Pred and Brandom

[drc]

Hi,

I've uploaded a pdf of a piece that started off as a review of Pred's
book, then veered off into a comparison of Pred's phenomenology with
Brandom's Wittgensteinian pragmatism. I'd be especially interested in
opinions about the attempt at adjudication at the end.

Wes

[matthew...@gmail.com]

I find that DrC's comparison of Pred and Brandom reminds me of Shapin
and Schaffer's book, 'Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and
the Experimental Life', and Shapin's other book, 'The Scientific
Revolution'. Shapin says that while he does think there are simple
"facts of the matter" independent of us, nevertheless scientific
STATEMENTS about those facts of the matter belong to our culture. They
are, Shapin claims, "cultural entities, what else could they be?" This
is maybe a limited aspect of the debate between radical empiricism in
the phenomenological tradition and Brandom's analytic pragmatism, but
nevertheless I find it is interesting to see how the debate might be
cashed out in terms of the history of science.

Here's a link to a radio interview with Shapin for CBC Ideas: How to
Think about Science: http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/features/science/index.html#episode16

All that aside, I think I agree with DrC's closing comments, that
Pred's phenomenological radical empiricism cannot claim to be free of
"normative, rule-governed contexts of commitment and entitlement." As
soon as we start making statements with supposed 'radical empirical'
content, we have created a cultural entity. But I still think that it
is only the statement, not the fact it attempts to communicate, that
must behold to Brandom's analysis. So Brandom is right, to a point.
That point is the limit of language/communication, and the world lies
outside this boundary.

[Wesley Cooper]

But I still think that it
> is only the statement, not the fact it attempts to communicate, that
> must behold to Brandom's analysis.

If you're right about this, Matthew, isn't Brandom's project
devastated? Brandom is sufficiently committed to Wittgenstein's idea
of a language game that he can't accept peeling away the language from
the facts about the game. LW's critique of a private language isn't
undertaken without prejudice to the facts about the private sensation
that it's alleged to keep track of. On the other hand, phenomenology
(or some models of it) does seem to refer to psychological facts from
which language can be separated. The idea of such facts has strong
appeal. Whatever its merits, I read Brandom's theory as resisting this
idea. Anyway, that's what I think is at stake. If someone on our group
can put things in a better frame, I'd be grateful.

[matthew...@gmail.com]

The essential problem here is that there simply is no adequate way to
express the distinction between the "fact" and the "statement of
fact". The term "fact" is just that, a term, a word, an inert symbol,
a part of a statement. It is at most a linguistic devise and it is
tied up with language and language games.

But there is something very strange going on here. How do you signify
something without engaging in a practice of signifying? Obviously you
can't, on pain of circularity. Even the term "indescribable" is a
description. And yet somehow the term seems to have some sense to it.

I think what I'm trying to say is, the radical empiricist's intended
use of "looks" talk is ultimately and necessarily doomed to failure.
They attempt to express the inexpressible, and in so doing they
fundamentally miss-describe what they set out to describe.

This has long been the poet's dilemma. Margret Atwood once wrote:

By the rules of the game, I must always lie.
Now,
Do you believe me?

There is a strange paradox at the bottom of this problem. It seems
fair to say that the world is independent of us. But, the only way to
communicate this, perhaps even the only way to clearly think about
this at all, is to reduce the world to a symbol - the word "world". In
this act of conceptual domestication, this attempt to encompass all
that which is not "I" or "We", something is essentially missed. But
what is missed cannot be named; we fundamentally cannot TALK about it.
It defies description. It's like trying to grasp water; we know it's
there but we can't close our hands around it because as soon as we do,
it slips between our fingers.

I think that Wittgenstein and Brandom are right, but only within the
bounded realm of discursive practice. In any conversation, any
discourse, perhaps even any act of clear conceptual thought, we simply
cannot peel away the language from the facts about the game. And there
is a paradox (arising from a classical problem of reflexive reference)
involved in claiming that there exists a world that is independent of
language. The paradox arises because the assertion, "there exists a
world that is independent of language" is itself hopelessly entangled
in language and linguistic conceptual descriptions that ultimately
miss-represent what they attempt to represent.

Perhaps the fact that a paradox arises ought to be taken as evidence
that the assertion, "there exists a world independent of language",
must be false, is absurd, and cannot be really believed. But damn it
there IS a world out there independent of language, even if my attempt
to express this belief is inadequate and paradoxical. It may not be a
world that is exactly as I CONCEIVE of it (i.e. make it intelligible,
domesticate it, subsume it under concepts that are insolubly
linguistic), but surely it is out there!

I concede that there isn't much apparent cash value in talking like
this, attempting to paradoxically express the inexpressible. What I'm
trying to get at has no value of generating psychological facts from
which language can be separated. Perhaps it has no value at all.

There is a great monologue from the movie Waking Life might be
relevant here:
"It just seems that so much of our experience is intangible. So much
of what we perceive cannot be expressed, is unspeakable. And yet, when
we communicate with one another, and we feel that we feel that we have
connected, and we think that we're understood, I think we have a
feeling of almost spiritual communion. And that feeling might be
transient but I think it's what we live for."

Here's a youtube link to the video of the monologue:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6Ee9mW9IG8

This seems to be related to what the transcendentalists like Emerson
and Whitman were on about. In fact, part of my forthcoming paper is
attempting to deal with this relation to Emerson's transcendentalism.
It's also what seems to be at the heart of the Zen emphasis on
practice.

So that's at least a sketch of what I think is at work here. You can
see the inherent difficulty with my project of articulating all this.
At times it seems futile, like trying to grasp at air. Anyway I'd love
to hear what you think.

cheers,

Matt

[matthew...@gmail.com]

With respect to the problem of W's private language argument. I'm not
saying that there exists a private language that can pick out facts
about the world. I'm saying that there is a world independent of us
and that we can and do experience that world non-linguistically.
Again, the fundamental paradoxical problem of describing this "non-
linguistic experience" arises. But the point is that language, private
or public, doesn't enter into it.

-Matt

[Wesley Cooper]

It's been awhile since I read *Making It Explicit*, and the last half of the book went by mostly in a blur, so correct me if I'm wrong in not imputing to him `linguistic idealism', if this entails the denial that the statement `snow is white' is true just in case snow is white, or the denial that the statement `snow is white' corresponds to the fact that snow is white. But that statement is tied to a host of others -- about colors and weather conditions, etc., ad nauseum. This is his inferentialism. This `host' of statements contributes to score-keeping practices of commitments, endorsements, defenses, etc. This is his language-game paradigm. The `host' and the practices are embedded further in a `form of life' -- for instance, one that involves human vision. The members of this trio -- inferential relations, language game, form of life -- are not separable, they're a package deal. That's what's wrong with the idea of a non-linguistic encounter with facts about one's mind or the external world (according to Brandom, according to moi). One of the issues you raise, Matthew, is whether our ordinary experience of ourselves and the world is incompatible with the package deal. Or suppose that there's no incompatibility with ordinary experience. A further issue you raise is whether a mystic or phenomenological `bracketer' could cut through ordinary experience and the package deal, to reveal the pristine, if incommunicable, truth about reality that is distorted by the statement that snow is white, or that I have a headache. The view I take from Brandom is that a guru might go beyond ordinary experience, but his doing so wouldn't unravel the package deal. Whatever he's doing, he wouldn't be peeling away distorting language to reveal the real goods.

I know this is vague, but possibly not vague enough not to be wrong So correct me if I'm wrong! I'd like to be clearer about what Brandom is up to.

Wes