29.4855, Review: Linguistic Theories; Pragmatics; Semantics: Turbanti (2017)

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Subject: 29.4855, Review: Linguistic Theories; Pragmatics; Semantics: Turbanti (2017)

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Date: Wed, 05 Dec 2018 16:55:28
From: Rodger Kibble [r.kibble at gold.ac.uk]
Subject: Robert Brandom's Normative Inferentialism

 
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AUTHOR: Giacomo  Turbanti
TITLE: Robert Brandom's Normative Inferentialism
SERIES TITLE: Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 280
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2017

REVIEWER: Rodger Kibble, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

SUMMARY

“Robert Brandom’s Normative Inferentialism,” by Giacomo Turbanti, is intended
to equip readers with the resources to engage with Robert Brandom’s (RB)
philosophy of language, the “normative inferentialism” of the title. 
Brandom’s approach is largely set out in three books: Making it Explicit
(1994, henceforth MIE), Articulating Reasons (2000, AR) and Between Saying and
Doing (2008, BSD), though the essential motivating ideas can be found in his
paper “Asserting” (1983). As the author notes, MIE was considered a
substantial breakthrough on its appearance in 1994 but its subsequent impact
has been relatively modest within philosophy, and it is probably safe to
assume that the work has been little studied within linguistic semantics or
pragmatics.  The appearance of this volume in Benjamins’s Pragmatics and
Beyond New Series may well serve to stimulate interest in RB’s work outside
his home discipline.

The author (henceforth GT) begins in Chapter 1 by contrasting inferentialism
with “denotational representationalism”, which conceives meanings of
utterances in terms of predications on terms standing for entities in the
world, and is characteristically atomistic. Inferentialism by contrast is
holistic: the meaning of an utterance consists in its norm-governed
inferential relations with other expressions, specifically which further
assertions it licenses. Assertion, in contrast to designation or naming, is
considered to be an autonomous discursive practice (ADP), since designation
“depends on the practices of giving and asking for reasons that essentially
involve language moves, that is assertions of propositional contents” (p. 5). 

Chapter 2, “The grounds of pragmatic significance”, aims to set out the
foundations of Brandom’s philosophy of language, starting with two elements he
adopts from Wilfrid Sellars: a rejection of the “Myth of the Given” and the
notion of discursive practice as a “game of giving and asking for reasons”
(see Brandom 1997). The “Myth” arises from a conflation of sensory awareness
with knowledge: for Sellars and Brandom, to know that an object is red, for
instance, is to be committed to certain normative consequences, such as that
it is coloured, is extended, is not green and so on.  And the emphasis on the
inferential nature of conceptual knowledge leads to the primacy of the
propositional, since a proposition is the smallest linguistic unit which can
be involved in inferences and for which one can take responsibility. 

A speaker who makes an assertion takes on a commitment to justify their
assertion by showing entitlement to it, and at the same time licenses others
to make the same assertion as well as acquiring further commitments and
entitlements though norm-governed inferences. Participants in a dialogue act
as “scorekeepers” who keep track of their own commitments and entitlements as
well as those of others.  Scorekeepers will bring with them their own
collateral commitments and thus practitioners are likely to end up with
different scores. This raises the question of objectivity: which score is the
right one?  It is safe to say that not all scholars are satisfied with RB’s
handling of this question.

If discursive practise is norm-governed, we would like to be clear about the
status and origins of the norms in question. RB considers and dismisses two
approaches: “regulism”, which identifies norms with explicit rules, and
“regularism” which holds that a performance is “correct” if it conforms to
some regularity. The former is rejected via a regress argument: we would need
rules for determining whether a performance had been correctly assessed
against a rule, and so on. The second is unsatisfactory as liable to what RB
calls “gerrymandering”, though GT does not spell out this argument in detail. 
The way out of this dilemma lies in “normative phenomenalism”: a performance
is appropriate not because it conforms to an explicit rule or to a regularity,
but because it is taken to be appropriate by the (linguistic) community. This
still seems to threaten a regress: how is this taking-correct itself to be
assessed? 

It will be clear that RB has a distinctive take on the relation between
pragmatics and semantics: for him, pragmatics is concerned with the
significance conferred on linguistic expressions through their use to perform
certain moves in language games.  The core of his inferential semantics is
that “the inferential articulation of commitments and entitlements is what
allows to [sic] understand assertions as expressing propositional contents”
(p39).  RB’s social-normative stance is elaborated in the remainder of Chapter
2 by contrasting it with the intention-based Speech Act theories of Austin and
Searle and the “cognitive approach” initiated by Grice. The chapter concludes
by problematising RB’s notion of assertion as the core or “downtown” of
discursive practice: GT notes Wittgenstein’s injunction to “stop theorizing
about the fundamentality of certain linguistic practices” as well as Belnap’s
denunciation of the so-called “declarative fallacy” in logic and philosophy of
language, which is taken up and extended in more recent work by Kukla and
Lance.

Chapter 3, “The articulation of conceptual content”, looks at how the work of
semantic analysis is tackled in RB’s inferential semantics and explores his
notion of logical expressivism. This is prefaced with a fairly lengthy
discussion of theories of meaning in the work of Frege, Dummett and
Wittgenstein, among others, with RB’s pragmatic approach characterised by the
idea that a theory of meaning has to begin with “the investigation of
linguistic practices”.  The question of the proper analysis of inferential
relations is central to RB’s project, and this is introduced by comparing how
Frege, Carnap and Sellars handled the difference between “logical” and
“extra-logical” inference rules. One question is whether an inference like
“Pittsburgh is to the West of Philadelphia/Philadelphia is to the East of
Pittburgh” relies on an enthymematic meaning postulate “For all x, y: West_of
(x, y) iff East_of(y, x)”.  The notion of “material inference” which RB adopts
from Sellars holds that the inference follows immediately by virtue of the
content of the expressions, and that “material properties of inference [are
treated] as prior in the order of explanation to formal logical properties of
inference” (MIE: 135, quoted by GT: 72).  

As noted, RB considers propositions or sentences to be basic moves in language
games: in order to account for the contributions of subsentential expressions
such as singular terms and predicates, he introduces a substitutional
mechanism such that, for example, two expressions are taken to have the same
content if they can be substituted without changing a sentence’s pragmatic
significance across all contexts.  Once these terms have been isolated, it
appears that speakers can adopt “anaphoric commitments” towards them as
elements in an “anaphoric chain”. RB models the well-known de re/de dicto
distinctions in terms of a difference between undertaking and ascribing
commitments (AR: 169-173). GT does not explicate the substitutional mechanism
in detail, considering it “unsatisfactory both for the logician, because it is
silent about quantification, and for the linguist, because it hardly accounts
for basic predication” (p 81).

One of the innovations in BSD is the framework of Meaning-Use Diagrams (MUDs),
essentially an expository device for the key notion of logical expressivism. 
For Brandom, language use involves mastery of certain vocabularies and
practices, where practices are what we do with elements of vocabulary,
including using them to specify extended practices. So far example, if we take
it that assertion ineluctably involves inference according to the game of
giving and asking for reasons, the introduction of conditional vocabulary (“If
… then …”) enables us to say that we are making an inference over and above
tacitly making and endorsing inferences. (This kind of process is described as
“algorithmic elaboration”, though no actual algorithm is formally spelled
out.) Thus logical vocabulary is no more than a description of already
existing practices.  GT queries, as others have done, how this can account for
the fact that there are many logical vocabularies and many different notions
of consequence. The MUD framework is further employed to motivate the claim
that users of ordinary empirical vocabulary are already capable of reasoning
with modal vocabulary, since proper understanding of empirical vocabulary
includes “associating ranges of counterfactual robustness to material
inferences” (p 105). 

The notion of logical expressivism, including the claims that operators such
as conditionals and negations essentially express practices which are already
implicit in the proper deployment of non-logical vocabulary, is substantially
worked out in the first phase of RB’s philosophy of language which roughly
extends from Brandom (1983) to AR.  This includes the thesis that participants
in assertional practices are able to recognise incompatibilities between
claims (or sets of claims), that the negation operator serves primarily to
express incompatibilities, and that entailment can be defined in terms of
incompatibility.  This is fleshed out as a formal system of Incompatibility
Semantics in BSD, and GT’s Chapter 4 expounds this system and discusses some
of its properties. It turns out that while some of the definitions are rather
intricate, the system supports the same sets of inferences as classical
propositional logic and S5 modal logic.

While IS may serve as a proof of concept for some of the intuitions underlying
RB’s project, it has limited expressivity, dealing only with monotonic,
propositional inferences, and GT allows that it is “logically unexciting”.  To
remedy this, Chapter 5 is taken up with GT’s own proposals to extend the
framework as a reimplementation of Kripke’s machinery of frames and
accessibility relations, and to incorporate non-monotonicity on the basis of
Preferential Semantics for Gabbay-Makinson’s non-monotonic logics. It is
claimed that this exercise shows how various semantic properties of modal and
non-monotonic reasoning can be expressed in terms of “various normative
properties of discursive practices” (p170).

Chapter 6 is devoted to weighty, fundamental questions about realism,
particularly semantic realism, and objectivity.  Many scholars have discerned
a tension between RB’s framework of perspectival, normative assessment and the
objectivity of conceptual contents. It is not really possible to do justice to
the arguments of this chapter in the confines of a short review, but the
reader may get some impression of its scope from the fact that the discussion
ranges over Sellars, Dummett, Dewey, Hegel and Kant among others. It turns out
that Brandom looks for guidance rather more to the German “Idealists” than to
his Pragmatist compatriots – for instance he is said to draw on Hegel’s
“conceptual realism” which crucially relies on the latter’s “analysis of
normativity in terms of his socio-historical model of reciprocal recognition”
(p 198). (GT notes that he is describing RB’s take on the great thinkers of
the past, rather than providing any novel exegesis on their work, so for
example he is careful to refer to “Brandom’s Hegel”.  My own, possibly flawed
understanding of Hegel’s notion of reciprocal recognition is that it is
conceived as inherently asymmetric and unstable, giving rise to the well-known
dialectic of “Master and Slave” (Hegel 1977).)

The concluding Chapter 7 reviews the “tripartite” structure of normative
pragmatics, inferential semantics and rational expressivism, and considers a
possible flaw in RB’s “allegedly unsatisfactory account of the objectivity of
the norms that ground pragmatic significance”.  It is safe to say that many
readers are somewhat puzzled and unconvinced by RB’s account of the sources of
normativity, while Habermas (2000) notes that MIE appeals in part to “a
conceptual realism grounded on an objective idealism that [RB] does not really
motivate” (p 209). The book concludes by sketching some possible further
research directions: these include extending normative pragmatics in ways
which “challenge the primacy of cognitive approaches”, following for example
Kukla and Lance’s work on non-declarative speech acts, and technical analysis
and development of inferential semantics itself.

EVALUATION

I enjoyed reading this book, and have learned much from it.  The text is
generally written in a lucid, engaging style, and shows evidence of wide and
deep study not only of RB’s work but in the mainstream C20 traditions of
philosophy of language and semantic/pragmatic theory. Readers who are less
familiar with RB’s antecedents and foils in these traditions will benefit from
GT’s careful exposition and critique of their respective positions.  The book
could fruitfully be read alongside Jeremy Wanderer’s well-received monograph
(Wanderer 2008) which gives less space to contextual issues and more to the
actual machinery of RB’s inferential semantics.  Wanderer also highlights the
problem of objectivity, and concludes by pointing out the need for a
“historical conception of rationality”. With Bernhard Weiss, he has co-edited
a valuable collection of articles on aspects of MIE (Weiss and Wanderer 2010).

The book is rather dense, but the author has nevertheless had to be selective
in his coverage given the extent of the source material. So, for example, very
little is said of RB’s notion of “practical commitments” which correspond to
“intentions” as doxastic or propositional commitments do to “beliefs”, and are
involved in practical reasoning leading from “beliefs” to “intentions”.  More
could also be said about the somewhat mysterious notion of “material
inference” which is said to underlie formally valid inferences.  In RB’s
treatment this is not limited to matters of physical fact such as the
complementarity of “East” and “West” (GT: 72) but also appears to include
inferences based on social convention such as “I am a bank employee going to
work, so I shall wear a necktie” (AR: 84). And the author is silent (as, to be
fair, is RB himself) on previous and contemporary approaches to commitment in
dialogue such as Hamblin (1970) or Walton and Krabbe (1995), as well as
formal/computational interpretations  (Kibble 2006, Piwek 2011).  He does not
discuss philosophers who have engaged with RB’s work from the standpoint of
social theory, including Heath (2008), Rouse (2003), Schatzki (2002) and (in
an adversarial spirit) Turner (2010). 

There are, naturally, some points of interpretation and/or emphasis where one
might take a different view from GT.  RB’s claim that assertion makes up an
“autonomous discursive practice (a language game one could play though one
played no other)” has been challenged by some: it is hard to see how the case
could be proven one way or the other, and in any case it seems to be
undermined from the start by being equated with a “game of giving and asking
for reasons”. Asking is, after all, something different from assertion.  On
the question of how much the work presented in BSD hangs together with the
programme of MIE, it seems to me that RB has retreated from the “social
practice” orientation of the earlier work towards a more cognitive position. 
Thus “practices” become “practices-or-abilities” throughout BSD, and
constraints on the ability to arbitrarily hook “discriminative and
performative abilities together in arbitrary combinations” count as
“psychological restrictions” (BSD: 38; see further Kibble 2014).  GT’s account
of logical expressivism is couched in largely formal and general terms, with a
paucity of motivating linguistic examples.  The presentation of IS shows that
one can construct an algebra in which the meanings of logical operators
reflect existing relations between sets of defined entities, but more work is
needed to show that logical terms in natural language can be treated in the
same way.  The idea that logical vocabulary has the property of marking out
logically valid inferences, which are to begin with materially correct and
cannot be made materially bad by substitution of non-logical for non-logical
vocabulary, is an empirical claim which (as argued by Kibble (in prep.)) faces
significant challenges when tested against a wide range of linguistic data.

Regrettably, the text includes a fair sprinkling of typos, misspellings and
grammatical infelicities.  Some are perhaps harmless if irritating, such as
“congitans” for “cognitans” (p 176) or the repetition of “des Geistes” in the
bibliographic entry for Hegel’s masterwork (p 215). Others are potentially
confusing or misleading, e.g. “ADS” for “ADP” (xi), “entailment” for
“entitlement” (p 26) or the Greek letter “φ” where “ψ” seems to be meant (p
114). Of course, the prevalence of easily-spotted errors raises a worry that
others may be buried within the numerous formulas in the text, particularly in
Chapters 4 and 5.

REFERENCES

Brandom, Robert.  ''Asserting'' Noûs, Vol 17 No 4, November 1983, pp. 637-650

Brandom, Robert.  Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive
Commitment. Harvard University Press (Cambridge) 1994. 741 pp. ISBN
0-674-54319-X 9 (cloth), 0-674-54330-0 (paper)

Brandom, Robert, 1997. Wilfrid Sellars’ ‘Empiricism and the philosophy of
mind’: Study guide. Sellars, Wilfrid (1997). Empiricism and the philosophy of
mind, with an introduction by Richard Rorty and a study guide by Robert
Brandom, pp.119-181.

Brandom, Robert. Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism.
Harvard University Press, 2000 (paperback 2001), 230 pp.  ISBN#0-674-00158-3
(cloth), #0-674-00692-5 (paper) 

Brandom, Robert. Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism.
Oxford University Press, 2008, 240 pp. ISBN 0-199-54287-2

Hamblin, Charles Leonard. Fallacies. London: Methuen (1971).

Heath, Joseph. Following the rules: Practical reasoning and deontic
constraint. OUP USA, 2008.

Hegel, G.W.F, 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller with
analysis of the text and foreword by J. N. Findlay (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1977) ISBN 0-19-824597-1

Kibble, Rodger. ''Reasoning about propositional commitments in dialogue.''
Research on Language and Computation 4.2-3 (2006): 179-202.

Kibble, Rodger. “Discourse as practice: from Bourdieu to Brandom”, in
Proceedings of the 50th Anniversary AISB Convention: Symposium on Questions,
discourse and dialogue: 20 years after Making it Explicit. 2014.

Kibble, Rodger (in prep.). “From Discursive Practice to Logic? Remarks on
Brandom's Logical Expressivism”. 

Piwek, Paul. ''Dialogue structure and logical expressivism.'' Synthese 183.1
(2011): 33-58.

Rouse, Joseph. How scientific practices matter: Reclaiming philosophical
naturalism. University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Schatzki, Theodore R. The site of the social: A philosophical account of the
constitution of social life and change. Penn State Press, 2002.

Turner, Stephen P. Explaining the normative. Polity, 2010.

Walton, Douglas, and Erik CW Krabbe. Commitment in dialogue: Basic concepts of
interpersonal reasoning. SUNY press, 1995.

Wanderer, Jeremy. Robert Brandom. McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008,
240pp. ISBN 9780773534865.

Weiss, Bernhard, and Jeremy Wanderer, eds. Reading Brandom: On making it
explicit. Routledge, 2010.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Rodger Kibble is a member of the Computer Science faculty at Goldsmiths,
University of London. His research activities have ranged across formal and
computational semantics for natural language semantics, natural language
generation, theories of artificial agents and agent communication, AI ethics
and philosophy of language. His more recent work has investigated whether
Robert Brandom’s normative pragmatics and inferential semantics can inform the
development of agents and dialogue models, and the extent to which Brandom’s
work can yield empirical hypotheses capable of being evaluated against corpus
data. In his leisure time he enjoys drawing and printmaking, using traditional
techniques such as woodcut, wood engraving, etching and lithography.





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