the logicist sort is both possible and legitimate at all. I do not claim to have entitled myself to that conclusion here, only to have introduced some conceptual machinery that might make it possible to do so—and so at least to have sketched a way in which the insights of the pragmatist tradition can be assembled and developed in order to be constructively helpful to, rather than destructively critical of, the classical project of philosophical semantic analysis, and thus to open the way to extending that project in promising new directions.

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7 PRAGMATISM, EXPRESSIVISM, AND ANTI-REPRESENTATIONALISM

Local and Global Possibilities

It has now been thirty years since the appearance of Richard Rorty’s masterpiece, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.1 A lot has changed in Anglophone philosophy in that time. One wholly salutary development, to which, in my view, PMN substantially contributed, is that the concern to understand our contemporary concerns as the outcome of currents of thought that have been flowing at least since Kant—a principal structuring aim of Rorty’s book that was sufficiently unusual at the time of its publication to be found off-putting and even alarming by some of its critics—has now become thoroughly incorporated into the analytic mainstream. The topic on which I want to focus here, however, concerns a central aspect of the content of the work, rather than its form. According to Rorty’s diagnosis, the common cause of many of the ills of philosophy in the twentieth century is the representationalist model of mind and meaning that had been dominant in its distinctively modern form since Descartes, and in a recognizable form, since Plato. The therapy he boldly proposed is that we stop our retail, local tinkering with that model and reject it wholesale and globally, in favor of a Deweyan, nonrepresentationalist, pragmatist model that understands the adoption and development of vocabularies as modes of coping with felt problems. In this chapter, I consider the current state of global anti-representationalism, thirty years after Rorty’s original provocative recommendation. Against the Rortyan background, in a compare-and-contrast sort of way, I will discuss Huw Price’s contemporary global anti-representationalist successor program. I will close by considering the prospects for a third phase of this movement, which is anti-representationalist without being globally anti-representationalist. 1. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981; Thirtieth Anniversary Edition, 2008). Hereafter, PMN. 190

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I. Price’s Subject Naturalism and Global Expressivism Huw Price is one of the boldest and most original voices of pragmatism in the generation after Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam. Two particularly interesting ideas he has been developing recently are subject naturalism and global expressivism.2 The term by contrast to which “subject naturalism” is defined is “object naturalism,” which is the kind usually associated with the term ‘naturalism’. Object naturalism aspires to a particular kind of semantic account of some vocabulary or discursive practice. More particularly, it offers a representational account. That is, it says what objects and properties that vocabulary talks about, what range of facts it states or expresses. That representational semantic strategy accounts for the ‘object’ side of object naturalism. The ‘naturalism’ side is a matter of the semantic metavocabulary that is employed, in part to specify the ontology: what kinds of things the vocabulary in question represents. It is to be a naturalistic vocabulary. That is a genus that comprises a variety of species, including at least the vocabulary of fundamental physics, vocabularies of the special natural sciences, or least demandingly, ground-level empirical descriptive vocabulary, including both observational and theoretical vocabulary.3 By contrast, subject naturalism is the project of using a vocabulary that is naturalistic in one of these senses, not as a semantic metavocabulary, but as what, in Chapter 6 (and Between Saying and Doing) I call a “pragmatic metavocabulary.” That is, it is to be used to describe what the discursive practitioners who deploy the vocabulary in question do, the practices they engage in, or the abilities they exercise, in virtue of which they count as using that vocabulary. The idea is to formulate in the favored vocabulary necessary and sufficient conditions for doing what one needs to be doing in order thereby to be saying what can be said using the vocabulary—rather than (as with a semantic metavocabulary) for saying in different terms what they can say in that vocabulary. This is telling the sort of story familiar to us from the many instances of the genre we find in Wittgenstein’s Investigations. Instead of worrying about what the vocabulary 2. A good overview of the Price essays I have in mind is provided by his collection Naturalism Without Mirrors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 3. Note that one ought not just to assume that only vocabulary that is descriptive in a sense that contrasts with prescriptive, or, more broadly, normative (not the only way of thinking about description) can have observational uses. 191

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says about how things are with whatever it is it talks about, how it is describing or representing the world as being—a model that might or might not fit with the use of the vocabulary in question—we describe how the use of the vocabulary is taught and learned. If there is nothing mysterious about that, and if we can say in our favored terms just what one needs to do in order to use the vocabulary correctly, Price argues, then the vocabulary should count as naturalistically acceptable, regardless of whether we have anything to say about what it represents. As a somewhat fanciful example, consider someone who is puzzled about what is represented by indexical and demonstrative vocabulary. Are there indexical and demonstrative facts, over and above those expressible in nonindexical terms? If not, why are indexical terms not freely interchangeable with nonindexical ones (as the phenomenon of the essential indexical, pointed out by Perry and Lewis, shows they are not)? If so, what are these peculiar items? (One might imagine here some naturalistic analogue of the theologians who worry that a deity who is not spatiotemporally located could not think the sort of indexical and demonstrative thoughts we express using ‘here’, ‘now’, and ‘this’.) The fact that we can formulate rules sufficient to specify the correct use of indexicals (at least for ordinary, spatiotemporally located speakers)—including the uses that are demonstrably not interchangeable with the use of any nonindexical terms—entirely in nonindexical terms4 should be enough to dispel any concern that there is something spooky or mysterious going on. Some thought like this seems to be behind Wittgenstein’s stories about the use of terms such as ‘pain’ and ‘rule’. If the practices themselves are all in order from a naturalistic point of view, any difficulties we might have in specifying the kind of things those engaged in the practices are talking about, how they are representing the world as being, ought to be laid at the feet of a Procrustean semantic paradigm that insists that the only model for understanding meaningfulness is a representational one. The term by contrast to which “global expressivism” is defined is “local expressivism” about some particular vocabulary. One of the central examples here is the expressivism about terms of moral evaluation that has been developed by Allan Gibbard and Simon Blackburn. The thought is that the best way to understand this sort of vocabulary is to think about what one is doing in using it, what subjective attitudes one is 4. As I argue in the appendix to chapter 2 of Between Saying and Doing (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008), hereafter BSD. 192

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expressing, rather than how one is supposedly representing or describing the objective world as being. On this line, the essential thing about normative vocabulary is its use to express an attitude of commendation, approval, or practical commitment. For understanding this particular kind of vocabulary, that expressive role is central, rather than any descriptive or representational role that it might also be thought to play. An essential part of what recommends an expressivist approach to some vocabulary consists in the contrast it emphasizes between the functioning of that vocabulary and the functioning of ordinary empirical descriptive vocabulary. But Price wants us to consider radicalizing the expressivist approach, so as to adopt it in understanding the use of all vocabularies. A global expressivism would be a way of implementing the move from object naturalism to subject naturalism. What global expressivism and subject naturalism have in common is the rejection of representationalism, by which I understand a commitment to having the concept of representation play a fundamental explanatory or expressive role in semantic theory. That is the aspect of these views I want to focus on here. Let me begin by making some further distinctions. One thing at issue between object naturalism and subject naturalism is whether one is concerned with what one is saying or thinking, or with what one is doing in saying or thinking it. As I want to use the terms, this is the distinction between semantics and pragmatics: the study of the contents of utterances and other episodes and the study of the acts being performed in producing or exhibiting them. In addition to engaging in a semantic project, what Price calls “object naturalism” is committed to a particular form of semantics: representational semantics. It aspires to an account of content in terms of what is being represented, that is, talked or thought about. The semantic project need not take that form. One might, for instance, take inference or information rather than reference or representation as the central concept in one’s semantic theory. Finally, object naturalism is committed to formulating its representational semantic theory in a vocabulary restricted to naturalistic terms, in one of the various senses in which a vocabulary might qualify as ‘naturalistic’. So as I understand it, “object naturalism” is a project characterized by three in principle independent commitments: to a naturalistic representational semantics. In understanding subject naturalism to be concerned in the first instance with pragmatics rather than semantics, I do mean to emphasize that subject naturalism and object naturalism are not necessarily incompatible 193

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enterprises. One might pursue both projects: using a naturalistic vocabulary to specify what the users of a certain vocabulary are doing when they deploy that vocabulary, and using a naturalistic vocabulary (perhaps the same one) to say what it is they are talking about, how they are representing or describing the world as being, when they deploy that vocabulary. Of course, these need not be construed as simply independent enterprises. What I have called “methodological pragmatism” is the view that the point of introducing a notion of semantic content or meaning (and hence the source of the criteria of adequacy of the resulting theory) is to explain or at least codify central proprieties of their pragmatic use. What motivates Price to make his first distinction is the observation that naturalistic scruples will have been respected—the commitments that motivate restricting ourselves to naturalistic vocabularies when explaining intentional phenomena will not have been violated—if we offer naturalistic accounts of the pragmatics of some discourse, even in the absence of a representational semantics couched in the same vocabulary. That is exactly what local expressivist accounts of the significance of moral normative vocabulary aspire to offer. I want to put the issue of naturalism to one side, and just consider some of the relations between representational semantics and broadly expressivist pragmatics. As a matter of fact, I am skeptical about the prospects for a naturalistic pragmatic metavocabulary sufficient to say what one needs to do in order to be able to say even all the things we can say by deploying naturalistic vocabularies themselves. For the principle object of the study of pragmatics is proprieties of use: how it would be correct to use various kinds of vocabulary. Understanding pragmatics that way does not by itself rule out the possibility of a naturalistic pragmatic metavocabulary. For one might be able to offer a pragmatic metavocabulary for the deontic normative metavocabulary in which those proprieties of use are specified. The most promising approach I know of for specifying such proprieties in a naturalistic metavocabulary is Ruth Millikan’s selectional teleosemantics.5 But this is not the line of thought I want to pursue here. 5. The issues in the vicinity of naturalistic pragmatic and semantic metavocabularies are intimately related to the distinction between the aspirations for reductions from below and reductions from above (in Daniel Dennett’s useful phrase). In chapter 1 of Making It Explicit (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994, hereafter MIE) I aspire to, if not a reduction from above of normative vocabulary in terms of socially articulated attitudes and practices, at least an explication of it from above. For I want to understand the normative statuses that confer concep194

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One thing that Price sees as promising about the possibility of being a local expressivist about some kinds of vocabulary is that it shows that we need not accept global semantic representationalism: the view that for any legitimate vocabulary, it must be possible to offer a representationalist semantics for it—on pain of its not turning out to be legitimate after all. A successful local expressivism about some vocabulary would show that, while it might be possible to offer a representational semantics for that vocabulary, it is not necessary to do so in order to show it to be legitimate. For there are other legitimate things one can do with language, other expressive functions besides representing or describing that it can perform. This is a theme that was near and dear to Wilfrid Sellars’s heart. In a 1959 essay he takes as his principal target what he calls the “tendency to assimilate all discourse to describing,” which he takes to be primarily “responsible for the prevalence in the empiricist tradition of ‘nothingbut-ism’ in its various forms (emotivism, philosophical behaviorism, phenomenalism)”6: [O]nce the tautology ‘The world is described by descriptive concepts’ is freed from the idea that the business of all non-logical concepts is to describe, the way is clear to an ungrudging recognition that many expressions which empiricists have relegated to secondclass citizenship in discourse are not inferior, just different.7 Sellars is here rejecting a global descriptivism. Now, not all discursive representations are descriptions: demonstratives and indexicals are not, for instance. But Sellars’s discussion makes it clear that this sort of difference is irrelevant to his point. He would have been just as happy to say that not all declarative sentences should be understood as representing states of affairs. In particular, he takes modal claims to have the expressive function of making explicit rules of inference, which he takes to entail that they are not to be put in a box with descriptive claims that purtual content as themselves instituted by socially articulated practical normative attitudes. McDowell and others have complained that this is a kind of residual naturalism. I would reply that it is precisely a naturalism of second nature, and that I am just talking about the fine structure or mechanism that implements what McDowell wants to be entitled to say. 6. “Counterfactuals, Dispositions, and the Causal Modalities,” in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 2, ed. H. Feigl, M. Scriven, and G. Maxwell (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1957), §103. Hereafter CDCM. 7. CDCM, §79. 195

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port to say how things are. Sellars should be understood here as rejecting a global semantic representationalism, on the basis of a local expressivism about alethic modal vocabulary. I will have more to say about this sort of local expressivism further along. Without going into details of the case of modal vocabulary at this point, I want to make two observations about the conclusions Price and Sellars draw from the different local expressivisms they consider. First, it is at any rate not obvious that playing some expressive role that is not itself descriptive or representational rules out also being susceptible to a representational semantic treatment. (After all, it is having something to say about how expressivist analyses need not rule out discerning also a descriptive content—and so being able to respond to the Frege-Geach embedding objection—that distinguishes contemporary moral expressivism from its earlier incarnations.)8 Further collateral premises of some sort will be required to secure that inference. Second, supposing such auxiliary methodological hypotheses to have been supplied, the result of any particular local expressivism will be at best an argument against global semantic representationalism, not an argument for global semantic anti-representationalism. The latter is the conclusion Price seems to be aiming at (as Rorty did before him): that the content of no vocabularies, not even ground-level empirical descriptive vocabulary, should be understood semantically in representational terms. Anti-global-representationalism is weaker than global antirepresentationalism. The latter will require, as Price is fully aware, global expressivism (or pragmatism), together with whatever collateral commitments are needed to secure the inference from the applicability of a nonrepresentational expressivist pragmatics to the unavailability of a representational semantics.

II. Rorty’s Global Anti-Representationalism As I have been saying, in at least taking seriously global semantic antirepresentationalism, Price joins that other great neopragmatist, Richard Rorty. Thirty years ago, in his magnum opus, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,9 Rorty offered a stunning diagnosis of the ills of contemporary philosophy as the culmination of working through ideas around which the whole of modern philosophy since Descartes had been built. The ther8. I discuss the embedding objection in Chapter 3, Section IV. 9. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979. 196

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apy he proposed is even more radical: reject those ideas root and branch, and figure out how to do what we need to do with the sparer, more naturalized, more historicized neopragmatist vocabulary generated by a picture of vocabulary use as a part of the natural history of a certain kind of creature, as at once a coping strategy and an instrument of self-formation and transformation. The two master ideas of Enlightenment philosophy that Rorty blamed for setting us on an ineluctable path to the bottomless abyss he takes us to be confronting are representation and experience. He saw these concepts as by now so thoroughly contaminated by and infected with disastrous collateral commitments as to be forever entangled with them. He despaired of the project of producing sanitized, hygienic successors. The only safe way to treat these leper’s rags, he thought, is to burn them. I have by and large followed my teacher in rejecting the notion of experience as too burdened by noxious baggage—in particular, by the Myth of the Given—to be worth trying to recruit for serious explanatory and expressive work in philosophy. ‘Experience’ is not one of my words— literally: it does not occur in Making It Explicit, which contains many words. However, I broke with Rorty in trying to show why it is necessary and how it is possible to recover a notion of representation that is freed of the burdens and consequences he saw as inevitably encumbering it. In effect, where he thought that prudence requires building a fence that keeps the public out of sight of the edge of the abyss, I claimed that one much nearer would suffice to avoid catastrophe. John McDowell, in his magisterial Mind and World, while acknowledging the dangers Rorty pointed to, endorses the rehabilitation of both of Rorty’s suspect Enlightenment master concepts.10 His principal explicit concern is precisely with the notion of experience that I join Rorty in eschewing. In general, he thinks no barrier need be erected, no radical pragmatist measures taken. He shows us how to hop sure-footedly along the very edge of the precipice, with the confidence and insouciance of a mountain goat. And indeed, I do not think he succumbs to the sirenlike temptations of the deep. He does not, in fact, fall into the Myth of the Given. But I still want to say: “Kids, do not try this at home. This man is a professional. If you try, it will end in tears.” Now in this sketch I have also followed Rorty’s rhetorical example and used rather melodramatic terms: ‘abyss’, ‘leper’, ‘catastrophe’, and so 10. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. 197

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on. But what, exactly is the problem that leads Rorty not only to reject global semantic representationalism, but to recommend global antirepresentationalism? It is perhaps less easy than it ought to be to glean a crisp answer to this question from the text of PMN. The somewhat equivocal response to this powerful book is, I think, partly to be explained by the fact that its readers could generally tell quite well what Rorty was claiming and recommending, but had a harder time discerning exactly why he did so. And if you are, as he was, urging that we must burn down our ancient hometown and strike out for the frontier, you had better be able to be very clear about the danger or threat that calls for such a drastic response. I think Rorty’s diagnosis of the ills of semantic representationalism falls under two general headings: a characterization of life-threatening symptoms, and an etiology of them. He is much more explicit about the first part than he is about the second. The proximal difficulty is that thinking of our broadly cognitive and intentional relations with our environment principally in terms of our representing things as being thusand-so (thinking of the mind as a “mirror of nature”) requires, he thinks, commitment to various kinds of epistemically privileged representations. Prime among these, in their twentieth-century analytic form, are what is given in sensory experience and cognitively transparent meanings. What is wrong with the genus of which these are both species is that the privilege in question is essentially magical in nature. Representations of these sorts are understood as having a natural or intrinsic epistemic privilege, so that their mere occurrence entails that we know or understand something. They are self-intimating representings: having them counts as knowing something. But there is no way to cash out this sort of intrinsic authority in terms of the practices of using expressions or interacting with each other or our world. Rorty sees the middle years of the century as having unleashed a rising tide of social pragmatism about normativity: the view that all matters of authority and responsibility, entitlement and commitment, are ultimately matters of social practice. The later Wittgenstein adopts this standpoint to make fun of the idea of us as having automatic, intrinsic, infallible access to what we experience and what we mean. More pointedly, in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” Sellars mounts a broadly pragmatist critique of the idea of things known simply by being in some sensory state, and in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” Quine does the same for the idea of things known simply by our grasp of our own

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meanings.11 (Rorty took it as persuasive evidence of how hard it is fully to disentangle ourselves from this particular tar baby that Sellars seemed to hold onto a version of the analyticity Quine had discredited, and Quine remained committed to the sensory given.12 Carnap, of course, embraced both forms of givenness.) So Rorty’s first claim is that we should realize we have been driven to a philosophical impasse when we find ourselves committed to representations characterized by a sort of intrinsic epistemic privilege that is magical in virtue of its supposed intelligibility independently of the role the representings in question play in our actual reason-giving practices. His therapeutic recommendation is that the pragmatist critique that revealed the idea of this kind of epistemic privilege as incoherent be radicalized and extended. But we can ask: Why should the recommended surgery extend to the excision of the whole notion of representation? That is, why should our theoretical response take the form of global anti-representationalism? Why not just give up the idea of representations characterized by this objectionable sort of epistemic privilege? Rorty’s answer is that representational semantics has epistemological consequences. Unless some representations are intrinsically intelligible—grasped just by being there—understanding our cognitive and intentional relations to the world in representational terms puts an epistemological intermediary (a set of representations) between thinkers and what they think about. In this way, it excavates a gulf between mind and world. Semantic representationalism accordingly makes us patsies for epistemological skepticism, which then calls out for foundations in privileged representations. The sensory given and cognitively transparent meanings are foundationalist regress-stoppers on the sides of premises and of inferences, respectively. That is why Sellars and Quine between them should be understood as mounting a comprehensive pragmatist refutation of epistemological foundationalism. Rorty concludes that if we begin, as Descartes and Kant, for instance, taught us to do, with a semantic understanding of knowledge and meaning in terms of representation, we 11. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, with an introduction by Richard Rorty and study guide by Robert Brandom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” in From a Logical Point of View, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp.  20–46. 12. I think this picture is unfair to Sellars—though not to Quine. This story has been told with particular force and clarity by Michael Williams, in his Groundless Belief (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).

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will end with the unpalatable alternatives of epistemological skepticism or an untenable epistemological foundationalism. That is why he sees a form of pragmatist global anti-representationalism as the preferred way out of the impasse. My impression is that many philosophers who are principally concerned with semantic notions of meaning and content are unmoved by this line of thought because they are inclined to some such response as this: “I am not at all worried by the supposed ‘threat’ of epistemological skepticism. I am perfectly prepared to take for granted the common-sense and scientific picture of us as natural organisms adapting to and in constant causal commerce with a natural environment, which renders moot the extravagant suspicions of demon-deceiver or brain-in-a-vat skepticism. Concern with how one might in principle respond to such traditional, ultimately cartesian epistemological worries does not and should not exert any constraint on my choice of semantic explanatory primitives.” There is certainly something to this response. But it is not clear that broadly epistemological issues can be neatly severed from more narrowly semantic ones. I suspect, for instance, that the return of (objectionable) sensory givenness in two-dimensional modal semantics is not a contingent feature of some ways of working out that idea, but essential to the program itself.13 And McDowell argues persuasively in Mind and World that subscribing to the Myth of the Given is an intelligible, though ultimately unsustainable, response to the entirely legitimate (not just in the context of epistemology, but even in the context of semantics) demand that the world we are talking and thinking about be intelligible as exercising not only causal, but also rational constraint on our talking and thinking. Apart from that, he thinks, the very idea of empirically contentful judgments is bound to go missing. I think the deep reason for the inextricable intertwining of broadly epistemological with narrowly semantic concerns is an animating insight about which, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty is not as explicit as he is about the bearing of the options of skepticism or foundationalism on semantic representationalism, but which I think is present nonetheless. The forces that push representationalists toward semantic and epistemological foundationalism in the form of commitment to sensory, logical, or semantic givenness (i.e., analyticity) ultimately stem from concern with 13. A paradigm is Frank Jackson’s From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000). 200

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the question of what it is to understand representations as such, what it is to grasp representational content, what one must do to count thereby as taking or treating something in practice as a representation, as pointing beyond itself in this distinctive intentional way. Only the possibility of a suitable answer to that question can keep representations from having the significance of a veil interposed between representers and a represented world. (Rebecca West asked rhetorically why one would want a copy of the world: “Isn’t one of the damn things enough?”) The idea of epistemically privileged representations (“givens”) represents one, flawed, answer to that question. Semantic representationalism will only be as viable as the alternative answers it can make available.14 It seems to me that one of the cardinal advantages of semantic inferentialism over representationalism is precisely the availability of such an answer. Grasping a conceptual content is a kind of practical know-how: mastery of an inferential role. That is being able to discriminate good from bad material (that is, content-dependent) inferences in which it plays an essential role either in the premises or in the conclusions. Typically such mastery will be both partial and fallible. But one counts as grasping a concept insofar as one knows what else one would be committed or entitled to by applying it, and what would commit or entitle one to do so.15 There appears to be no equally straightforward and natural answer to the question of what grasp of representational purport consists in— of what one must in practice be able to do in order to count as taking and treating something as a representing, as answering for its correctness (in a distinctive sense) to how it is with what, in virtue of playing that 14. I think this is essentially the argument of the first half of the introduction to Hegel’s Phenomenology, but that is a story for another occasion. I have discussed what I take to be Kant’s and Hegel’s answers to this question in chapters 1 and 3 of Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 15. It is only in the presence of substantial optional collateral methodological commitments that such an approach is obliged to go on to pick out, among material inferences, a distinguished proper subset that plays some privileged role in the individuation of contents, or in assessments of grasp of them—for instance, inferences whose material goodness is underwritten by conceptual content rather than contingent facts about how the world is. Assessments of agreement and disagreement (hence of communication), whether within the practice or by a theorist looking on, are underwritten by assessments of whether two interlocutors have bound themselves by the same norms (so applied the same concept), even though they have different partial, fallible takes on what those norms require and permit. 201

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distinctive normative role as authoritative, is intelligible as being represented by that representing. I am not claiming that no such answer can be constructed16—only that the representational model does not come with one similarly ready to hand. The basic thought behind raising the question is that meaning and understanding are coordinate concepts, in the sense that neither can be properly understood or explicated except as part of a story that includes the other. Meanings are what one in the first instance understands, and talk of meaning in isolation from talk of what it is to grasp or understand that meaning is idle. Michael Dummett, Donald Davidson, and Crispin Wright are philosophers of language who have made this principle the centerpiece of their thought about meaning. If it is accepted, then semantics is inextricably bound up with broadly epistemic issues—where the broad sense of ‘epistemic’ refers not just to knowledge (a matter of knowing that), but also to understanding (a matter of knowing how). Of course, this view is not universally accepted. Jerry Fodor, in particular, considers the commingling of issues that are epistemic in this sense with properly semantic concerns to be the Great Bad of contemporary philosophy of mind and language. I do not want to argue the point here, just to register the dispute and to claim that Rorty’s rejection of representationalism (indeed, his endorsement of global anti-representationalism) is rooted in his endorsement of what we might call the “entanglement thesis.” My own view is that it is a thesis about the relation between semantics and pragmatics—between theories about meaning or content and theories about what one needs to do in order to count as applying concepts with that meaning or deploying vocabulary that expresses that content. Insofar as that is the right way to understand it, it is entailed by methodological pragmatism: the view that meaning should be thought of as a theoretical concept, and meanings as postulated to explain proprieties of use, that is, of the activities of those who express them. 16. So, for instance, for the simplest grades of representation, mapping and tracking (relations I understand in terms of the possibility of us, the theorists, being able to make inferences from map-facts to terrain-facts), being able to navigate among representeds by consulting representings is certainly a responsive, and probably a correct answer to the question. For practical intentional systems (those intelligible as having goals), goal-satisfaction with respect to representeds achieved by consulting representings plays a similar role. Millikan offers a sophisticated response relying on her central notion of Proper Function within a reproductive family. 202

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III. Some Bad Representationalist Theses Does endorsing methodological pragmatism or its consequence, the entanglement thesis relating the concepts of meaning and understanding,17 require one also to endorse global anti-representationalism—that is, the denial that the concept of representation can play a fundamental explanatory, or even expressive, role in an acceptable semantic metavocabulary?18 This is a complicated question. In the closing portions of this chapter, I describe one perhaps unexpected dimension along which the issue ramifies. But first I want to point to two views in the vicinity, two forms that semantic representationalism often takes, that on this basis I think we should reject. The first is semantic atomism: the idea that the semantic contents of at least some episodes, states, and expressions can be made sense of one by one, each independently of all the others. The master idea animating Sellars’s rejection of the sensory given is a semantic one, which then turns out to have (anti-foundationalist) epistemological consequences. The idea of sensory givenness is the idea of there being episodes that qualify as knowings (in a sense that includes their being available as suitable premises in inferences whose conclusions also count as knowings, in part in virtue of those inferences) that are noninferential, not only in the (unobjectionable) sense that the process that results in the occurrence of those episodes is not an inferential process (but a matter of exercising, inter alia, a reliable differential responsive disposition), but also in the (objectionable) sense that its possession of the content it has is independent of any inferential relations to other contentful episodes. When Sellars talks about the ideology of givenness requiring that the occurrence of some contentful episodes not 17. I think of the entanglement thesis as a reciprocal sense-dependence claim (in the sense I define in chapter 6 of Tales of the Mighty Dead (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), hereafter TMD. As such, it stands in apparent tension with the claim that it is entailed by methodological pragmatism, which asserts an asymmetric relation between pragmatics and semantics. The bridge principle or auxiliary hypothesis I have in mind as relating them is the claim that once a set of theoretical concepts has been incorporated into a vocabulary, by being related inferentially to each other and to some observational vocabulary conceived of as antecedently available, the concepts expressed even by observational terms (those that have noninferential, reporting uses) can be articulated in part by their inferential relations to the newly introduced theoretical vocabulary. 18. Later I will distinguish between explanatory and expressive versions of representationalism, and so of anti-representationalism. 203

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depend on any prior “learning,” the learning he means is mastery of other concepts. (After all, it would be no problem for anyone on either side of the debate about givenness to allow that one might need some sort of training regimen to master the reliable differential responsive dispositions involved.) That is, the point is grounded in a denial of semantic atomism. My discussions of this point usually involve parrots19—I will not trample again on that well-worn ground. Suffice it to say here that semantic atomism is hard to maintain for anyone committed to the entanglement thesis. Meaning is holistic because understanding is. If that line of thought is right, then atomistic representationalism should be rejected. But there is no necessity for semantic representationalism to take an atomistic form (though its more empiricist versions have tended to do so). When Descartes, impressed by Galileo’s geometrical treatment of time by lines and acceleration by areas, wanted to replace traditional resemblance theories of the relation between appearance and reality by an account in terms of a more abstract notion of representation, his model was the relations he had discovered between discursive algebraic equations and geometric figures. “x2 + y2 = 1” and “x + y = 1” do not resemble the circle and line that they represent. They represent those figures in virtue of the facts relating the whole system of equations to the whole system of extended figures, in virtue of which, for instance, one can compute the number of points of intersection between the figures by simultaneously solving the corresponding equations. This original understanding of representation in terms of global isomorphism is an essentially holistic one. The second, related, pernicious form of semantic representationalism is semantic nominalism. This is the view that takes as its semantic paradigm the designation relation between a name and its bearer (what it is a name of), or between sign (signifier) and signified, and assimilates all varieties of the representing/represented relation to that model. (Contemporary semiotics takes this shape, as does much structuralist and post-structuralist thought, downstream from Ferdinand de Saussure. Derrida was at various points sufficiently within its grip that his alternative to de Saussure’s signifier/signified model was to take it that signifiers designate . . . other signifiers.) What this approach misses is the Kant-Frege lesson that sentences 19. Taken as an organizing trope to particularly good effect by Jeremy Wanderer, in the opening chapter of his recent book Robert Brandom (Montreal: McGill University Press, Acumen Press, 2008). 204

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are special. They are prior in the order of pragmatic explanation, because it is using some expressions as declarative sentences, making judgments or claims, that is what makes something a discursive practice or ability in the first place. It is items in this category that a knower can take responsibility for (Kant), attach pragmatic—paradigmatically assertoric—force to (Frege), or use to make a move in a language game (Wittgenstein). As Frege taught us, our understanding of predicates should derive from our understanding not only of singular terms, but also of sentences. So using the designational model for predicates and using it for sentences are intimately related moves. Methodological pragmatists are obliged to take the category of sentences as semantically fundamental, precisely because of their pragmatic priority. A popular idea is that what sentences represent in the sense of designate is a special kind of thing: states of affairs. The thought is that what true sentences designate is facts, and some states of affairs are merely possible facts, designated by false sentences. This model inevitably leads to metaphysical extravagance. For there are lots of different kinds of sentences, because there are many different ways of using sentences (things one can do with them). Pretty soon one must worry about logical facts and states of affairs (including negative and conditional ones), modal facts and states of affairs, probabilistic ones, normative ones, semantic and intentional ones, and so on, and corresponding kinds of properties to articulate each of them. One of the motivations for various local expressivisms is precisely to avoid such extravagance. Indeed, Wittgenstein in the Tractatus adopts what can be thought of as a local anti-representationalism about logical vocabulary, precisely to avoid having to postulate the kind of logical properties and relations (such as negation and conditionality) that his picture theory of representation forbids. But his tinkertoy approach, treating states of affairs as arrangements of objects, offers no account of modal or normative facts, only a token, unworkable approach to probabilistic ones, and treats semantic and intentional facts as in principle inexpressible. In doing so he opens the gate to a path he did not himself take: to treating these other kinds of vocabulary also in a nonrepresentational, locally expressivist fashion. For he showed that even if one’s semantics is at base representationalist, it need not take the form of semantic nominalism. (Jerry Fodor’s “divide and conquer” semantic methodology acknowledges the same lesson.) Representationalism invites, but does not entail, semantic nominalism. But one of the basic criteria of adequacy for any representationalist account 205

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must be its treatment of sentences and what they express. This demand sometimes surfaces in the form of the issue of characterizing the distinctive “unity of the proposition.” This is another criterion of adequacy (along with offering an account of understanding coordinate with that of meaning, and rejecting semantic atomism) that inferentialist semantic approaches automatically satisfy. For to be propositionally contentful, according to this approach, just is to be suitable to play the role both of premise and of conclusion in inferences, which articulate the content of the proposition. In sum, these arguments do not rule out making essential use of representational vocabulary in semantics, so long as the account meets at least three conditions. First, an account must be offered of the uptake or grasp of representations as such—what one has to do to count thereby as taking or treating them as representings of some represented things. That is a normative status: according to things a distinctive kind of authority over the correctness of one’s claims, thereby making oneself responsible to them. For that is what it is to take it that one is talking or thinking about them. Second, the account must be consistent with the pragmatic priority of sentential contents. Third, it must acknowledge the way the semantic content of some expressions, states, or episodes is essentially related to that of others, to which one might or might not be committed. Semantic representationalism invites and encourages the denial of these insights, but it does not entail them. In fact, I do not think Rorty would have claimed an entailment. He was happy enough with a sort of guilt by association. He thought that representational semantics had been so intertwined with bad epistemological projects that it was irretrievably tainted. Indeed, he recommended jettisoning not only representational semantics, but semantics in general, as a handmaiden to bad epistemology.

IV. Local Expressivism about Representational Vocabulary There is another direction from which it is possible to address the nature, and therefore the viability, of the project of semantic representationalism. Price has pointed out the possible bearing of expressivist pragmatic theories of what one is doing in applying the concepts expressed by some vocabularies on the feasibility and utility of representationalist accounts of their semantic contents. I endorse a sophisticated expressivism with regard to logical, modal, and normative vocabulary. This is quite a different line of thought from that motivating contemporary expressivist treat-

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ments of moral normative vocabulary, for instance in Gibbard and Blackburn. I call my version a ‘sophisticated’ expressivism to mark the fact that the expressive role taken to be shared by both classical and modal logical vocabulary and normative vocabulary is one possible role picked out from a structured space of possibilities. That space is structured by the basic meaning-use relations I identify in Between Saying and Doing and rehearse here in Chapter 6. The most important of these are one set of practices-orabilities being sufficient to deploy a particular vocabulary (PV-sufficiency), a vocabulary being sufficient to specify a particular set of practices-orabilities (VP-sufficiency), and one set of practices-or-abilities being sufficient (for instance, by either algorithmic or pedagogical elaboration) for implementing another set of practices-or-abilities (PP-sufficiency). Various expressive roles are then determined by the specific pragmatically mediated semantic relations they stand in to practices and other vocabularies. The simplest such complex meaning-use relation is being a pragmatic metavocabulary: the relation a vocabulary V' stands in to another vocabulary V when V' is VP-sufficient to specify practices-or-abilities that are PV-sufficient to deploy the vocabulary V. That is not the expressive role that I take logical vocabulary to play— the genus the logical species shares with the modal and normative species of vocabulary. Complex meaning-use relations can be botanized by their meaning-use diagrams (MUDs). The diagram for being a pragmatic metavocabulary, shown in Figure 7-1, is a simple composition.20 The meaning-use relation of which I take logical vocabulary to be paradigmatic is that of being elaborated from and explicitating of some feature of practices-or-abilities that are PV-necessary to deploy any autonomous discursive practice—for short, being LX for every ADP. This means that there is some set of practices-or-abilities necessarily exhibited by any autonomous discursive practice—any language game one can 20. Reminder: The conventions of this diagram are the following: • Vocabularies are shown as ovals, practices-or-abilities as (rounded) rectangles. • Basic meaning-use relations are indicated by solid arrows, numbered and labeled as to kind of relation. • Resultant meaning-use relations are indicated by dotted arrows, numbered and labeled as to kind, and the basic MURs from which they result. The idea is that a resultant MUR is the relation that obtains when all of the basic MURs listed on its label obtain.

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V1

V :V

1,2 1:PV-suff

s1

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Figure 7-1 A pragmatic metavocabulary

play though one plays no other21—that can be elaborated into a set of practices sufficient to introduce vocabulary that is expressively powerful enough to specify the original practices. So, in having mastered a natural language, one already knows how to do everything one needs to know how to do, in principle, to deploy a vocabulary that is expressively powerful enough to specify the basic set of abilities on the basis of which the new vocabulary was introduced.22 The meaning-use diagram, shown in Figure 7-2, for that complex meaning-use relation is a more intricate one. I cannot say enough here to make these diagrams, and the relations they present graphically, truly intelligible, never mind to say what reasons 21. As I use the term, to be a language game, a Sprachspiel, to be a verbal and not just a vocal, practice, some performances must be accorded the pragmatic significance of claimings, utterances with assertional significance, which accordingly count as the use of declarative sentences expressing propositional content. Wittgenstein’s Sprachspiele are not autonomous discursive practices in this sense. 22. It may be worth mentioning in passing that I am not offering an account of logical vocabulary (inter alia) that is metalinguistic in any ordinary sense. For, first, it does not involve mentioning the nonlogical expressions it is applied to, but using them in a distinctive way. Of course, as McDowell points out, mentioning an expression is a way of using it; see his “Quotation and Saying That,” in Meaning, Knowledge and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp.   51–86. That the sort of use involved in my account is quite different from the use that amounts to mention is clear from how indexicals, demonstratives, and foreignlanguage expressions behave in, say, conditionals. Again (and closely related), the logical vocabulary is not restricted to a metalanguage distinct from the object language, but is added to the object language. One would get closer by looking at indirect discourse, which shares these features. The closest thought in the vicinity would be that “If p then q,” means something like “That-q follows from that-p.” But any such model would require a lot of commentary. 208

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Vconditionals

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su

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Figure 7-2

Elaborated-explicating (LX) conditionals

there are to think that modal and normative vocabulary play structurally identical expressive roles. I hope the discussion in the previous chapter offers enough of an introduction to give some flavor of the structure that permits the botanization of an infinite, recursively generated class of expressive roles, with a hitherto undreamt-of precision. That is the structure within which my local expressivism about a variety of vocabularies is located.23 The sort of expressivism about logical, modal, and normative vocabulary that consists in understanding them as LX for every ADP is essentially, and not just accidentally, a local expressivism. Not all vocabularies can play this particular expressive role. Autonomous discursive practices must contain vocabularies playing other expressive roles—for instance, observational vocabulary that reports features of the nonlinguistic bits of the world (ones that are not themselves the deployment of vocabularies). So this sort of expressivism is not a candidate for extension to a global expressivism. However, one of the vocabularies I am a local expressivist about is representational vocabulary itself. By this I do not mean deflationism about traditional technical semantic vocabulary: ‘true’, ‘refers’, ‘denotes’, 23. I construe this view about the expressive role characteristic of logical, modal, and normative vocabulary as developing, extending, and generalizing the approach Wittgenstein takes to narrowly logical vocabulary in the Tractatus. For there he saw that one need not follow Russell’s logical atomism in acknowledging a distinct realm of logical facts, over and above the nonlogical ones. One can instead construe logical vocabulary as playing an expressive role that is quite distinct from the representational one played by logically atomic vocabulary. 209

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and like cognates. I do in fact endorse a distinctive kind of deflationism about such locutions, understanding them as anaphoric proform-forming operators.24 In spite of specific differences, generically, this view belongs in a box with Paul Horwich’s.25 I mean something possibly more fundamental. For I am also a certain kind of deflationist about the representational dimension of intentionality itself. In the last chapter of Between Saying and Doing, I offer an account of intentionality as a “pragmatically mediated semantic relation.” I do not there discuss representational vocabulary. But the account of its expressive role that I offer elsewhere is an expressive, deflationary one.26 (Sebastian Knell is very good on this point in his book.)27 In fact, though the case would have to be made out—as I do not do in BSD and will not do here—the expressive role assigned to paradigmatic representational locutions (the ‘of’ of “what I am thinking of” . . . etc.) is also to be LX of some features essential to ADPs. The vocabulary I am interested in is the ordinary, nontechnical natural language vocabulary that expresses the idea that besides what we say or think, there is also what we are talking or thinking about. I take this distinction to be the phenomenon that motivates various semantic theorists to introduce technical notions of representation, and initially picks out their topic. They want to elaborate, in a controlled way, the representational dimension of discourse that shows up pretheoretically in our talk about what we are talking about. What distinguishes the ‘of’ and ‘about’ that express intentional directedness (the representational dimension of thought and talk) from the ‘of’ of “the pen of my aunt” and the ‘about’ of 24. See MIE, chap. 5; and “Expressive vs. Explanatory Deflationism about Truth,” in What Is Truth? ed. Richard Schantz (Berlin: Hawthorne de Gruyter, 2002), pp.  103–119, reprinted in Deflationary Truth, ed. Bradley P. Armour-Garb and J.  C. Beall (Peru, IL: Open Court, 2005), pp.  237–257. 25. In his book Truth (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999, second edition). This view is further developed, and extended to notions of meaning, including representational understandings of it, in his Meaning (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999), Reflections on Meaning (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006), and Truth, Meaning, and Reality (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010). 26. In chapter 8 of MIE, chapter 3 of TMD, chapter 5 of Articulating Reasons (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), and “Hermeneutic Practices and Theories of Meaning,” SATS—Nordic Journal of Philosophy 5, no. 1 (2004), pp.  5–26. 27. Propositionaler Gehalt und Diskursive Kontoführung: Eine Untersuchung zur Begründung der Sprachabhängigkeit intentionaler Zustande bei Brandom (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004). 210

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“the book weighs about five pounds”? I think it is their use in de re ascriptions of propositional attitudes. That is, the home language game of this vocabulary is ascriptions such as “John believes of the green tie that it is blue,” and “When Mark says ‘ordinary language’ he is talking (thinking) about the language of classical mechanics.” So, for instance, if we want to know whether some alien language has locutions for making explicit the representational directedness of their thought and talk, and which locutions those are, the place to start is by looking for expressions that have the pragmatic significance and conceptual content of de re ascriptions of propositional attitudes. The expressions that mark off the de re from the de dicto portions of such ascriptions (in lightly regimented English, what goes inside the scope of the ‘of’ from what goes inside the scope of the ‘that’) is then the explicitly representational vocabulary. To understand the representational dimension of discourse, then, we need to understand what is made explicit by de re ascriptions of propositional attitudes.28 The way to do that, I have argued, is to look at what one is doing in asserting a de re ascription. And I have argued that from the pragmatic, deontic scorekeeping point of view, one is doing two things in making any ascription of a propositional attitude. One is in the central case attributing a commitment, typically to someone else. That one is doing that by explicitly saying that the individual has that attitude is what distinguishes ascription of the attitude from the simple attribution of the attitude, which may otherwise be practically implicit in what one does. But because in ascribing one is saying something, in the sense of asserting it, one is also undertaking or acknowledging a commitment. Each bit of vocabulary deployed in the ascription must accordingly do double duty pragmatically. It contributes to the specification both of the claim responsibility for which is being attributed and of the claim responsibility for which is being undertaken. The question can then arise whether the choice of some way of expressing the claim being attributed is itself something for which 28. Although it is not obvious, the anaphoric account of the expressive (substitution-inferential) role distinctive of the classical semantic vocabulary of ‘true’ and ‘refers’ takes its place within the framework provided by de re ascriptions of propositional attitudes, via the insight that what I have called (in MIE) “ascriptionstructural anaphora”—paradigmatically, the ‘it’ in “John believes of the green tie that it is blue”—is the intrasentential correlate and codification of interpersonal anaphoric inheritance of (substitution-inferential) content. That is why we can say “Senator McCarthy believed of the first sentence of the Communist Manifesto that it was true.” I discuss this issue in greater detail in chapter 8 of MIE. 211

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responsibility is being attributed, along with the ascribed claim, or undertaken, along with the ascribing claim. Segregating some expressions within the scope of a de re operator, such as ‘of’ or ‘about’, is a way of making explicit that responsibility for using those expressions to specify the content of the claim ascribed is being undertaken, along with the ascribing claim, rather than attributed, along with the ascribed claim. Thus if I say “Kant came to believe of his loyal and long-suffering servant Lampl that he was conspiring against Kant,” I make it clear that the specification of Lampl as “loyal and long-suffering” is one that I am taking responsibility for, not one I am attributing to Kant as part of the attitude I am ascribing to him. The semantic device that performs the pragmatic function that is the converse of that performed by the representational vocabulary that segregates the scope of the de re portion of an ascription is scare quotes. So, picking up the remark of another, I might say something like “That s inspiring national leaders is nothing but a self-interested kleptocrat.” Here I attribute responsibility for using that expression, while undertaking responsibility for the claim being made. The pragmatic expressive function that determines the semantic content of representational vocabulary is marking the crucial distinction of social perspective between commitments (assertional and identificational = substitution-inferential) that are attributed and those that are acknowledged or undertaken. That is a very different job from describing how the world is. This vocabulary helps us keep our social books straight on who is committed to what—something we must be able to do in order to be able to deploy empirical descriptive vocabulary, but nonetheless something quite distinct from what we do with such vocabulary. A central observation of Kant’s is that what we might call the framework of empirical description—the commitments, practices, abilities, and procedures that form the necessary practical background within the horizon of which alone it is possible to engage in the cognitive theoretical activity of describing how things empirically are—essentially involves elements expressible in words that are not descriptions, that do not perform the function of describing (in the narrow sense) how things are. These include, on the objective side, what is made explicit as statements of laws, using alethic modal concepts to relate the concepts applied in descriptions. On my account, the representational vocabulary we use in natural language to make explicit the intentional directedness of our speech and thought performs a similar framework-explicitating function, but on the subjective side

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of the ones undertaking and attributing commitments concerning how things are. So my form of local expressivism is peculiar (though not unique) in that it includes the vocabulary we use to make explicit the representational semantic dimension of discourse—exactly the semantic vocabulary by contrast to which the pragmatic expressivist vocabulary is usually introduced. The account has the consequence, however, that that representational dimension turns out to be ubiquitous. Every vocabulary can be used in expressing commitments that can be both attributed and acknowledged. Every vocabulary can figure in de re ascriptions, and so be talked about in representational vocabulary. (In fact, the vocabulary of de re ascriptions can itself be used to ascribe such ascriptions de re.) So representational vocabulary makes explicit an essential and ubiquitous dimension of conceptual content. This is a kind of global semantic representationalism, underwritten by a local expressivism about representational vocabulary itself. What I am doing, I think, is just filling in Price’s notion of I-representation (representation in an internal sense). At least, I want to offer this account of what is expressed by de re ascriptions of propositional attitudes for that purpose. But I also want to emphasize how serious the need for such a filling-in is. For, as things stand at the end of his Descartes Lectures, I think the notion of I-representation is a mere placeholder—the mark of an aspiration rather than the specification of a serviceable concept.29 My reasons for saying that will emerge if we ask what makes the notion of I-representation a notion of a kind or sense of ‘representation’. If, as Price recommends, we look for it horizontally, at the relations states and locutions stand in to other states and locutions, to the functional role they play in a system of others, rather than vertically, to their mapping or tracking relations to something outside the system, what is it about such roles that justifies us in treating them as representations in any sense? Price likes the idea—at the core of my own thought—that a decisive line is crossed when we become entitled to think of the relations they stand in to one another as inferential relations. Indeed, I think we then become entitled to think of them (for the first time) as expressing propositional contents. For me, such contents are just what can play the role of premises and 29. Three Themes in Contemporary Pragmatism, René Descartes Lectures, Tilburg University, The Netherlands, 2008. Forthcoming.

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conclusions of inferences—what can both serve as and stand in need of reasons. But what results from that view is at least to begin with a notion of I-expression, not I-representation. For what does expressing propositional contents in this sense have to do with representation? Here it looks as though Price is seeking to procure by terminological fiat what can legitimately be secured only by honest toil. To be sure, once propositional contents in this functional, inferential sense are on board, we will be able to appeal to a deflationary account of truth—either Horwich’s sophisticated development of Quine’s disquotational approach, or what I take to be much more expressively and technically flexible and powerful, the anaphoric account of ‘is true’ as a prosentenceforming operator and ‘refers’ as a pronoun-forming operator—to underwrite the Tarskian T-sentences. But again, what does this notion of truth have to do with representation? The way it swings free of the traditional connection between truth and representation is precisely what makes the theory deflationary. Price does have a substantive and important pragmatic account of truth—as coming into play with the possibility of social disagreement and procedures for resolving such disagreements. (I am thinking here of his essay “Truth as Convenient Friction.”)30 This is a rich and promising line of thought. But here, too, a lot more work needs to be done to elaborate from it a sense of “representing” things and their relations to each other and to us. I offer the story I am gesturing at here (and have told elsewhere), about why what is expressed by de re ascriptions of propositional attitudes is present wherever propositional contents in the inferentialfunctional sense are in play as a way of redeeming the promissory note that Price has issued under the rubric of “I-representation.” What I am advocating is a soft global semantic representationalism. It is an account of the expressive role of representational vocabulary that shows the same expressive function that makes it ubiquitously available to express a crucial dimension of conceptual contentfulness also disqualifies it from playing a fundamental explanatory role in an account of the semantics of at least some discursive practices. For the expressive role characteristic of representational vocabulary (like that of logical, modal, and normative vocabulary) can itself be fully specified in a social, normative, inferential pragmatic metavocabulary that does not itself employ representational vocabulary. In the context of a commitment to method30. Reprinted as chapter 8 of Naturalism without Mirrors. 214

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ological pragmatism—the claim that the point of theoretically postulating semantic properties associated with discursive expressions, episodes, and states is to explain or at least explicate features of their use—this means that the invocation of semantic primitives (unexplained explainers) such as representation, in this case, the case of representational vocabulary itself, is unnecessary. That is why the view is explanatorily deflationary about representational vocabulary, though not at all expressively deflationary about it. (Paul Horwich agrees with me about the first part of this claim, but I am not sure that he agrees about the second. Davidson, in “Reality without Reference” can also be considered as enrolled in this cause, in giving [I would claim] a basically inferential account of truth conditions, and then denying that they can be generated by referential/ representational primitives—which, on the other hand, are computed from the truth conditions, and accordingly, do not function as primitive or explanatory-foundational.)31 The question remains: just how deflationary is it to provide this sort of nonrepresentational pragmatic metavocabulary? It opens up a space for a view that is deflationary, according to which this sort of account in terms of pragmatic metavocabulary is all there is to say about the vocabulary in question: no further semantic questions should be asked or could be answered. Rorty and Price might be tempted by such a view. But it also seems compatible with acknowledging that at least in some cases, an orthodox representational semantic metavocabulary might also be available.32 That is, we can ask: does this sort of deflationary local explanatory antirepresentationalism about what representational vocabulary expresses entail a global explanatory anti-representationalism? I do not see that it does. For it might well be that although representational vocabulary need not be used in specifying the use of representational vocabulary itself (because its expressive role can be fully specified in a nonrepresentational, 31. In his Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001). 32. Compare: It is one thing to understand what it is to introduce a range of singular terms and the objects they refer to by abstraction—that is, by means of an equivalence relation on some antecedent vocabulary, picking out objects that count as (more) concrete relative to this procedure. It is something else (it requires more argument to be entitled) to understand the objects to which one thereby gains semantic access as abstract objects. For presumably the latter are objects to which we can only gain semantic access by a process of abstraction. It is at least not obvious that Frege, for instance, believed in abstract objects in this sense. 215

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social-normative-inferential pragmatic metavocabulary),33 nonetheless in order to specify the proprieties governing the use of ordinary empirical descriptive vocabulary, its distinctive expressive role requires specification with the help of a representational semantic metavocabulary. I have talked so far only about discursive representational vocabulary. But this is not the only candidate for a representational semantic metavocabulary. In addition there are at least three others: those that express mapping relations (static), those that express tracking processes (dynamic), and those that express the practical intentional directedness of goal-seeking systems.34 I think the expressive role characteristic of each of these kinds of representational vocabulary can also be made fully explicit in an inferential, itself nonrepresentational pragmatic metavocabulary. Understanding (practically taking or treating) something as a representation in the mapping sense is exercising the ability to make inferences from map-facts to mapped-facts. Tracking is updating a map in that sense so as to keep the map-inferences good as the mapped-facts change. Taking or treating something as a practical intentional system is understanding its behavior in terms of sample pieces of practical reasoning. Here, too, the possibility of an adequate nonrepresentational pragmatic metavocabulary for these varieties of representational vocabulary would not seem to rule out their playing fundamental roles in a semantic metavocabulary for some other 33. The relation being asserted cannot straightforwardly be put by saying that discursive representational vocabulary and the social-inferential vocabulary that serves as a pragmatic metavocabulary for it turn out to be reciprocally referencedependent, but not reciprocally sense-dependent. I think that latter claim is also true (and the expository strategy of part 2 of MIE depends on it). But the pragmatic metavocabulary relation involves special features that are not part of the generic reference-dependence-without-sense-dependence story. I discuss these concepts in chapter 6 of TMD. 34. As I explain in chapter 6 of BSD, the fundamental pragmatist commitment is to explaining discursive intentionality in terms of practical intentionality. Thus in MIE, the claim is that discursive scorekeeping can be understood as a particular structure of practical intentionality, the sort exhibited already by nonlinguistic creatures—a structure that then in turn can be used to understand discursive intentionality. So there is an interaction between fundamental pragmatism and the entanglement thesis. For the notion of understanding that the latter appeals to as coordinate with the notion of meaning is a practical one: a kind of knowing how, an ability to do something. The denial of semantic atomism then follows from an appreciation of the systematicity of the answers to the question about the kind of practical understanding that grasp of representing as a representing consists in.

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vocabulary—quite possibly, empirical descriptive vocabulary. Though I cannot pursue the point here, the semantic-epistemic entanglement thesis will give us important clues about relations between semantic metavocabularies and their pragmatic metavocabularies.

V. Conclusion What are we to conclude? Rorty and Price agree that the evils representationalism is prey to require, or at least make advisable, global antirepresentationalism. The sort of expressivist, deflationary, pragmatic account of what one is doing in using representational vocabulary that I am advocating suggests that this response is an overreaction. I have tried in this chapter to assemble some analytic materials that might help us toward a more nuanced conclusion. Once one has freed oneself from the idea that semantic representationalism need take a nominalist or atomist form, must fail to appreciate what is special about sentences, or has to enforce a disconnection between semantic issues of meaning and epistemic ones pertaining to understanding (and also from the auxiliary hypotheses that enforce those associations and inferences), representational vocabulary can be understood as peforming an important, indeed essential, expressive role in making explicit a discursive representational dimension of semantic content that necessarily helps articulate every autonomous discursive practice. Further, we can rigorously distinguish the quite different expressive roles played by different kinds of vocabulary. (BSD shows how.) So no argument that depends on the impossibility of offering one kind of semantics or pragmatics for some vocabularies, and others for others, is going to be plausible or sustainable. When we make those distinctions, we discover that it is possible to specify the expressive roles characteristic of various important kinds of vocabulary—among them logical, modal, normative, and representational vocabularies—entirely in a social, normative, inferential, nonrepresentational pragmatic metavocabulary. In the context of a commitment to methodological pragmatism, then, there is no need to postulate, as part of semantic theory, representational explanatory primitives in order to explain the use of such vocabulary (since methodological pragmatism says that that is why we postulate semantic theoretical features such as meanings). And the vocabularies of which that is true include, I claim, discursive representational vocabulary. So we do not need to use the concept of

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representation (or I-representation, or Price’s contrasting concept E-representation) in order to understand what we are doing when we use the concept of (discursive) representation. I have also claimed that it does not follow (even in the context of collateral commitments to methodological pragmatism and to semantic-epistemic entanglement)35 that the use of ordinary empirical descriptive vocabulary, which plays quite a different expressive role from that of logical, modal, normative, or representational vocabularies, is not best explained by appeal to a semantics that is couched in (I- or E-) representational terms. Price makes much of the fact that any local expressivism is committed to drawing a line between the discourses or vocabularies that should be treated representationally and those that should be treated expressively, in their semantics. He is, I think, inclined to skepticism about the possibility of drawing such a line in a principled way. I do not think that this argument will work. On my account, logical, modal, and normative vocabulary plays the distinctive expressive role of being LX for every ADP. That is not true of groundlevel empirical descriptive terms. Perhaps they are best understood to be representing features of the objective world, by responsive, mapping, and tracking, indeed, even in the practical-acting sense. Even if that is so, we still have to worry about what it means that the use of the representational vocabulary appealed to in our semantics can itself be rendered nonrepresentationally. For I think we do not know how the possibility of offering a certain kind of pragmatic metavocabulary for a vocabulary relates to the kind of semantic metavocabulary it is amenable to. In this case, the question is: what does the possibility of offering a social-normative-inferential pragmatic metavocabulary specifying the expressive role of representational vocabulary say about the 35. I have tried to be clear about the collateral methodological commitments within which I am assessing consequences. They include methodological pragmatism and semantic-epistemic entanglement (with the holism about meanings that results, in the context of relatively weak auxiliary hypotheses). One response might be: “No doubt one can derive all sorts of extravagant consequences, if one is allowed to make use of substantially false collateral premises. But why should we care?” But I think this would be too quick. Meaning (like representation) is a theoretical notion. And that means that what we mean by ‘meaning’ is determined in no small part by the collateral commitments available to conjoin with it as auxiliary hypotheses in reasoning about it. They help determine what sense of ‘meaning’ we are exploring.

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possibility of also offering an explanatorily representationalist semantics for it, or for other vocabularies? I conclude that we have just not yet sufficiently explored (and so do not now know enough about) the relations between pragmatic metavocabularies and semantic metavocabularies, for vocabularies playing very different expressive roles to be able to answer to this question. In the wake of the Frege-Geach embedding argument against classical meta-ethical expressivism, Blackburn, Gibbard, and Peter Railton pioneered a new level of sophistication in thinking about the relations between nondescriptive expressive roles and descriptive content. Price has placed their enterprise in a much larger, more global theoretical setting, raising issues about the relations between the pragmatic metavocabularies in which we specify what we are doing when we use any kind of vocabulary and the semantic metavocabularies in which we specify what we are saying or meaning when we use them. My principal aim in this chapter has been to clarify the state of play that I understand as resulting from that recontextualization of Rorty’s idea, to indicate how some of my own work on expressive roles and pragmatic metavocabularies might contribute to greater analytic clarity on these issues, and finally to say something about the challenges for further research that confront us as we try to discern and navigate the next level of fine structure in the relations between expression and representation, and between pragmatics and semantics more generally.

219

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Versions of Chapter 1 were previously published as “When Philosophy Paints Its Blue on Grey: Irony and the Pragmatist Enlightenment,” in boundary2, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Summer 2002), pp.  1–28. “The Pragmatist Enlightenment (and Its Problematic Semantics),” in European Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 12, No. 1, (April 2004), pp.  1–16. “When Philosophy Paints Its Blue on Grey: Irony and the Pragmatist Enlightenment,” in  Pragmatism, Nation, and Race: Community in the Age of Empire, ed. Chad Katzer and Eduardo Mendieta (Indiana University Press, 2009), pp.  19–45.

Versions of Chapter 2 were previously published as “Pragmatics and Pragmatisms,” in  Hilary Putnam: Pragmatism and Realism, ed. James Conant and Urszula M. Zeglen (Routledge, 2002), pp.  40–59. Translated into German as “Pragmatik und Pragmatismus,” in Die Renaissance des Pragmatismus, ed. M. Sandbothe (Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2000), pp.  29–58.

Chapter 3 was previously published as “Pragmatism, Inferentialism, and Modality in Sellars’s Arguments against Empiricism,” in  Empiricism, Perceptual Knowledge, Normativity, and Realism,  ed. Willem deVries (Oxford University Press, 2009), pp.  33–62.

Chapter 4 was originally published as “Ein Gedankenbogen: Rortys Weg vom eliminativen Materialismus zum Pragmatismus,” in  Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie (2009), pp.  5–11.

221

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Chapter 5 was originally published as “Vocabularies of Pragmatism: Synthesizing Naturalism and Historicism,” in  Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert B. Brandom (Basil Blackwell, 2000), pp.  156–183. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Versions of Chapter 6 were previously published as Chapter 1 of Between Staying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism (Oxford University Press, 2008). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. “Towards an Analytic Pragmatism,” in  Robert Brandom: Analytic Pragmatist, ed. Bernd Prien and David P. Schweikard (Transaction Books, 2008).

Chapter 7 was originally published in Huw Price, with Simon Blackburn, Robert Brandom, Paul Horwich, and Michael Williams, Three Themes in Contemporary Pragmatism (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

222

INDEX

OF

NAMES

Anscombe, G. E. M., 46, 182 Aristotle, 134, 139, 141, 143 Ayer, A. J., 91

Dreyfus, Hubert, 11–13, 65–66 Dummett, Michael, 22, 24, 55, 59, 62, 62n12, 67, 149, 161, 202

Bach, J. S., 149 Baudelaire, Charles, 143 Bentham, Jeremy, 35 Blackburn, Simon, 192, 207, 219 Blake, William, 135 Braque, Georges, 184

Eliot, T. S., 154

Carnap, Rudolf, 4, 7, 22, 23, 25, 36, 55, 116, 165, 182, 199 Carroll, Lewis, 66

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 55 Galilei, Galileo, 137, 204 Gibbard, Allan, 192, 207, 219 Goethe, J. W., 149 Gombrich, Ernst, 140n18 Goodman, Nelson, 22 Grice, Paul, 57, 66, 165

Dalton, John, 140, 154 Davidson, Donald, 12, 51, 55, 56, 67, 74–75, 77n32, 117, 122, 125n5, 128, 202, 215 Democritus, 140 Dennett, Daniel, 194n5 Derrida, Jacques, 55, 204 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 204 Descartes, René, 6, 7, 9, 28, 29, 31, 40, 42, 53, 109–110, 114, 118–119, 120, 190, 196, 199, 200, 204 Dewey, John, 5, 6, 9, 14, 15–16, 18–20, 22, 23, 24, 32, 33, 35, 36, 38, 39, 42, 46, 47, 50n10, 52n13, 56, 65, 70n25, 71, 75n30, 78, 108, 115, 137, 142, 143, 150, 158, 161, 190

Fodor, Jerry, 202, 205 Frege, Gottlob, 1, 3, 4, 21, 22, 23, 55, 57, 68–69, 101, 133, 159n2, 165, 196, 204, 205, 215n32, 219

Habermas, Jürgen, 142, 143, 145, 150, 152 Haugeland, John, 66, 66n18 Hegel, G. W. F., 1, 4, 5, 7, 17, 20, 20n18, 21, 25–26, 32, 39, 42, 47, 49, 67n20, 107, 109, 117, 137, 145, 150, 164n7, 201n14 Heidegger, Martin, 9, 11, 13, 23, 29, 35, 55, 56, 65, 78, 79, 143, 158 Herder, J. G., 67n20 Hobbes, Thomas, 107, 150n23 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr., 42, 43, 44 Horwich, Paul, 210, 210n 214, 215

223

INDEX OF NAMES

Hume, David, 1, 7, 42, 83, 91, 93, 94, 95n9, 95–96, 104 Husserl, Edmund, 55, 134n11 Jackson, Frank, 200n13 James, William, 1, 5, 6n2, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 32, 33, 35, 42, 44, 46, 50n10, 56, 70n25, 71, 118n1, 158, 161 Johnson, Samuel, 147 Kant, Immanuel, 8, 9, 13, 14, 17, 22, 25, 31, 32, 42, 46, 52, 54, 56, 68, 72, 83, 95n9, 102, 105, 107, 116, 117, 120, 122, 133, 133n10, 134n11, 145, 149, 150n23, 152, 190, 199, 201n14, 204, 205, 212 Kelly, Gene, 50 Kempe, Alfred Bray, 21 Kierkegaard, Søren, 143 Knell, Sebastian, 210 Kripke, Saul, 61 Leibniz, G. W., 1, 64 Lewis, C. I., 22, 91 Lewis, David, 61n9, 107, 182, 192 Lincoln, Abraham, 127 Locke, John, 1, 7, 42, 77, 122, 143, 145 Lucretius, 140 Marx, Karl, 143 McCarthy, Joseph, 211 McDowell, John, 128n8, 194n5, 197, 200, 208n22 Meade, George Herbert, 15 Menand, Louis, 43–45 Metternich, Klemens, 138 Mill, J. S., 1, 35, 143 Millikan, Ruth, 15, 15n8, 194, 202n16 Milton, John, 138 Moore, G. E., 1 Morris, Charles, 15 Nabokov, Vladimir, 143 Neurath, Otto, 7, 86

Newton, Isaac, 5, 6, 7, 36, 42, 79, 134 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 107, 109, 118, 143 Peirce, C. S., 5, 6, 6n2, 20, 21, 22, 23, 29, 32, 37, 38, 42, 43, 44, 47, 50n10, 56, 70n25, 71, 118n1, 158 Perry, John, 182, 192 Picasso, Pablo, 184 Plato, 148 Price, Huw, 10n4, 33, 36n1, 168, 169n10, 182, 190, 191–196, 206, 213–214, 215, 217, 218, 219 Proust, Marcel, 143 Putnam, Hilary, 36, 56, 124n4, 158, 191 Quine, W. V. O., 4, 7, 9, 22, 25, 26, 55, 56, 60, 63, 93, 94, 96, 116–117, 120, 121, 127, 149, 161, 163n4, 198–199, 199n12, 214 Railton, Peter, 219 Rawls, John, 143, 145 Rorty, Richard, 6, 33, 36, 46, 46n5, 56, 65n17, 81n34, 107–115, 116–125, 127, 128, 128n8, 130, 131, 132–138, 138n17, 141–146, 150, 150n23, 153–156, 158, 161, 190, 191, 196–200, 202, 206, 215, 217, 219 Royce, Josiah, 21, 22 Russell, Bertrand, 1, 21, 22, 23, 35, 55, 134n11, 158, 159n2, 165, 182, 209n23 Rutherford, Ernest, 140 Ryle, Gilbert, 9, 14 Schiller, F. C. S., 15, 18 Sellars, Wilfrid, 9, 12, 15, 33, 33n37, 39n3, 51, 52, 55, 56, 60n8, 62n11, 66, 67, 73, 75, 83–85, 87–92, 93, 94–106, 118, 118n1, 120, 121, 122, 123, 127, 128n8, 130, 133, 151, 156, 160, 169, 170, 171, 182, 195–196, 198–199, 199n12, 203 Skinner, B. F., 14 Sober, Elliot, 15n8 Socrates, 148 Swinburne, Algernon, 1

224

INDEX OF NAMES

Tarski, Alfred 57, 57n1, 58, 59, 165, 181, 214 Thoreau, Henry David, 143 Wanderer, Jeremy, 204n19 Watson, John B., 14 Weinberg, Stephen, 126 West, Rebecca, 201 Williams, Michael, 199n12 Williams, Raymond, 137

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 3, 9, 11, 13, 14, 23, 24, 28, 29, 30–31, 32, 33, 55, 56, 57–58, 57n1, 61, 69–70, 78, 109, 111, 120, 121, 133, 137, 142n20, 158, 160, 161, 162, 163, 163n5, 164, 164n7, 165, 183, 191, 192, 198, 205, 208n21, 209n23 Wordsworth, William, 135, 154 Wright, Crispin, 202 Yeats, W. B., 110, 137

225

INDEX

OF

Ability, 9, 11, 22, 65, 66, 67, 85, 92, 163, 172–176,172n13, 179–180, 185 linguistic, 22, 27, 80, 83, 88, 103, 105, 188 See also Distinctions: knowledge how/ that; Know how; Practice; Practiceor-ability Aboutness. See Intentionality ADP. See Practice: autonomous discursive Algorithmic elaboration, 10, 183–188, 207 Analysis, 3, 85–86, 90–91, 158–172, 181–189 pragmatist critique of, 160–161, 165–166, 168, 172, 181, 189 See also Distinctions: analyticity/ syntheticity; Meaning-use analysis Analytic philosophy. See Philosophy: analytic Anaphora, 57n2, 210, 211n28, 214 Anti-intellectualism. See Intellectualism Anti-representationalism, 33, 197, 205, 215 explanatory, 203n18, 214–215 expressive, 203n18 global, 190, 196, 198, 199–200, 202, 214, 217 See also Expressivism; Givenness; Representationalism A posteriori, 116 Apperception, 2, 25 synthetic unity of, 2–3, 8, 17, 32 Application circumstances and consequences of, 49–50, 84, 94, 96, 102, 149, 187

SUBJECTS

of concepts. (see Concepts: application of; Content) A priori, 27, 105, 116 Artificial intelligence, 10, 65, 184–185 See also Distinctions: knowledge how/that; Know how Assertibility, assertibilism, 30, 50, 64 Assertion, 22, 57, 60n8, 67, 68–69, 136, 186, 208n21, 211–212 content of, 30, 73, 101, 187, 212 See also Content: propositional; Distinctions: content/attitude, content/force; Force Assessment, normative, 2, 13, 54, 68–69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 79–80, 81, 113, 114, 123, 129–132, 133, 135, 136, 148, 154, 186 prospective, 20, 139–141, 145, 152n25 retrospective, 20, 139–141, 145, 152n25 Atomism, semantic. See Representationalism: atomistic Attribution, 69, 73–75, 211–213 of knowledge, 129–132 See also Distinctions: attribution/ acknowledgment Authority, 3, 46–47, 108–115, 118–122, 123, 138n17, 142, 150n23, 155–156, 198, 206 See also Responsibility Automata, 171–180, 181, 186 finite-state, 173–176, 177–178, 180, 183 push-down, 177, 178–180 transducing, 183–185

226

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Behaviorism, 11, 14, 50, 95, 109, 195 Belief, 4, 9, 11, 12, 16, 19–20, 44, 56, 65–67, 68, 72–76, 78, 81, 116–117, 118n1, 119, 149, 153 content of, 9, 16 19–20, 45, 47–48, 50–51, 52, 66–67, 71, 73, 74–75, 77, 87 justification of, 46–47, 49, 122, 123–124, 127–133 truth of, 46, 51–52, 72–73, 75–76, 124, 129, 129n9 See also Distinctions: de dicto/de re ascription, meaning/belief; Status Bible, King James version, 137 Biology, 5–6, 29n32, 37, 41–42, 145 “Boche,” 149. See also Content Boolean algebra, 59 Bootstrapping, pragmatic expressive, 168–169, 176, 179, 180, 181, 183, 185 Brain-in-a-vat, 200 Capacity. See Ability Cartesianism, 6–7, 9, 28, 29, 31, 40, 53, 109–110, 114, 118, 119, 120, 190, 196, 199, 200, 204 Categories, Kantian, 105 Category theory, 171 Chomsky hierarchy, 176–180 Circumstances of application. (see Application: circumstances and cconsequences of) counterfactual. (see Conditionals: counterfactually robust; Counterfactuals; Inference: counterfactually robust) Civil War, 43–45 Claim. See Assertion Cognitive science, 11–13, 14, 65 Commitment, 21,87, 88–89, 97, 101, 103, 104, 114, 116, 129, 131–132, 148, 149, 201, 211–213 cognitive, 4, 8 conceptual, 51, 76–77, 88, 201 discursive, 8, 23, 68–69, 70, 76–77, 132 implicit, 76, 143, 144, 146 methodological, 3, 10, 13, 63n13, 110, 201n15, 218n35

normative, 2–3, 30, 31–32, 76–77, 198, 199, 201 practical, 4, 8, 31, 134, 193 theoretical, 31, 66 withheld, 88–89, 169 See also Distinctions: commitment/ entitlement; Endorsement Communication, 25, 29n32, 57, 77, 201n15 Community, 4, 30, 45, 110, 111, 129n9, 143, 144, 145, 150–151, 153, 163 Concepts, 8, 9, 55, 60n8, 73, 76, 77–78, 128, 133, 133n10, 137, 151 application of, 2, 3, 4, 26, 29, 49–50, 62n11, 68, 70, 79, 81, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 104, 116, 117, 121, 130, 148, 149, 150, 153, 161, 202, 206 deployment of. (see Concepts: application of) descriptive, 96, 103, 104, 105, 164n6, 195, 212 determinateness of, 26, 117 determination of, 4, 25, 26, 117, 139, 148, 149–150, 153, 164n7 development of. (see Concepts: determination of) empirical, 10, 105, 106, 121 evaluative, 49 as functions of judgment, 3, 54 grasp of. (see Concepts: possession of) inferential roles of, 84, 87–88, 89, 103–104, 106, 132, 148, 149, 161, 201, 201n15, 203n17 institution of, 4, 26, 116, 117, 194n5 as linguistic, 22, 25, 29, 66, 67, 77n32, 78, 88, 89, 103 modal, 84, 90–91, 102n23, 104, 212 noninferential roles of, 87, 88, 203n17 nonlogical, 96, 195 normative, 10 as norms, 2, 4, 13, 26, 54, 116, 117, 124, 148–150, 153, 194n5, 201n15 observational, 62n11, 84, 86, 87, 89, 203n17 possession of, 25, 66, 67, 77, 78, 87, 88, 103, 104, 201, 204

227

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Concepts (continued) primary quality, 89 probabilistic, 10 reciprocal sense dependence of, 54, 202 as rules, 2, 13, 68, 116 secondary quality, 88 semantic, 10, 51, 53, 54, 124, 161, 193 theoretical, 62n11, 68, 202, 203n17 understanding of, 49, 87, 88 use of, 3, 4, 10, 79, 104, 105, 150 See also Categories, Kantian; Vocabulary Conditionals, 49, 66, 102, 205, 208n22 counterfactually robust, 91, 93–94 elaborated-explicating, 186–187, 209 See also Frege-Geach embedding test Consequences, 2–3, 19, 23, 66, 148 of application. (see Application: circumstances and consequences of) material. (see Inference: material) practical, 21, 38, 45, 47, 49, 62n12 See also Inference Content, 16–17, 23, 24, 39, 57, 57n1, 58, 61, 62, 63, 68–69, 72n27, 111, 135, 165, 166, 166n8, 179, 193, 200, 202, 211n28 of assertion. (see Assertion: content of) attribution of, 73, 129, 212. (see also Attribution) of belief. (see Belief: content of) of claims. (see Assertion: content of) conceptual, 3–4, 20, 21, 26, 30, 48, 49–50, 52, 54, 66–67, 68, 72, 74, 75, 77n32, 83, 84, 87, 88, 117, 160, 164n7, 194n5, 201, 201n15, 202, 206, 211, 213, 214 descriptive, 196, 219 of desire. (see Desire: content of) determinate, 19–20, 26, 117 determination of, 26, 117 development of. (see Content: determination of) discursive, 3 empirical, 101, 200 of experience, 52, 54, 91–92 grasp of, 69, 201, 201n15 institution of, 117, 194n5 of judgment, 2–4, 9, 25–26, 32, 87, 200

propositional, 12, 30,48, 49, 52, 66, 124, 129, 187, 206, 208n21, 213–214 representational, 11, 201 semantic, 32, 51, 77n32, 87, 89, 99, 114, 194, 203, 206, 212, 217 See also Distinctions: content/force; Inferential role; Meaning; Pragmatism: instrumental; Score-keeping; Use Counterfactuals, 15, 15n8, 96, 127. See also Concepts: modal; Conditionals: counterfactually robust; Inference: counterfactually robust; Modality Dasein, 25 Decision theory. See Rational choice theory Deflationism, 209–210, 214, 215, 217 Deixis, 57n2 Demarcation of the linguistic. See Demarcation question Demarcation question, 26, 28–32, 34 See also Emergence question; Language; Leverage question Demonstratives, 57, 192, 195, 208n22 See also Indexicals; Reference Dependence, reciprocal reference, 216n33 Dependence, reciprocal sense, 21, 54, 149–150, 203n17, 216n33 Descriptivism, global, 96, 195 Desire, 50–52, 81, 118n1, 119 content of, 16, 20, 51, 52, 73, 74–75 satisfaction of, 16, 17, 20, 51, 52, 71–73, 75–76 Deutung, 13, 70. See also Rules Direction of fit, 46–47, 78, 110 Discursivity, 2, 3, 9–11, 12, 14, 14n7, 20, 22–23, 25–32, 36, 55, 68, 114, 117, 132, 133, 135, 138, 152, 153, 161–162, 163–164, 165, 184–186, 187, 191, 205, 207, 208n21, 209, 214, 215, 216n33, 216n34, 217 instrumentalist account of. (see Pragmatism: instrumental) See also Commitment: discursive; Concepts; Iron triangle of discursiveness; Language; Score-keeping: discursive; Vocabulary

228

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Disposition, 58, 69, 90, 94, 96, 129, 148, 150 reliable differential responsive, 89, 131, 134, 203–204 See also Behaviorism; Functionalism; Vocabulary: dispositional Dissatisfaction, 20 felt, 17, 73. (see also Givenness; Incorrigibility) See also Satisfaction Distinctions act/object, 114, 210 ampliative/critical/justificatory responsibility, 2, 17, 31–32 analyticity/syntheticity, 60, 198–199 appearance/reality, 86, 88–90, 159, 169, 204 attribution/acknowledgment, 21, 129–132, 211–212 attribution/endorsement, 132 authority/responsibility, 3, 46, 47, 110, 111, 113–114, 123, 198, 206 cause/justification, 97n14, 122–124, 128, 130–133, 133n10, 200 cause/norm, 8, 12, 49, 122–124, 127, 128, 130–133, 133n10 circumstances/consequences of application, 49–50, 84, 94, 96, 102, 149, 187 commitment/entitlement, 30, 32, 104, 123, 128, 129–132, 148, 198, 201 content/act, 2, 45, 125, 193 content/attitude, 45, 47 content/force, 4, 47, 57, 68 conversational/semantic implicature. (see Distinctions: saying/conveying) de dicto/de re ascription, 21, 163n4, 210–214 deontic attitude/status, 32, 76–77, 110, 113–115, 130, 194n5 description/evaluation, 192–193 description/explanation, 96, 98–99, 103 diachronic/synchronic, 37 discriminating/rational classification, 73 explanation/understanding, 36–37, 148 explicit/implicit, 9, 11, 12, 13, 38, 40, 47, 65, 66–67, 69, 70, 85, 98, 101, 105, 149, 187, 188, 189, 211 229

expression/explanation, 203, 203n18, 214–215 expressive/explanatory deflationism, 215 expressive/explanatory representationalism, 203, 203n18, 214–215 externalism/internalism, 128n8, 129 inference/reference, 114, 193, 215 inference/representation, 114, 193, 215 inferential/referential semantics, 114, 193, 215 inferential/representational semantics, 114, 193, 215 information/representation, 114, 193 “ing”/ “ed,” 4, 45, 47, 52, 57, 78, 125, 127–128, 132, 204 intellectualism/rationalism, 31 intention/belief, 46, 81, 119 justification/truth-making, 124, 128, 132 knowledge how/that, 7, 9, 31, 38, 47, 54, 65, 68, 69, 185, 201, 202 knowledge/understanding, 7, 54, 202 language/theory, 4, 25, 117 law/regularity, 7, 92–93 local/global anti-representationalism, 190, 215 local/global expressivism, 192–193, 196, 209 local/global order of explanation, 3 locutionary/illocutionary/perlocutionary force, 57 meaning/belief, 25, 47, 116–117, 149, 153 meaning/understanding, 202, 203, 204, 206, 216n34, 217 meaning/use, 22, 23, 25, 33, 48, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62n12, 63, 127, 160–164, 165–168, 169–172, 176, 181, 183, 185, 186–187, 189, 194, 202, 207–208, 219 mind/body, 108, 118 mind/world, 8, 41, 46–47,121, 122, 128n8, 198, 199, 200 modest/maniacal metaphysics, 155–157 necessity/contingency, 5–6, 36–37, 41 “of”/ “that” intentionality. (see Distinctions: de dicto/de re ascription)

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Distinctions (continued) personal level/sub-personal level, 12–13 physical/evolutionary/statistical explanation, 5–6 positive/negative freedom, 81, 151–152 practical/discursive intentionality, 9–10, 12, 14, 29, 31, 54, 216n34 pragmatics/semantics, 3, 23–24, 30, 47, 48, 57–59, 62, 63, 64, 160, 164–165, 193, 194, 202, 203n17, 217, 219 a priori / a posteriori knowledge, 116 probabilistic/necessary laws, 5–7, 37 prospective/retrospective, 20, 21, 98, 139–141, 145, 152n25 public/private discourse, 142–146, 150, 151–152, 153–155 reduction from below/reduction from above, 194n5 saying / conveying, 101–102, 102n23 saying / doing, 23, 31, 36, 41, 57, 64n14, 65, 70, 85, 88, 89, 98, 101, 102, 103, 104, 108, 109, 113, 160, 161, 166, 167, 169, 177, 179, 180, 182, 185, 186, 187, 191, 193, 194, 211, 219 semantic/epistemological explanatory priority, 54 semantic/pragmatic inference, 101–102 sense/reference, 216n33 sentience/sapience, 29, 30, 119 signifier/signified, 78, 204 subject/object naturalism, 10–11, 169n10, 191–194 subjective/objective, 10, 18, 86, 90, 110–111, 191, 192–193 theoretical/observable objects, 62n11, 92–93 theoretical/observational vocabulary, 62, 92–93 theoretical/practical, 2, 4, 108 traits selected/selected for, 15n8 type/token, 173, 178, 182, 183 Verstand/Vernunft, 164n7 weak/strong/hyperinferentialism, 30n35 See also Dualism Dualism, 47, 118, 133, 135

Embedding. See Frege-Geach embedding test Emergence of the linguistic. See Emergence question Emergence question, 26–27, 28, 29, 31, 34 See also Demarcation question; Language; Leverage question Empfindung, 7 Empiricism, 1, 6–8, 27, 38–40, 42, 50, 83–96, 99, 100n19, 104, 105–106, 159–161, 169–171, 181, 182, 184, 188, 195, 204 logical, 7, 36, 39, 53, 83, 90, 91 methodological, 53, 60–61 traditional, 7, 32, 39, 49, 83–85, 90, 91 Endorsement, 66, 88–89, 98–99, 100–101, 102, 104, 116, 124, 130, 148, 149, 186 Enlightenment European, 7, 36, 37–39, 40–42, 46–47, 54, 108, 109, 112, 113, 150, 150n23, 197 pragmatist, 36, 37–42, 44, 46–47, 108, 112 Entanglement thesis, 36n2, 202, 203, 203n17, 204, 216n34, 217, 218, 218n35 See also Dependence, reciprocal sense Erfahrung, 4, 7, 39, 53 Erlebnis, 7, 39, 52, 53 Evolution. See Explanation: evolutionary Experience, 2, 3, 4, 6–9, 14, 17, 19–20, 22, 25, 38, 39, 41, 44, 47, 49, 52, 53, 54, 84, 121, 127–128, 197 sensory, 9, 83, 86, 90–92, 128, 198 Explanation, 2–5, 13n6, 14, 26–27, 39, 57, 62n11, 62n12, 96, 98–99, 103, 112, 116–117, 124, 133n10, 150, 154, 218 behaviorist, 50 causal, 12–13 evolutionary, 5–6, 15, 15n8, 37 functionalist, 50 intellectualist, 65 order of. (see Order of explanation) pragmatist, 9, 11, 12–13, 22, 23, 30, 36, 51–52, 53, 54–55, 58–63, 65–67, 69, 71, 72–73, 121, 161, 162, 166, 185, 202, 205, 215, 216n34, 217 representationalist, 11, 23, 193, 203, 203n18, 214–215, 219

230

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

scientific, 5, 12–13, 37, 65 semantic, 2, 200 statistical, 5–6, 37 See also Counterfactuals; Emergence question; Order of explanation; Propositional, explanatory priority of Explanatory priority. See Order of explanation Explicit, 6, 9, 10, 11–13, 23, 24, 38, 40, 47, 52, 64, 65, 66–67, 69–70, 85, 96, 97, 98, 100, 100n19, 101, 103, 104, 105, 148, 149, 160, 162, 187, 188, 189, 195, 211, 212–213, 216, 217 See also Implicit Explicitation, 189, 207, 212 See also Distinctions: explicit/implicit Expressivism global, 191, 192–193, 196, 209 local, 192–193, 194–196, 205, 206–207, 209, 213, 218 moral, 192, 206–207, 219 See also Frege-Geach embedding test Externalism, 128n8, 129, 130–132 Facts, 68, 95, 110, 112, 114, 121, 124–125, 126–128, 129–130, 129n9, 131, 132–133, 142, 161, 162, 191, 192, 201n15, 205, 209n23, 216 Force, 3, 4, 47, 57, 68–69, 102n23, 205 Frame problem, 185n21 Freedom, 81, 122, 134n10, 145–146, 150n23, 150–152 positive vs. negative, 81, 151–152 Frege-Geach embedding test, 101–102, 196, 219 Function, Proper. See Proper Function Functionalism, 3, 16–17, 18, 19–20, 24, 48n8, 48–50, 52, 54, 63, 77, 84, 85, 87–89, 93, 109n3, 184–185, 185n21, 188, 214 See also Concepts: inferential roles of; Inferentialism Game theory. See Rational choice theory Geist, 25, 29

Givenness, 9, 37, 51, 52, 73, 74–75, 86, 121, 123, 128n8, 129, 130, 156, 197, 198–199, 200–201, 203–204 Grammar, 177–178, 179 habit, 5–8, 37–40, 70–71, 102n23 handiness. See Zuhandenheit holism, 16, 19, 39, 48n8, 79, 204, 218n35 Idealism, 1, 32, 42, 127–128 Immediacy, 26n26, 51, 52, 53, 75. See also Incorrigibility Implicature, conversational. See Distinctions: saying / conveying Implicit, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 26n26, 32, 38, 40, 47, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 85, 98, 101, 103, 105, 120, 121, 124, 133, 139, 142, 143, 144, 146, 149, 151, 153–154, 187, 188–189, 211 See also Explicit Incompatibility, 2, 31, 66, 148 material, 3, 8, 30, 32, 188 Incorrigibility, 7, 53, 75, 109–110, 112, 118–119, 138n17 See also Givenness Indexicals, 57, 169, 182–183, 192, 195, 208n22 Industrial Revolution, 9, 38 Inference, 2–3, 30, 31, 39, 51–52, 59, 60n8, 66, 74, 84, 87, 98–103, 114, 121, 123, 125, 128, 130, 131, 148–149, 150, 161, 170, 186, 193, 195, 199, 203, 206, 209, 212, 214, 215, 216–218 commitment-preserving, 30 counterfactually robust, 90, 92, 94, 96, 103, 104, 105, 188 entitlement-preserving, 30 material, 3, 8, 32, 103–104, 186, 187, 188, 201, 201n15 practical, 49 pragmatic, 101–102 semantic, 101–102 See also Conditionals; Incompatibility; Inferentialism 231

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Inferential articulation, 30, 75, 77n32, 88, 96, 97, 98, 105, 121 Inferential relations, 31, 32, 49, 59, 89, 122–124, 130, 132, 203, 203n17, 213 Inferential role, 30, 49, 84, 161, 201, 211n28 Inferentialism, 30, 30n35, 32, 34, 51n11, 83–85, 87–89, 97, 99, 102, 104, 193, 201, 206, 214, 215, 216 Instrumentalism, 93, 94. See also Pragmatism: instrumental Intellectualism, 9, 16, 18–19, 24, 28, 29, 31, 35, 41, 54, 65, 70, 71 Intention, 16, 46–47, 52, 66–67, 68, 69, 81, 119, 121, 143, 166 Intentionality, 13, 114, 128n8, 129, 210 discursive, 9–10, 12, 14, 29, 31, 54, 216n34 practical, 9–10, 12, 14, 29, 31, 54, 216n34 Interpretation, 13, 23, 24, 51, 61, 62, 63, 64, 64n15, 66, 67, 70, 74, 75, 86 Iron triangle of discursiveness, 30 Irrationalism, 112 Justification, 17, 31, 50, 83, 95–96, 97n14, 98, 99, 120, 122, 123–124, 127–129, 130–133, 148, 150 Kant-Sellars thesis about modality, 105 Know how, 7, 9, 14, 31, 38, 47, 54, 65–66, 68, 69, 70–71, 80, 103, 104, 105, 185, 201, 202, 208, 216n34 See also Distinctions: knowledge how/ that; Knowledge Knowledge, 7–8, 19 35, 36, 39, 40–41, 53, 73, 75, 83, 87, 108, 116, 118, 119, 127–132199, 205 know how, 7, 9, 14, 31, 38, 47, 54, 65–66, 68, 69, 70–71, 80, 103, 104, 105, 185, 201, 202, 208, 216n34 noninferential, 88, 131, 198, 203 See also Externalism

Language, 4, 22–25, 26–31, 32–33, 37, 40, 49, 55, 83, 97n14, 98, 102n23, 103, 127, 136, 137, 144, 147, 153, 162, 168, 179, 205 artificial, 23, 24, 25 autonomous, 10, 87, 88, 89, 92, 154, 160, 185, 207–208, 208n21 and communication, 77 context-free, 179, 179n19 development of, 25–26, 27, 98, 137, 146, 150, 153, 155 formal, 23, 59 natural, 21, 23, 24, 25, 185, 208, 210, 212 normativity of, 23–24, 26, 49, 69, 111, 151–152 philosophy of, 22, 23, 25, 32, 64, 142, 165, 202 private, 142n20 recursively enumerable. (see Vocabulary: recursively enumerable) regular, 178 symbolic, 21 and thought, 22, 27n30, 30, 67, 71, 77, 212 as tool, 22, 28, 33, 35, 56, 57, 57n1, 77–81. (see also Pragmatism: instrumental) use of, 3, 10, 22, 24, 25, 56–61, 63–67, 69, 78, 100n20, 121, 147, 161, 195, 208n22, 212 See also Demarcation question; Emergence question; Leverage question; Lingualism; Practice: linguistic; Vocabulary Language game, 3, 31, 49, 57, 87, 88, 89, 92, 151, 154, 160, 162, 185, 205, 207–208, 208n21, 211 Laws, 41, 92, 103–104, 133n10, 212 mathematical, 37, 40 natural, 5–7, 37, 86, 95, 96, 101, 105, 161 necessary, 5–7, 37 of perspective, 140 probabilistic, 5–7, 37 Learning, 5–8, 14, 38, 39, 40, 47, 53–53, 204 of language, 26n28, 163, 192 232

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Leverage question, 26, 28, 29, 34. See also Demarcation question; Emergence question; Language Liberalism, 144, 145, 146 Lingualism, 22–23, 26, 29 Linguistics, 80, 172n12, 179, 181 Linguistic turn, 22, 26, 55, 109 Logicism, 91, 94, 189 semantic, 159, 159n2, 188 LX vocabulary. See Vocabulary: elaboratingexplicative Materialism, 35, 40, 42, 118 eliminative, 108, 110, 111, 112, 117–120, 155 Meaning, 9, 16, 18, 19, 20, 24, 49–50, 50n10, 66, 69, 71, 85, 89, 121, 159, 190, 192, 198–200, 210n25, 218n34 and belief, 25, 47, 116–117, 149, 153 and truth, 36, 52–53 and understanding, 202, 203, 204, 206, 216n34, 217 and use, 22, 23, 25, 33, 48, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62n12, 63, 127, 160–164, 165–168, 169–172, 176, 181, 183, 185, 186–187, 189, 194, 202, 207–209, 219 institution of, 4, 24, 116–117 See also Analysis; Functionalism; Peirce’s Principle Meaning-use analysis, 33, 166–172, 181–189, 207n20, 207–209 Meaning-use diagram, 33, 167, 168–171, 176, 186, 187, 207n20, 207–209 Meaning-use relation, See Meaning-use analysis Medicine, ancient Greek, 139 Metalanguage, 102n23, 208n22 pragmatic. (see Metavocabulary: pragmatic) semantic, 24, 168, 172n12 syntactic, 173n14 Metaphysics, 107, 109, 155–157, 157n27, 162, 169n10, 205 Metavocabulary, 136n14, 154 of causes, 134–135, 137, 146 inferential, 214, 216, 217, 218

naturalistic, 169, 194, 194n5 normative, 214, 216, 217, 218 pragmatic, 64n14, 167–169, 175, 176, 179, 180, 181, 182, 185, 191, 194, 194n, 207, 208, 214–219 of representation, 135, 136 representational, 215, 216 semantic, 181, 191, 194n5, 203, 215–217, 218–219 social, 214, 216, 217, 218 syntactic, 173n14, 177 of vocabulary, 133n10, 133–136, 138, 146, 155 Mind-body problem, 108, 118 Mind, mindedness, 35, 40–41, 46–47, 48, 50, 90, 121, 122, 138, 190, 198, 199 ontology of, 99n17, 108–110, 118–120, 138n17, 142 See also Discursivity; Intentionality; Sapience; Subjectivity Modality, 5, 7, 8, 15, 22, 33, 84–85, 86, 89–91, 94–106, 127, 159, 162, 168, 182, 188, 195, 200 205, 206, 207, 209, 209n23, 214, 217, 218 alethic, 15n8, 93, 95, 96, 105, 196, 212 causal, 84, 95 deontological, 84, 95 logical, 84, 95 See also Counterfactuals; Distinctions: probabilistic/necessary laws Myth of the Given, 9, 51, 52, 73, 75, 123, 128n8, 129, 130, 197, 200. See also Givenness Naturalism, 5–8, 10, 26, 27, 32, 38, 40, 41, 42, 53, 54, 55, 72, 86, 96, 134, 134n11, 136, 138–139, 140, 141, 145, 146, 151, 152–153, 154, 156, 159–160, 161, 181, 182, 184, 188, 194n5 object, 10–11, 169n10, 191–194 pragmatic normative, 70, 71, 168 subject, 10–11, 169n10, 191–194 Necessity, 5–6, 7, 36–37, 41, 91, 95, 98–101, 103, 105 Negation, 64, 166, 188, 205

233

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Neo-Kantianism, 1, 22, 120 Nominalism, semantic. See Representationalism: nominalist Normative turn, 1–2, 9, 13, 14, 31, 68 Norms, 9, 10, 15, 30, 46, 49, 50, 52, 54, 55, 68–69, 71, 78, 79, 108–115, 127, 128, 133n10, 146, 154, 156, 162, 169–170, 182, 202, 205 conceptual, 2, 4, 13, 26, 116, 117, 124, 148–150, 153, 194n5, 201n15 constraint by, 2, 12, 81, 123, 133, 148, 151, 152, 201n15 development of, 4, 20, 26, 116, 117, 149–150, 151, 153, 194n5 discursive, 2, 4, 13, 14, 20, 25, 26, 31, 33, 76, 116, 117, 124, 148–149, 150, 153, 194n5, 201n15 epistemic, 120–124, 131 inferential, 148 institution of, 4, 26, 31, 109, 113, 116, 117 instrumental, 16, 20, 71–72, 76, 80, 135. (see also Pragmatism: instrumental) linguistic, 69, 151–152 moral, 46, 207 normative vocabulary, 33, 51n11, 68, 86, 159, 160, 169, 191n3, 192–194, 194n5, 206–207, 209, 209n23, 214, 216, 217, 218 political, 150n23, 152 practical, 69, 70, 71, 72 pragmatism about, 13–14, 16, 69–70, 111, 113, 120, 121, 123, 124, 129, 130, 132, 155–156, 198 rational, 150n23 semantic, 16, 33, 54, 71 social, 4, 31, 32, 46, 113, 115, 118, 143, 150, 151, 153 See also Assessment, normative; Authority; Concepts: as rules; Givenness; Pragmatism: instrumental; Responsibility Objectivity, 10, 17, 18, 26n26, 29n32, 86, 88, 89, 90–91, 101, 106, 108, 110–112, 113, 114, 116, 119, 129n9, 159–160, 191, 192–193, 205, 212, 218

Objects abstract, 215n32 theoretical, 60, 61, 62n11, 92–93 Order of explanation, 2–4, 63, 128 intellectualist, 65, 71 lingualist, 22 pragmatist, 9, 11, 12–13, 22, 23, 30, 54–55, 58–63, 65–67, 69, 71, 72–73, 121, 161, 162, 166, 185, 194, 202, 205, 215, 216n34, 217 representationalist, 11, 23, 193, 203, 203n18, 214–215, 217, 219 See also Explanation; Propositional, explanatory priority of Pain, 145, 152, 163, 192 Painting, 140, 184 Parrots, 88, 204 Particularism, 164, 165 Peirce’s Principle, 20–21, 50n10 Pejoratives. See “Boche”; Content Perception, 2, 7, 17, 39, 47, 62n11, 83, 86, 92, 94, 98, 121, 128, 131 See also Givenness; Knowledge: noninferential Pessimism, semantic, 24, 164 Phenomenology of Spirit, 25n24, 26n26, 210n14 Philosophy, 11, 53, 120, 122, 134n11 analytic, 1, 21, 23, 33, 36, 83, 85–86, 158–159, 181, 190, 198 ancient, 118, 139, 148 contemporary, 32, 196, 202 Enlightenment, 197 as a form of writing, 142 of language, 22, 23, 25, 32, 64, 142, 165, 202 of mind, 35, 48, 50, 107, 108, 202 modern, 118, 196 political, 150, 152 of science, 5, 22 Platonism, 9, 12, 54, 65, 70 Poetry, 110, 135, 135n12, 137, 138, 140, 143, 147, 154 Political theory, political philosophy, 35, 107, 141–146, 150n23, 150–153

234

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Poststructuralism, 55, 204 Practice, 9, 11, 12, 13, 17, 18, 28, 38, 40, 41, 56, 57–58, 59, 71, 85, 105, 111, 115, 124, 139, 144, 155, 166, 167, 169, 188, 192, 194n5, 199, 201n15, 208 autonomous discursive, 87, 89, 170, 185, 186, 187, 207, 209, 217 development of, 108, 109, 112, 113, 117, 163–164 discursive, 23, 28, 30, 55, 68, 70, 71–72, 76, 77, 78, 80–81, 114, 133, 146–153, 160, 161, 162, 164, 191, 208n21, 214 inferential, 87, 187 linguistic, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 58, 60–69, 77, 77n32, 80–81, 116–117, 121, 133, 136, 146, 150, 153, 162–163 projection of, 163–164 social, 4, 6, 31, 32, 77, 109–110, 113, 120, 123, 130, 153, 198 See also Ability; Practice-or-ability Practice-or-ability, 7, 10–11, 12–13, 13n6, 17, 24, 85, 166–172, 166n8, 181–187, 191, 207 207n20, 212 discursive, 10, 23, 184–185, 205 linguistic, 26–30, 31 nondiscursive, 10 See also Algorithmic elaboration Practice-practice (PP-)necessity, 169, 170, 171, 186, 186n22, 187 Practice-practice (PP-)sufficiency, 183, 185, 186, 187, 188, 207, 209 Practice-vocabulary (PV-)necessity, 187, 188, 207–208, 209 Practice-vocabulary (PV-)sufficiency, 166–176, 177, 179–188, 207, 208, 209 Pragmatics, 3, 23–24, 30, 47, 48, 57–59, 62, 63, 64, 160, 164–165, 166, 193, 202, 203n17, 217, 219 expressivist, 194, 196 normative, 30, 68–72, 79 Pragmatism, v, 4, 25–26, 58, 64n15, 85, 87–88, 89, 106, 107, 108, 142, 160–161, 165–166, 168, 181, 185, 189, 190, 191, 196, 199, 200

about norms, 13–14, 16, 69–70, 111, 113, 120, 121, 123, 124, 129, 130, 132, 155–156, 198 classical, 1, 5–10, 13, 14–16, 17–22, 23, 24, 27–28, 29, 32–33, 35–55, 56, 68, 70–72, 75, 76, 77, 78, 81, 120, 137, 158 discursive, 138 fundamental, 9–14, 16, 23, 24, 29, 31, 48n7, 65–67, 68, 69, 70–71, 72, 76–77, 78, 82, 216n34 historicist, 140, 141, 152, 153, 155, 197 inferentialist, 30–31, 32, 34, 97, 98, 99, 102, 104 instrumental, 15–21, 22, 28, 33, 35–36, 48n8, 48–53, 54, 62 71–76, 77–82, 93, 94, 120, 135, 136, 150n23. (see also Instrumentalism) linguistic, 24, 55, 67, 70n25, 77, 77n32, 82 methodological, 3, 3n1, 23–24, 58–61, 62, 63, 64, 67, 68–69, 70–71, 72, 75, 82, 161, 166, 194, 202, 203, 203n17, 205, 214–215, 217, 218, 218n35 naturalistic, 140, 141, 145, 153, 197 normative, 69–70, 71 rationalist, 30–31, 32, 34, 83–106 reductive, 67 semantic, 24, 61–63, 64, 66–67, 70–71, 72, 76–77, 82, 166 semiotic, 70n25 social, 109, 110, 111, 112–115, 127–133, 198 vulgar, 18, 48n8 Preference, 50, 51n11 Presence, objective. See Vorhandenheit Present-at-hand. See Vorhandenheit Primary qualities, 86, 89, 93, 106, 159 Proform-forming expression, 210 Proper Function 15, 15n8, 202n16 propositional, explanatory priority of, 3, 204–205 Quietism, 164, 165

235

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Rational choice theory, 35, 51 Rational integration. See Synthesis Rationalism, 22, 29–31, 32, 34, 41, 42, 95n9, 99, 100n19, 101, 102, 106 Rationality, 8, 39, 42, 148, 150n23 instrumental, 35 RDRD. See Disposition: reliable differential responsive Ready-to-hand. See Zuhandenheit Reference, 18, 54, 58, 64, 79, 114–115, 161, 166, 193, 211n28, 214, 215n32 proform-theory of, 209–210 Reference dependence, reciprocal. See Dependence, reciprocal reference Regress explanatory, 66 justificatory, 120–121, 199 of rules, 13–14, 14n7, 69–70 tortoise-style, 66 Relations, 21, 90 causal, 8, 49, 122–124, 127, 128, 130–133, 133n10, 134 normative, 2, 3, 8, 23, 32, 49, 122–124, 127, 128, 130–133, 133n10 inferential, 31, 32, 49, 59, 89, 122–124, 130, 131, 132, 203, 203n17, 213 Reliabilism, 50, 88–89, 128n8, 131–132 See also Disposition: reliable differential responsive Representation, 11–13, 14, 40, 53, 54, 57n1, 77n32, 114, 120–122, 123, 136, 197, 193, 198–199, 201–206, 210, 213–214, 215, 218 See also distinctions: de dicto/de re ascription, “ing”/ “ed”; Givenness; Reference; Representationalism Representationalism, 11, 79, 120, 122–124, 135–136, 138, 192, 206 atomistic, 203–204, 209n23, 216n34, 217 explanatory, 203, 203n18, 214–215 expressive, 203, 203n18, 214–215 global semantic, 195–196, 198, 199, 200–201 nominalist, 78, 204–205, 217

See also Anti-representationalism; Expressivism; Givenness; Inferentialism; Reference Responsibility, 46–47, 49, 68, 70, 108, 110, 111, 113, 114, 123, 144, 198, 205, 206, 211–212 ampliative/critical/justificatory, 2, 17, 31–32 rational, 2–3, 31–32 See also Authority Romanticism, 40–43, 140 Rules, 2, 9, 10, 11–14, 23, 24, 65, 68, 69–70, 91, 95, 99, 105, 111, 133n10, 153, 162, 164, 177, 182, 186, 192, 195 See also Norms Sapience, 2, 29–30, 87, 119, 184 Satisfaction, 16, 18–19, 20, 51, 52, 56, 72, 76, 202n16 felt, 73, 75. (see also Givenness; Incorrigibility) See also Dissatisfaction Scare quotes, 163n4, 212 See also Distinctions: de dicto/de re ascription Science, 5–7, 10, 11–13, 14, 16, 21, 22, 35, 36–42, 43, 53, 54, 65, 96, 101, 105, 141, 143, 160, 191 See also Explanation: scientific Scientia mensura, 38–39, 39n3, 96 Scientific method, 6, 16 Scientism, 39, 41, 112 Score-keeping, 211, 216n34 See also Attribution: of knowledge; Distinctions: de dicto/de re ascription Secondary qualities, 86, 89, 93–94, 159 Selection. See Distinctions: traits selected/ selected for; Explanation: evolutionary Semantic relations, 64, 124, 132–133, 158–159, 189 pragmatically mediated, 85, 88, 97, 102n23, 164–172, 175, 181–183, 186–188, 207, 210 reductive, 159, 181 See also Meaning-use analysis 236

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Semantics, 3, 23–24, 30, 35, 47, 49, 53, 54, 57–59, 62, 63, 67, 84–85, 86, 87, 94, 160, 161 164–165, 168, 202, 203n17, 214, 217, 218, 219 inferentialist, 83, 206. (see also Inferentialism) instrumentalist, 48, 50, 52. (see also Pragmatism: instrumental) pragmatist, 18, 51 representational, 191, 193–196, 199, 205, 206, 215, 216. (see also representationalism) teleosemantics, 194 truth-conditional, 48, 59, 64, 161 Semiotics, 204 Sensation. See Experience: sensory Sense dependence, reciprocal. See Dependence, reciprocal sense Sense impressions. See Experience: sensory Speech act, 64n15, 70 Sprachspiel. See Language game Status, 87, 119 deontic, 77n32 normative, 30, 109, 111, 113, 114, 115, 118, 150n23, 156, 194n5, 206 social, 32, 76, 113 See also Attribution; Commitment Stone Representation Theorem, 59 Structuralism, 55, 204 Subjectivity, 10, 18, 86, 90, 109, 110–111, 191, 192, 212 Syntactical relation, pragmatically mediated, 175, 179, 180, 181 Syntax, 30, 148, 171–176, 177–180, 181, 183, 184, 185 See also Pragmatics; Semantics Synthesis, 3, 4, 32, 144 ampliative/critical/justificatory, 2, 17, 31–32 See also Distinctions: analyticity/ syntheticity Technology, 38, 54, 140, 141 Thought, 10, 17, 19, 22, 23, 26n26, 27n30, 30, 41, 47, 54, 56, 65, 67, 68, 71, 77, 84, 85, 88, 103n24, 109, 110, 113,

114, 118, 143, 155, 156, 160, 169, 185, 192, 193, 199, 200, 206, 210, 211, 212 Tools, 27n30, 78–80, 135, 137, 137n15, 144, 147, 150, 154, 162 “Tool of tools”. See Language: as tool; Pragmatism: instrumental Translation, 85, 91, 92, 102n23, 133n10, 139, 154, 155, 159, 168, 181 Trees, 76, 81, 104 Truth of belief, 46, 51–52, 72–73, 75–76, 124, 129, 129n9 as correspondence, 46, 129, 130, 133 and meaning, 36, 52–53 prosentential theory of, 209–210 as “what works.” (see Pragmatism: instrumental) See also Anaphora; Facts Truth-makers, 17, 124, 125, 128, 132 See also Facts T-sentence, 214 Understanding, 5–6, 7, 10, 13–14, 25, 36–37, 38, 40–42, 54, 57, 69–70, 80, 87, 88, 98, 100, 134n11, 145, 146–148, 151, 198, 199, 201, 202, 203, 204, 206, 216, 216n34, 217 See also Distinctions: knowledge/ understanding, meaning/understanding; Explanation; Inference; Rationality; Sapience Unity of apperception, 2–3, 8, 17, 32 Use concept, 2, 3, 4, 26, 29, 49–50, 62n11, 68, 70, 79, 81, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 104, 116, 117, 121, 130, 148, 149, 150, 153, 161, 202, 206 language, 3, 10, 22, 24, 25, 56–61, 63–67, 69, 78, 100n20, 121, 147, 161, 195, 208n22, 212 Utilitarianism, 35 Utility, 16, 18, 78, 140 Verificationism, 50 Vernunft, 164n7

237

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Verstand, 164n7 Vocabulary, 13n6, 64n14, 64n15, 67, 74n29, 81n34, 101, 102n23, 110, 111, 116, 118n1, 120–130, 132, 139–141, 156, 158–159, 161, 163–164, 165–168, 170, 190, 192, 195, 202 autonomous, 154, 160, 185, 187, 188 base, 85–90, 92, 94, 97, 98, 99, 106, 159–160 causal, 133n10, 133–136, 135n12, 137, 142, 154 change of, 117–119, 138, 138n17, 149–150, 153 context-free, 178, 179, 180 counterfactual, 104 demonstrative, 192 descriptive, 97, 98, 99, 100, 103, 104–105, 106, 160, 186, 191, 191n3, 193, 196, 212, 216, 217, 218 discursive, 216, 216n33, 217 dispositional, 104 elaborating-explicative, 187, 188, 189, 207, 208, 209, 210, 218 empirical, 123, 124, 134, 186, 191, 193, 196, 212, 216, 217, 218 functional, 93 fundamental, 154. (see also Vocabulary: autonomous) indexical, 169, 182–183, 192 inferential, 87, 216n33, 217 intentional, 33, 66, 136, 160, 185 logical, 33, 85, 90–91,159, 159n1, 162, 186, 188, 205, 206–207, 208n22, 209, 209n23, 214, 217, 218 modal, 33, 85, 86, 91, 93, 94–99, 102, 103, 104–105, 159, 188, 196, 206–207, 209, 209n23, 214, 217, 218 naturalistic, 64, 169, 182, 191–194, 197 normative, 33, 51n11, 68, 86, 159, 160, 169, 191n3, 192–194, 194n5, 206–207, 209, 209n23, 214, 216, 217, 218

nonmodal, 97, 103 nonnormative, 69, 142, 182 objective, 88, 90, 91, 92, 106, 159, 160, 171 observational, 62, 86, 87, 88, 93, 159, 191, 203n17, 209 parasitic, 154 phenomenal, 86, 88–89, 90, 91–92, 159 of physics, 136, 154, 160, 191 primary-quality, 86, 93, 106, 159 private, 142n20, 142–146, 151–152, 154 probabilistic, 86 public, 142–146, 151–152, 154 recursively enumerable, 177, 178, 179–180 representational, 206, 209–213, 214–218 scientific, 136, 154, 160, 191 secondary-quality, 86, 93–94, 159 semantic, 64, 159, 160, 185, 209, 211n28, 213 social, 216n33, 217 syntactic, 172n12, 172–176, 177–180, 181 target, 85–86, 92, 94, 106, 159–160, 181 theoretical, 62, 86, 92–93, 106, 149, 159, 191, 203n17 as tool. (see Pragmatism: instrumental) vocabulary, 133–136, 138, 142, 146, 149, 150, 153, 154–155 See also Metaphysics; Metavocabulary Vocabulary-practice (VP-)sufficiency, 167, 168, 169, 172, 175, 176, 179, 180, 181, 183n20, 185, 186, 187, 188, 207, 208, 209 Vocabulary-vocabulary (VV-)necessity, 167, 168, 170, 176, 180, 187, 188, 208, 209 Vorhandenheit, 9 Wants. See Desire Zuhandenheit, 9

238