Tom Swann Rosen On Brandom Who Makes The Rules Around Here

Gideon Rosen 1997, “Who Makes the Rules Around Here?” In Philosophy and Phenomenological Research

Brandom’s project is reductionist: he seeks to explain intentionality in terms of normativity. Moreover, on his view norms are not explainable in any further terms. Norms ‘all the way down’ (MIE 44)

And yet Brandom eschews talk of objective normative features of the world, by talking of our imposing them on a world that is normatively inert. This is his phenomenalism about norms. Our deontic attitudes institute deontic statuses.

What does institution mean? MIE 219: Facts about which things are Ks supervene on facts about which things are to be Ks.

But this is false, assuming only that one can vary the objects of judgments without varying the contents and others’ appraisals of these judgments. Widening the base to include non-normative facts will make the talk of assessments redundant, assuming that facts about assessments supervene on these. And it only secures correlation of extensions, not any explanatory relationship.

Can this be fixed by appeal to response-dependence? That is, is correctness bound to certain subjects taking it to be correct under certain conditions? Is correctness nothing more than a disposition to seem correct under certain conditions? ->All the work is being done by the place-holding specification of subjects and conditions. What determines the right ones, other than ‘the conditions causing seeming-correct responses’? In general, can one hope to reduce something to judgments about it? Doesn’t it involve some kind of conceptual circularity?

Does response-dependence violate Brandom’s reductionism by appealing to intentional notions as responses, namely ‘taking to be’? No, because he talks of practical takings and treatings. ->Is Rosen right that nonvocal animals can treat in Brandom’s sense? Still, he would have to specify the subject and conditions non-intentionally. But Brandom is not worried so much by this, as by regularism, the view that tries to ground facts about what ought to occur in facts about what does occur. This commits the naturalistic fallacy: any non-normative description, however complexly it describes a hierarchy of ‘takings as correct’, cannot fund a normative description, even if it is extensionally correlative. ->Rosen points to (MIE 34), but there Brandom is unclear why there is this gap.

Brandom’s view is like Wiggins or Mc Dowell, in being a normatively constrained response-dependence. His is a normative phenomenalism about norms. But this is no longer reductive at all: Correct iff correctly taken to be correct. And it also seems trivial. Isn’t it an instance of a schema? Worst, it says nothing about how anything we do makes it so, especially by Brandom’s stricture of preserving the gap between status and attitude.

Refuge in a regress? But at no stage of the regress is anything we do responsible for the connection between status and attitude of treating as having that status. For the direction of grounding is the direction of regress, meaning that the chain is never grounded, and so not in our attitudes. Consequently it is possible that the whole chain is true but we are always wrong. ->An attitude is something we /can/ do. So the objection as put assumes Brandom’s account intends to rest on actual attitudes. But perhaps the notion of attitude here is related to the game it features in, as it were, implicitly inferentially. That would make it vital to note that Brandom’s notion of practice is already modal. I can play a game without having ever played all of its moves, or we can play the same game without (indeed only by not?) playing the same moves. The modal element of the identity of a game could then be taken to mean that the attitudes that make it up, even those actually ‘played’, are in part counterfactually determined.

->This thought doesn’t speak to the regress concern though. Brandom doesn’t want to allow this kind of recognition transcendence. But what could stop it? MIE is 600 pages of searching for this fugitive condition, the source, hidden in us, of normativity. But we always find only what it is ‘proper’ to do, never what we have done. ->Or what we would do. P168 ‘If we can understand how even one normative status could emerge from the prenormative, preintentional ooze [Brandom’s terms], we would have a better sense of how a generalized antiplatonism about the normative might look.’

->Footnote 8 references MIE 648 ‘the norms turn out to be’ here’. Here Brandom is talking about collapse of levels in external (aka radical?) interpretation. The idea seems to be that in interpreting someone else as performing some normative practice, we assume the norms that govern our own practices of scorekeeping. Brandom argues, and Rosen agrees, that a community can’t be subject to norms unless it can treat performances as correct. Why? Is this because only those that can treat normatively can be said to be responsible for whether or not they obey by it? But what is it about the community in virtue of which it may be said to deserve any appraisal?

169 ‘Unless one assumes a distinction between natural and unnatural behavioural kinds’ a distinction the antimetaphysical Brandom will not take on board at the start ’ any new behaviour can be seen as conforming to some established pattern’

It seems, and Brandom agrees, that it’s possible for the incorrect action to always have been sanctioned. So even if we were disposed to always sanction the correct action, the attitudes would not count as a good explanation for the status.

Footnote 9: Can treatings as be understood non-normatively, even non-intentionally? MIE 34: ‘applying a negative sanction might be understood in terms of corporal punishment; a prelinguistic community could express its practical grasp of a norm by beating with sticks any of its members who are perceived as transgressing that norm.’ This implies that we negatively sanction by beating when perceiving transgressions. Rosen wants to say we sanction by beating /because/ we perceive transgressions. ->This distinction seems like it could be important, not sure how. Different ways of specifying the enabling conditions of the disposition: e.g. if they had known what the transgressor was up to, they would have sanctioned him.

Brandom wants to elaborate from Wright’s norms, where a ‘community’s all-inclusive practical assessment cannot be mistaken’, to objective conceptual norms. But Rosen thinks no norms are ever unmistakable, unless we specify them dispositionally and so via some idealized enabling condition. This brings us back to the question: what idealization?

‘It seems to me evident that any attempt to make good on the claim that normative facts are creatures of ours by deriving them from facts about communal assessment must inevitably advert to assessments that would be made under conditions of full (or better) information about the natural features of the performances in question.’

But this includes intentional features in the base, undermining his reductionism.

Rosen endorses, at least values the interest of, Brandom’s inferentialism, just questions the normative pragmatism on which it is said to rest.

Binding the normative to the intentional seems undoubtable, but any way of doing that, including Brandom’s reduction to the normative, fails to show how both have climbed out of the ooze.