Abstract
Brandom’s inferentialism offers, in many ways, a radically new approach to old issues in semantics and the theory of intentionality. But, in one respect at least, it clings tenaciously to the mainstream philosophical tradition of the middle years of the twentieth century. Against the theory’s natural tendencies, Brandom aligns it with the ’linguistic turn’ that philosophy took in the middle of the last century by insisting, in the face of considerable opposing evidence, that intentionality is the preserve of those who can offer and ask for reasons and thus of language users alone. In this paper, I argue that there is no good reason for giving inferentialism a linguistic twist, and that, in doing so, Brandom is forced to make claims which are implausible in themselves and lead him, in the attempt to mitigate them, to a number of doubtful expedients.
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Notes
Cf., e.g., Dummett (1973), pp. 453–5.
Robert Brandom, Making It Explicit (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), ch. 1, passim. All references, unless otherwise indicated, are to this work.
This famous phrase is (almost) Sellars’. It’s from Sellars (1956), §36, though Sellars in fact spoke of ‘the logical space of reasons’—Brandom’s emendation is not without significance. My account of the space of reasons is not the one that Brandom gives, but is broad enough to include his. As I shall argue below, it has the additional virtue of being defensible.
I use ‘grasp’ to cover both contents and inferences. In the case of contents, Brandom explicitly describes grasp as a ‘practical mastery of a certain kind of inferentially articulated doing’ (120). I use it in the same way to cover inferences as well: inferential proprieties are grasped when we have a practical mastery of the inference in question—making them explicit as contents is not required.
Brandom maintains (141, 157, 168, 199) that whatever is written or uttered in an assertive performance is a declarative sentence. Surely not! But the more important idea, that assertional practices have to be discursive, is equally mistaken. There are many ways in which assertions can be made without the use of language, many of them available to nonlinguistic animals.
Wittgenstein gets much credit for this point, though it’s really Lewis Carroll’s (1895), as Brandom acknowledges (22).
The phrase is first used on p. 14 and reappears frequently, right through to p. 649.
The second requirement, however, is likely to be met in the two examples given—unless it is an elephant attempting to extricate the car from the ditch for some purpose of its own. But it will not be met in the case of a chimpanzee trying to extricate a termite from the ground.
Cf. also, e.g., pp. 14–15, 5, 89, 230. It’s worth noting that the first time Brandom uses the expression ‘inferential articulation’ he does not explicitly use it in the second, narrower sense. He says: ‘propositional contentfulness should be understood in terms of inferential articulation; propositions are what can serve as premises and conclusions of inferences, that is, can serve as and stand in need of reasons’ (ME, p. 14). So far as it goes, this is entirely compatible with what I’ve called inferential segmentation. Although he then goes on to mention the ‘social practices of giving and asking for reasons’, he says only that these are ‘specifically linguistic discursive practices, which suffice [my emphasis] to confer propositional contents on states, attitudes, performances, and expressions’ (pp. 14–15). That they suffice for the purpose is not in dispute, that they are required for it is, in my view, mistaken. Brandom at times acknowledges the gap (e.g., p. 277), but, so far as I can see, does nothing to bridge it.
Brandom’s is a hard line even for card-carrying linguistic philosophers to embrace. Malcolm (1972), for example, shared Brandom’s view that the grasp of propositional contents presupposes language, but nonetheless attempted to accommodate the intentionality of nonlinguistic animals by maintaining the prima facie implausible position that, though they could think, they had no thoughts.
The exact order of the sequence does not seem entirely stable through Brandom’s exposition, whether this matters is an exegetic problem that will not be discussed here. Moreover, many variant formulations of all five theses could be supplied from Brandom’s account (which is nothing if not terminologically lush), and indeed the whole sequence might be articulated in different ways, with more or fewer elements, each equally well linked to the text.
Running all five claims together, Brandom writes: ‘the propositional contents of the intentional states appealed to in practical reasoning presuppose assertional-inferential proprieties, and hence linguistic social practices’ (231).
He says: ‘This inquiry is directed at the fanciest sort of intentionality, one that involves expressive capacities that cannot be made sense of apart from participation in linguistic practices. The aim is to offer sufficient conditions for a system of social practices to count as specifically linguistic practices’ (7). But this is an unduly innocent account of the book as a whole. The intentional practices he deals with extend far beyond those that are appropriately thought of as specifically linguistic, and the burden of the book is taken up with specifying necessary, not merely sufficient, conditions for them. To take another example, on p. 55 he says he is concerned with ‘discursive normative statuses, the sort of commitment and entitlement that the use of concepts involves’. This may limit the field, but does not do so in a way that is useful for our present problems, since perception and action, on Brandom’s account, both involve the use of concepts.
Stich (1979) gives such an argument. It is comprehensively demolished by Routley (1981). Davidson (1975, 1982) also considers arguments along these lines using his account of radical interpretation to support the claim that only creatures that can interpret language can have the concept of belief and only creatures with the concept of belief can have beliefs. The argument, such as it is, is demolished by Bishop (1980). See also Smith (1982) for further criticism of both arguments.
Such a case was persuasively argued by Kirk (1967) using a thought experiment involving an imagined species of non-social, non-linguistic creatures who were ingenious engineers.
The expression ‘discursive intentionality’ is a bit of a Trojan horse. It suggests the intentionality of those who can discourse about their beliefs and desires; it turns out (by persuasive definition) to cover the intentionality of those who have beliefs and desires. For Brandom, of course, the two groups are co-extensive, but that is something he needs to demonstrate.
He appeals to similar reasons elsewhere (e.g., at p. 230) and I shall return to the argument in the next section.
Of course he could not be taking this line if I am correct in thinking that he views even practical intentionality as derivative, for then even the use of the language game for practical intentional systems would be inappropriate for animals in just the way that the discursive language game was.
The implication here, of course, is that there are many concepts of a bone. Anyone who either insists that we must be able to say how many, or that the answer must be one, is invited to specify defensible identity criteria for the concept.
A specific belief is not necessarily a precise belief. I can have the specific belief that many people attended the meeting without having any precise belief as to how many.
Smith (1982), pp. 508–10 offers further arguments along these lines.
Even this is doubtful, as Dennett himself later recognized (see Dennett 1983, p. 349). Non-linguistic animals often practice deception and sometimes in ways that suggest that they recognize the beliefs and desires of others, i.e., that they are capable of adopting the intentional stance. The issue is widely studied by cognitive ethologists as the question of whether animals possess a theory of mind. Cf. e.g., Santos et al. (2006) and Kaminsky et al. (2008). The last work cites a large literature on the issue (I am grateful to John Turri for these references).
This cheeky analogy comes from Radner and Radner (1989), p. 191.
This is not the occasion to examine the empirical evidence, but useful surveys will be found in Wallman (1992), and more briefly in Pinker (1994), ch. 11, and Radner and Radner (1989), ch. 4. Incidentally, the experimental evidence described, while it fails to show that apes can use language, suggests quite strongly that they are capable of propositional thought.
Though not to forget Irene Pepperberg’s famous parrot, Alex, whose exploits are extensively documented in Pepperberg (2000). Dolphins are also the subject of research in this respect: it seems clear they have an elaborate system of communication, though whether it should be counted as a language is contentious.
This line of thought goes back at least to Anscombe (1957).
For a defence of this claim see Routley (1981). For specific examples, see studies by Gillan 1981; Call (2004); Mill et al. (2011) and many others—there is in fact a huge literature. For a survey see Andrews (2015), ch. 4 and Shettleworth (2010). There is as yet little consensus as to the interpretation of the data, but philosophers are ill-advised to cling, as Brandom seems to do, to the old stimulus-response model, deriving from Thorndike’s notorious Animal Intelligence (1911): there is a consensus that the stimulus-response model does not adequately account for the evidence. Cf., e.g., Dickinson (1980). The existence of beliefs and inference in pre-linguistic humans also needs to be taken into account, cf. e.g., Mody and Carey (2016).
We will assume for the sake of argument that all relevant non-assertional performances are practical ones.
There are many ways of making assertional performances which do not involve declarative sentences, and many that do not involve language at all: e.g., shaking one’s head or signalling thumbs up. Lest it be thought that these examples depend upon prior use of declarative sentences, consider children playing hide-and-seek: A is hiding, B is seeking and C, knowing where A is, points to A’s location.
Brandom, on so many different occasions and in so many different ways, slides from talking about the conditions necessary (and sometimes merely sufficient) for ascribing or explaining or making sense of some state to the conditions necessary for being in that state as if there were no distinction between the two that one suspects that it may not be simply an elementary mistake but a sign of undisclosed antirealist tendencies, i.e. a complex, philosophical mistake which requires further exploration.
Very experienced human hunters are often amazingly inarticulate if asked to explain what they are doing. In fact, quite generally, very experienced practitioners of a skill are often hard pressed to give reasons for their practices. Skill in giving reasons for a performance is quite different from skill in the performance itself. Of course, a far wider range of more sophisticated inferences is available to linguistic practitioners (at least, some of them) than is available to my dog, and there are good inferentialist reasons for thinking that without these many beliefs about rabbits are not available to my dog. But do we really need to be able to necessitate, contrapose, or quantify in order to have a belief about a rabbit’s location? If so, many humans would struggle to qualify.
At least, no declarative sentences! The dog may (plausibly) be thought to be making an assertion by enthusiastic barking.
They are a concession to regulism, though they fall short of regulism itself, since they require merely the possibility of explicitating assertional performances. Brandom’s position seems in fact to be a sort of “regulism in principle”.
A study of honeybees reported by Gould (1984), pp. 166–8, is relevant and curious enough to be worth describing. Bees were trained to retrieve food from a platform floating in the middle of a lake. On returning to the hive they performed their usual dance but failed to get any recruits for foraging over the lake. When the platform was towed to the far side of the lake, the bees returning from it had no shortage of recruits for foraging. ‘The most obvious interpretation’ (Gould’s phrase) is that when the foragers returned from the middle of the lake, the bees in the hive, knowing where the lake was, simply did not believe food was to be found there. In Brandomian terms, the scorekeepers in the hive recognized, but did not undertake, the foragers’ commitment to the location of food. Their belief in the reliability of the foragers was apparently defeasible. Nothing in my objections to Brandom’s prejudice in favour of the linguistic depends upon this being the correct interpretation of the bees’ behaviour, but at the same time it should not be simply assumed that the idea of scorekeeping in non-discursive creatures is too absurd to be countenanced. The large cognitive ethology literature on mind-reading (e.g., the studies cited by Kaminsky et al. 2008), can readily be interpreted as doxastic scorekeeping. Non-doxastic scorekeeping practices are endemic among social animals, especially those whose societies are hierarchically organized (cf., e.g., de Waal 1982; Cheney and Seyfarth 2007).
Goffman (1959) gives a vast number of examples (taken from many different sources) of non-doxastic human performances (Goffman’s term) on which score is kept. In many cases, the performances are intended to establish status or status-differentials and they may vary markedly according to who is there to keep score. The performances are often not linguistic at all [e.g., the positioning of curtains in homes to give the best impression to those outside (pp. 132–3)], but even linguistic performances are not always semantic [e.g., the adoption of a ‘telephone voice’ intended to give a cultivated impression (p. 221)]. In 1940’s America, African–American workers would address their white co-workers by their first names when no one else was around but would use ‘mister’ when whites from outside the group were present to suggest proprieties of deference that were thought to be appropriate (p. 79). Goffman’s examples are not surprisingly dated, but many are surprisingly easily up-dated. In North-American universities today faculty typically use first names among themselves, but when students are present often resort to ‘doctor’ or ‘professor’ to inculcate status-differentials. Status-establishing performances are common among pack, herd and social animals—not just linguistic ones—and score must be kept on them if they are to serve their purpose.
This would require a separate paper. It is not immediately obvious how much of Brandom’s scorekeeping model could be kept in the new version. Moreover, the issue is deeply entangled with the account Brandom wants to give of objectivity. I find myself far from persuaded by what he has to say about objectivity, but it would need to be shown whether a different version of scorekeeping could do any better.
Quite how important this project was to Brandom was brought home to me only by his paper ‘Self-consciousness and Self-constitution: The Structure of Desire and Recognition’ (given at the University of Guelph, October, 2003).
I am grateful to Phil Kremer, Sarah Halsted, Mark McCullagh and Reiner Schaefer for many helpful discussions of Brandom’s work, to Tad Zawidzki for advice on Dennett, and to John Turri and a referee for this journal for very helpful information about animal cognition.
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Griffin, N. Brandom and the brutes. Synthese 195, 5521–5547 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1460-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1460-6