This Question Has to Do with Chapters 1 and 9. a Significant Feature of Brandom's

November 27, 2012

Questions for Week 14

This question has to do with chapters 1 and 9. A significant feature of Brandom's theory is that it finds no use for a non-normative conception of a social practice. The picture in chapter 9 seems to be something like this: Discursive significance of speech acts arises from the deontic statuses they bestow according to a social practice. Deontic statuses arise from proprieties of attributing deontic statuses according to a deontic scorekeeping practice. Proprieties of attribution arise from proprieties of interpretation of communities as engaged in such attributions. These proprieties of interpretation arise from proprieties of attributing deontic statuses to members of the community according to the interpreter's OWN deontic scorekeeping practice. So, we can only understand norms implicit in a practice as instituted by other norms implicit in a practice.

My question is about how these norms of social practice are binding upon individuals. On what basis can someone be said to be subject to the norms of a social practice, or, put another way, when does someone count as one of a community of practitioners?

I also have a supplementary question, since the answer to the previous question seems to have something to do with being "one of us" - being included in the class "we rational social creatures". What is it to (practically) take someone to be a member of this class?

--Samuel Gavin You note on p. 634 that a feature of Sellars's response to the difficulty of sharing concepts is that "not only claims but concepts can be correct or incorrect, depending upon whether the inferences they incorporate correspond to actual laws" (634). If may be thought that your rejection of the Sellars view entails a rejection of this style of thought altogether -- to claim rather that there is no such thing as our concepts being correct or necessary, where this means something other than that we have these concepts and use the -- in the same way Wittgenstein is often taken to reject claims about necessary or correct concepts. Are there any exceptions to this rule? For instance, those of "justification" and "reasons", among others? Do worries about PP and VP necessity for ADPs make some concepts "the right ones" for a language-using creature to have?

-Billy Eck I have three questions this week. The first two are follow-up questions to my question last week, and so again concern the gerrymandering problem and—more generally—the source of conceptual norms in your framework. The second question transitions into a third question about whether there might be any constraints on what sort of conceptual content the most basic autonomous discursive practices must have.

In 9:II:4, you mention that the fact that “conceptual norms can be understood as *objective*, and so binding on all members of a discursive community, regardless of their particular attitudes” is “what is appealed to in responding to the possibility of *gerrymandering*” <#_ftn1> (631). I think the idea here is that the correct application of a term or concept does not depend on what anyone in the community, or even the whole community, thinks is the correct application of that term or concept. If that’s right, then we would fail to correctly use the term ‘plus’ in saying “58 plus 2 equals 5”—even if the whole community were to consent to the correctness of that claim. When the term ‘plus’ is used correctly is so to speak set in stone, for all possible cases, by the some of the norms of our linguistic practice—and importantly norms that are unaffected by how anyone or all of us thinks we should use the term ‘plus’.

You continue in the next paragraph that “the reason the conceptual contents conferred by the discursive scorekeeping practices a community is interpreted as engaging in can outrun the community’s capacity to apply them correctly and to appreciate the correct consequences of their application is the empirical and practical *solidity* or concreteness of those practices” (*ibid*). This solidity then derives from the connections the linguistic practice has to the world around it through “noninferential entries and exits” (632). I take it that the idea here is that the noninferential commitments gained through perception and the practical intentions we arrive at through practical reasoning from doxastic commitments—which inform our proprieties of material inference from both sides—all together *solidify* our conceptual norms, i.e., make it the case that ‘plus’ means plus, and thus it is correct to say “58 plus 2 equals 60” and so on.

I have two questions about how this works.

First, how exactly do connections with language entries and exits help with respect to the gerrymandering problem? Of course, they will help if they are involved in the adoption of a particular conceptual norm, at the exclusion of others. But it is hard to see how they could help with that. Here is a thought experiment to help see why. Imagine a community much like ours except that they mean *grue* and *bleen* when they say ‘blue’ and ‘green’. Imagine also that the date that grue things stop being green and become blue is sufficiently far in the future such that everything that it has so far been correct to ascribe ‘grue’ to it has also been correct to ascribe ‘green’ to. Since this community (at least seems) to have the same language exits and entries (they see the same green leaves, and select the same object asked “Pick up the green one”, etc.), what makes it the case that they have different proprieties of inference and different conceptual norms? Must we deny that they mean and understand *grue* and *bleen* by ‘grue’ and ‘bleen’?

Second, on your view, what underlies the conceptual norms of mathematical concepts? Since we obviously do not directly perceive numbers and their relations, is there some more complex story of how we arrive at the noninferential commitments that underlie the proprieties of inference concerning mathematical objects and concepts? Is such a noninferential base even needed?

This question brings me to a further question of a rather different stripe. You mention that a basic feature of an autonomous discursive practice is that it be possible to assert something in it. But I wonder if there are constraints on what must be assertable. For example, could we imagine a language with a vocabulary of only mathematical concepts and objects? It’s hard to see how these concepts could—by themselves, at least—be based in a rich enough content-conferring inferential practice to be meaningful. In fact, it’s hard to think of how such a content-conferring inferential practice could come about except for—in the first case—empirical observational language, for which we gain competence, as Sellars says, through “a long history of acquiring piecemeal habits of response to various objects in various circumstances” (*EPM*, 44–45). Must any autonomous discursive practice include—in the first case—observational language?

Chuck Goldhaber

Brandom claims that the model of discursive practice presented in *Making It Explicit* is expressively complete. A feature of this expressive completeness is that those to whom the model applies can themselves make explicit ‘implicit’, ‘practical’, inferential ‘know-how’ (I still have the most inchoate grasp of what these and similar words mean, but leave that aside). Is the claim that discursive practitioners are knowingly ‘making explicit’ something that is ‘implicit’ in the practice? There are occasions on which someone might ‘make explicit’ something ‘implicit’ by stressing “if” and “then” in “*If *you are good, *then *you get candy”. Or a teacher might write that on the board after saying it aloud to a child, she may then say “I made it explicit to him before I gave him detention”. (These actions and others like them form the ‘home language game’ of ‘making things explicit’.) There are of course other occasions when someone might just claim straight off, “If the bus comes, then I will hop on”, without intending to ‘make anything explicit’ at all. Indeed, there does not seem to be anything implicit that is to be made explicit. Is what is implicit the statements “The bus comes” and “I will hop on” taken to stand in relations of material inference? But who could ever say the material inference by saying individually “The bus comes” and “I will hop on” (with a brief pause in between)? ("P so Q" etc. presupposes a grasp of "if, then"). And if material inference cannot be said, then how is he to know that there is anything implicit to be made explicit?

Perhaps you will respond that practitioners do not need know that they are making things explicit at all. In that case, isn’t there a distinction between the way philosophers ‘make things explicit’ in the way you have here, and the way ordinary people ‘make things explicit’? This is more an expression of an attitude, than a straight-laced question.

Shivam Patel