2 line refutation

[matthew...@gmail.com]

I heard a two line refutation of Brandom's view today. I didn't get a
chance to get it clear though. Something about Brandom's view re:
intentionality and rule following and either being a naturalist or
arguing in a circle. If you know it could you post it?

[jkar...@ualberta.ca]

Hi Matt,

I do not know the exact objection, but I am pretty sure that Fodor
presents something against Brandom along those lines. Andrei is
writing a paper on this right now, so I'm sure he can provide you with
all the relevant information.

Cheers,

John

[pga...@ualberta.ca]

The version I got is this.

Brandom does not want to be a naturalist.
Brandom wants to give an account of intentionality in terms of rule-following.
Is rule following intentional?
If not, Brandom is a naturalist.
If yes, then Brandom's argument is circular.

At least that's the Coles Notes version I heard from Andrei.

Cheers,
Patrick

[matthew...@gmail.com]

Here's a passage from Rorty's "Truth and Progress" that might be
relavant:

"The trick here is not to try, as Carnap once did, to give necesswary
and sufficient conditions for sentences like "The word 'red' refers,
in English, to this 'color" or "That Spanish sentence is about the
union of Leon and Castille by describing how these sentences are used
by the relevant sets of speakers. There is no reductionist impulse at
work in Sellars, but there is a therapuetic impulse. The therapy
consists in saying: imagine how a term like "refers to" or "is about"
came to be used, and you will thereby know all you need to know about
how reference, aboutness, and intentionality came into the world. The
analogy here is with a term like "money": imagine how a barter economy
transformed itself into one in which legal currency and commercial
credit were in use, and you will know all you need to know both about
how money came into existence and about what money is. No mystery
remains for philosophers to puzzle about. The illusion of depth
vanishes - an illusion caused, in this case by the idea that only
things that can be experienced through the senses are
unproblematic." (p.127)

Brandom's view seams to be that, following Sellars/Wittgenstien,
vocabularies are to be judged only on their utility for human
projects. The only reason we describe computers and dogs differently
with respect to ascribing intential states to one and not the other,
is that it PAYS to do so for one (i.e it is useful to do so) and it
doesn't pay for the other. There is in this sense no non-human
authority by which to judge vocabularies and vocabulary uses.
Intentional vocabulary is nothing more than a vocabulary of varying
utilty.

So, is rule-following intentional?

Well I suppose on this account sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't,
depending on who/what is following the rule(s) and what the purpose/
use of, to quote Daniel Dennet, "the intentional stance" is in this
particular case.

So the objection is: when we take Brandom's view and we describe an
act of rule-following as 'intentional', we are arguing in a circle.
and when we take his view and describe an act of rule-following as non-
intentional we are being naturalists.

So does it make sense to switch back and forth between these two
consequences based purely on the utility of the vocabulary on a case
by case basis?

I get the sense that Brandom's view and the objection are somehow
talking past each other.

On Apr 1, 10:48 am, pga...@ualberta.ca wrote:
> The version I got is this.
>
> Brandom does not want to be a naturalist.
> Brandom wants to give an account of intentionality in terms of rule-following.
> Is rule following intentional?
> If not, Brandom is a naturalist.
> If yes, then Brandom's argument is circular.
>
> At least that's the Coles Notes version I heard from Andrei.
>
> Cheers,
> Patrick
>

> Quoting jkard...@ualberta.ca:
>
>
>
>
>
> > Hi Matt,
>
> > I do not know the exact objection, but I am pretty sure that Fodor
> > presents something against Brandom along those lines. Andrei is
> > writing a paper on this right now, so I'm sure he can provide you with
> > all the relevant information.
>
> > Cheers,
>
> > John
>
> > On Mar 31, 11:58 pm, matthew.ridd...@gmail.com wrote:
> >> I heard a two line refutation of Brandom's view today. I didn't get a
> >> chance to get it clear though. Something about Brandom's view re:
> >> intentionality and rule following and either being a naturalist or

> >> arguing in a circle. If you know it could you post it?- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

[Wolfgang Cernoch]

I think, You are right! But: if we think as naturalist, we have a
intention to the whole "naturalistic system of rule-following", if we
think as intentionalist, we have the intention to every act of rule-
following.

In my opinion is there also a possibility, to understand the
transformation of the point of view, which look at the proposition and
her representation, to the point of view, which look at the
proposition and her following acting or proposition-saying of other
persons, as a transformation of the perspective of thinking of time.
The first view is the time of actually processing, the second view
maybe could the time as history. This must not be a naturalization, if
we think on the historical originate from common "pictures" or
"values" (epistems), which we use in our communications without
special jugdment, although this epistems are not originate in our
concensiousness like a invention or discovery. Not all unconcensious
ist natural!

Greatings

WC

[matthew...@gmail.com]

I think the core of the attack is in this Fodor Paper. Here's the
link:

http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/faculty/lepore/brandomreply.pdf




On Apr 13, 4:13 am, Wolfgang Cernoch <wolfgangcern...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[matthew...@gmail.com]

Here's a quote of the last paragraph of the Fodor paper:

"We’re tempted beyond bearing to an ad hominem remark. We think
that Brandom, like most of the philosophical community, simply takes
it for granted that somebody (Sellars? Wittgenstein? Davidson?
Quine? Putnam? Frege? Dummett? Rorty? Block? Harman?
Boghosian? Heidegger(!))? has shown beyond reasonable cavil that
there is no serious prospect for a theory of concepts that embraces
an atomistic referentialism; and that the only serious alternative is
some sort of Inferential Role Semantics. That being so, Brandom is
(perfectly reasonably) prepared to go ahead with the project of
constructing an Inferential Role Semantics without, at this stage,
worrying a lot about the details; and to do so even it means flirting
with the analytic/synthetic distinction. Well, it’s hard not to be
impressed by the extent to which Inferential Role Semantics is the
consensus view, not just in philosophy but also in cognitive science.
But we’d be a lot more impressed if all the attempts to construct an
Inferential Role Semantics (over going on at least a hundred years
now) hadn’t been such abject and total failures. There isn’t, so far,
any known candidate for an inferential role analysis of any concept;
not, anyhow, one that meets reasonable constraints on accounts of
concept possession and individuation. It must be nice to have so
many people on your side, but you don’t win a war just by
assembling an army; you also have to win a battle or two."


Fodor claims that Brandom's account of intentionality is circular and
that he smuggles in the old problematic analytic/synthetic
distinction. That Brandom's view of intentionality is circular comes
out of the problem of accounting for how a child comes to be a
language user without already having a mind. One might extend this
problem to the problem of giving a non-circular account of how
language developed in the human species in the first place.

-Matt

[Wolfgang Cernoch]

To Matthew, BrandomSemantics: Fodor Paper

I dont believe, that the core of the attack is in this paper.

To the first point of Fodors Paper „metaphysic of intentionality“:

Intentions produced metaphysics, I dont think that there is a
metaphysic beyond intentionality, it is too simple to have a
tautologically system of sentences. We need as system of „metaphysic“,
in which intentionality is a part. Without something like that, every
interpretation of intentionalty started to be simple empirical
psychology. But in the sense of the question of a ability of free
decision-making this question about a connection from the concept of
intentionality and metaphysic lead to a „metaphysica specialis“ of
freedom (Kant, transcendental ideal of freedom).

I want to discuss „button up“ and bottom down“. At first I think, that
both perspectives are needed to understand the difference and the
relations between the kinds of semantic constitution and construction
and the kind of logical constitution and construction.

»Either one proceeds ‘bottom up’, beginning with an account of ‘what
it is for something to represent something else: paradigmatically
what it is for a singular term to pick out an object [in effect, with
a
theory of word reference] and then proceeds to an account of the
propositional content expressed by sententially shaped or labeled
representations [in effect, a compositional theory of the content of
sentences]; [ ... ]

I understand this, that we have two „buttons up“. The common problem
is, what means „representing“. The first explanation deals with the
problem of „laying“ the word, on a correspondending „part of the
world“, the second explanation deals with the problem of „laying“ the
sentence, idea on a correspondending „part of the world“. But what
means a „compositional theory of the content of sentences“? I said,
the elements of this compositional theory are products of a division
of a meaning of the proposition and not only addition or terms
(problem of syntax). But in this way, is the meaning of a sentence the
same idea or concept of a proposition as in the „top down“ example:

„Or one proceeds `top down’, adopting ‘a semantically and
categorically converse strategy [which]…starts with a notion of the
propositions expressed by whole sentences…[and then] seeks to
understand the contributions made to the specification of such
[sentential] contents by the subsentential expressions deployed in
the sentences that express them’ (2005, p. XXX).“

Only the way of the analysis how we want to discuss the origin of
rules, which are able to reconstruct the concepts, about we speak, if
we communicated in propostions, is different: The first (compositional
theory of the content of sentences) is a logical analysis, how we
built sentences, which are able to make a decision about true or
false, in a common understandable way. The second (notion of the
propositions expressed by whole sentences) is a linuistic-semantical
analysis, how we produced semantical contents. I think in this
question in the direction of Noam Chomsky.

Anyway, I speak about two different questions, there are asked about
the same concept of sentences as proposition with notion like in the
analysis of the syntax of a proposition, to think the expression
structured in simple S – P as representation. I dont believe, that
Fodor want make this difference in kinds of „looking for“ and in
identifaction of the concepts of propositions, but I also dont
believe, that Fodor speak about a meaningful problem, which is not
possible to describe it correctly.

„We take it that Brandom’s sense of the geography is that our way of
proceeding is more less the first and his is more or less the second.
But we think this way of describing the situation is both unclear and
misleading, and we want to have this out right at the start.“ [ ???]

I hope, Fodor organized his arguments by the way. I dont see any
meanful compatibility between my perspective an Fodors perspectives.
Its true, there same difference in the way of „speaking about“, if we
think in directions like ontological, semantical or psychological
concepts, and in this part of Fodors description I can assume, that
also some denotations between this directions are possible. But this
different kind of concepts dont deal with the same horicont of objects
(entinities) like in my example: In Fodors question we have put
togehther different perspectivs, in my question we have at least to
put elements or characteristicas of a hypothetic „object“ together.

I really dont believe, that Fodor are right, if he say:
„Brandom must be claiming more than that exposition is facilitated by
prioritizing word meaning over sentence meaning or vice versa.“

I think, that we have with some consequences of Brandoms philosophy
generally a problem, because he dont think about the well known
difference about representation and consequences, but the question of
Fodor is only possible after we can criticize this lack of the
„abstraction theory“ from Brandom. And than is logical no big problem
between his both perspectivs. I’m sure, that there is no connection
between the lack of Brandoms phylosophy and Fodors problem between
termlogic and logic of propositions, there a able to be true or false
— only propositions are able to be true or false, not words, if there
doesnt mean concepts, about we can speak in sentences (propositions).

Regards

Wolfgang

[Wolfgang Cernoch]

You wrote:
"So the objection is: when we take Brandom's view and we describe an
act of rule-following as 'intentional', we are arguing in a circle.
and when we take his view and describe an act of rule-following as
non-
intentional we are being naturalists."

I dont beliefe in the circle. Two arguments:

1. Very general: I can do something, "because" you have said it. If I
think on this relation, I also think on the person, which have said ro
me.

2. There is a concept in the sense of the meaning of
"proposition" (like Russell), "because" I know, what I have to do,
after You say it to me.

This circle is a circle of Brandoms idea, to explain communications
only with the half of the process of communication, not a circle in
the concepts, which contain a correct descrption of the necessary
connection between intentionality and concept. Intentionality always
have the two aspects: two construct concepts, and to communicate it.
(Husserl, I. Logische Untersuchung, innerer Monolog). Because this
(point 1),

I'm also not believe, that Brandoms concept could be understand as
naturalistic, because the rule-following is a concept of a kind of
social binding, not a concept of natural or physical processes. The
possibility to describe aspects of communication in a model near
physical models is not a argument for natural or physical causes.

I'm also not sure, how we should be able to say, that Brandoms
communication theory can say us something about, what is utility for
human beeings, this theory only say, that it is necessary, to believe
in rule-following, because without, we are not able to communicate any
concept or ideas of values.

Regards

Wolfgang

[Wolfgang Cernoch]

You wrote:
"there is no serious prospect for a theory of concepts that embraces
an atomistic referentialism;"

ok

"and that the only serious alternative is
some sort of Inferential Role Semantics."

I dont think so: Leibniz (generela inquisitiones of propositions and
notiones, 1686), Bolzano, Frege, Russell, Gödel?
Inferential is the half of the concepts we need to discuss the
question. We also cannot set linguistic or grammar problems on the
place of logic problems. Why we shoud be able now, to do this with the
communication theory of Brandom?

Wolfgang