Conflicting and Complementary Conceptions of Discursive Practice in Non Metaphysical Interpretations

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Conflicting and complementary conceptions of discursive practice in non-metaphysical interpretations of Hegel Torjus Midtgarden Philosophy Social Criticism 2013 39: 559 originally published online 23 January 2013 DOI: 10.1177/0191453712471657 The online version of this article can be found at: http://psc.sagepub.com/content/39/6/559

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Article

Conflicting and complementary conceptions of discursive practice in non-metaphysical interpretations of Hegel

Philosophy and Social Criticism 39(6) 559–576 ª The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0191453712471657 psc.sagepub.com

Torjus Midtgarden Centre for the Study of Sciences and the Humanities, University of Bergen, Norway

Abstract Pippin, Pinkard and Brandom are rightly seen as representatives of a distinct approach in contemporary Hegel scholarship. Still, their interpretations diverge due to different definitions and uses of conceptions of discursive practice. We focus on three ways in which such definitions and uses bear on their interpretations. First, while Lumsden has recently criticized Pinkard and Brandom for ‘discursive bias’ in their accounts of the contestation and upheaval of normative authority in Hegel’s Phenomenology, we note that Pinkard distinguishes between various modes of reason-giving, and we argue that a further qualification of interdependencies between these modes may support his interpretation against such criticism. Second, Pinkard and Pippin have recently criticized Brandom’s conception of discursive score-keeping practice, and Pippin in particular has argued that the latter rests on an individualistic reductionism about content foreign to Hegel. However, we find that the real issue is that the modes of methodological abstraction and idealization assumed for Brandom’s conception of discursive practice leave out of account the historical alteration as well as the institutional embodiment of normative authority as emphasized by Pippin and Pinkard. Third, while Pippin and Pinkard both make Hegel’s notion of modern ethical life bear on a conception of practical rationality, their uses of a conception of discursive practice in such an undertaking betray divergent conceptions of the sociality of rational agents.

Keywords Robert Brandom, discursive practice, G. W. F. Hegel, negativity, practical rationality, Terry Pinkard, Robert Pippin

Corresponding author: Torjus Midtgarden, Universitetet i Bergen, Senter for Vitskapsteori, Postboks 7805, N-5020 Bergen, Norway.

Email: torjus.midtgarden@svt.uib.no

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The American Hegel interpreters Robert Pippin, Terry Pinkard and Robert Brandom are rightly seen to represent a distinct approach in contemporary Hegel scholarship. Still, by talking in a general and collective manner about their contributions one easily overlooks exegetic and systematic divergences between the three scholars. Admittedly, there are important common denominators: as advocates of a so-called ‘non-metaphysical’ interpretation they all account for Hegel’s concept of Spirit [Geist] in terms of normativity and agency bound by norms, not in terms of an ontological entity, existing or subsisting independently of finite human agents. More specifically, they conceive agency in Hegel to be normatively situated within (in Wilfried Sellars’ phrase) a ‘space of reasons’,1 and they further conceive agents’ responsiveness to reasons in terms of participation in social practices. However, when it comes to the historical and developmental dimension of Spirit in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,2 divergences as well as convergences should be noted and qualified. Taking the Phenomenology generally to provide an account of the contestation and upheaval of normative authority through European history, the issue concerns how, more specifically, Hegel accounts for the authority of norms that historically situated agents have relied on in giving reasons for their beliefs and actions. As to Pinkard and Brandom, Simon Lumsden sees both of them to restrict such an account to norms that agents can assess and authorize self-reflectively through practices of giving and asking for reasons; with respect to Hegel’s notions of experience and negativity he thus criticizes them for ‘discursive bias’.3 This criticism, however, tends to overlook an aspect of Pinkard’s interpretation, and it ignores how both Pinkard and Pippin understand and assess Brandom’s conception of discursive practice and thereby distinguish their Hegel interpretations from that of Brandom.

First (I), we qualify and assess the charge of ‘discursive bias’ such that it takes account of the fact that Pinkard distinguishes between different modes and levels of reason-giving so that the level that defines self-consciousness in a form of life presupposes cultural institutionalization and depends on pre-reflective modes of practice. Using Pinkard’s interpretation of the Phenomenology’s story of the breakdown of the aristocratic ethos in early-modernity as an example we suggest ways in which a ‘non-metaphysical’ interpretation defining rational agency in terms of participation in social practices may further qualify such participation in terms of interdependencies between various levels and modes of practice. Second (II), we consider the issue Pippin and Pinkard have taken with Brandom’s pragmatic conception of discursive practice as deontic score-keeping. Brandom’s conception, they argue, cannot deal with the issue of ‘positivity’ in Hegel, and Brandom is incapable of accounting for how participants in a discursive practice ‘can properly challenge the authority of norms’ on which socially and historically situated discursive score-keepers rely (Pippin, 2005a: 392). In effect Brandom’s conception ‘reduces normativity to ‘‘positive’’, socially enforced rules’ (Pinkard, 2007: 166). However, while their criticism takes one decisive defect to lie in Brandom’s alleged methodological and semantic individualism, we argue that the real issue between them and Brandom is that the modes of abstraction assumed for Brandom’s original conceptualization of the normative (‘responsibility–authority’) structure of discursive score-keeping, and for his favoured ‘I–you’ type of sociality, systematically leave out of account ways in which the nature of normative authority itself has been historically altered and is institutionally embodied in modernity. We end (III) by considering how

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Pinkard and Pippin make the conception of modern ethical life [Sittlichkeit] in Hegel’s The Philosophy of Right bear on the issue of practical rationality. While Pinkard and Pippin both reject Brandom’s conception of discursive score-keeping, they suggest somewhat divergent accounts of practical rationality. Pinkard emphasizes that practical rationality depends on identification with ‘ends’ or ‘goods’ provided by a collective form of life; Pippin, however, defines practical rationality by interpersonal practices of reason-giving sustained and enabled by modern institutions.

I Pinkard on modes of reason-giving in a ‘social space’ In bringing out Hegel’s developmental account of normative authority in the Phenomenology Pinkard focuses on ways in which historical forms of life have reflected on, affirmed, or raised sceptical doubts about what count as authoritative reasons for belief and action. By participating in such reflective activity historical agents have located themselves in some particular ‘social space’ and through relations of mutual recognition achieved self-consciousness, a consciousness of who they are individually and collectively.4 However, Simon Lumsden finds that Pinkard’s recent account of the Phenomenology in terms of Hegel’s ‘Idea’5 makes ‘what counts as a determination of an agent too straightforwardly self-reflective’ (Lumsden, 2003: 51).6 Lumsden sees Pinkard to ‘limit . . . the negativity involved in thought’s self-determination to what an agent in interrecognitive relations authorizes as legitimate or illegitimate’ (ibid.). Lumsden rightly points out that Pinkard conceives such authorization to be achieved only through participation in discursive, reason-giving practices, but he just leaves Pinkard with a Brandomian idiom to conceptualize such participation in terms of ‘making things explicit’ through ‘the giving and asking for reasons’.7 Although he notes that Pinkard’s Hegel collectively attributes a ‘pre-reflective practical orientation’ to participants in a form of life,8 he fails to consider that Pinkard’s relatively indeterminate term ‘social space’ invites further specification of various modes and levels of reason-giving through Pinkard’s interpretation of the various ‘standpoints’ of ‘Consciousness’, ‘Self-consciousness’, ‘Reason’ and ‘Spirit’ in the Phenomenology. Such specification actually takes two directions in Pinkard’s book-length interpretation (Pinkard, 1994): first, regarding level of reflection required and enabled by practices; second, as to whether ‘moves’ in a ‘social space’ are conceived abstractly, as ‘inferential moves’ in a space of reasons, or concretely, as reason-giving situated in social interaction and institutional contexts. Therefore, to understand what Pinkard takes reason-giving to be, and to qualify Lumsden’s criticism, we need to consider both these lines of specification.

Across historical forms of life Pinkard recognizes a general division between participation in reason-giving at a distinctively self-reflective (self-conscious) level and participation at some less reflective level. When analysed concretely the latter amounts to daily verbal ‘activities of reason-giving’ such as narrating a story to explain or justify one’s actions or way of life to someone (Pinkard, 1994: 8). One may also talk about more implicit modes of reason-giving such that agents in social interaction hold themselves and each other accountable to reasons ‘on the basis of shared social norms that structure their ‘‘social space’’’ (ibid.). Abstractly analysed, however, reason-giving at this reflective level

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is conceived in terms of inferential ‘moves’ licensed by some material inference rule in a ‘space of reasons’.9 Further, reason-giving is analysed at a distinctively self-reflective or self-conscious level. Abstractly conceived, agents may need reassurance that ‘the ground rules’ themselves are in order when ‘some way of reasoning within that ‘‘social space’’ quite unexpectedly leads to scepticism about the whole system of reasons’ (Pinkard, 1994: 9).

Hence, ‘agents seek to affirm for themselves that what they have come to take as authoritative reasons really are authoritative reasons’ (ibid.). From the ‘standpoint of Spirit’ Pinkard’s Hegel specifies more concretely how such reflective practices are established and fulfil their ‘affirming’ or ‘reassuring’ function in their respective historical forms of life. The latter function is fulfilled in virtue of institutionalization of cultural activities such as ‘tragic drama, religious practice, philosophical reflection, acting within certain social roles’ (ibid.). Hence, normative authority can be affirmed only in virtue of historically established ‘reflective institutions’ (ibid.: 221), such as Sophocles’ tragic dramas in ancient Greece and the use of Pierre Corneille’s dramatic plays in early-modernity.

Moreover, the conception of such ‘reflective institutions’ plays a key role in Pinkard’s non-metaphysical interpretation as such: it makes it possible to account for normative change and development without an appeal to some metaphysical principle underlying historical progression.10 The emphasis is here on the content of the accounts of normative authority that are developed through such ‘reflective institutions’. A sceptical stance toward such accounts is developed through determinate negation by bringing out incoherencies and contradictions in the accounts themselves.11 Scepticism about an account of normative authority, and hence the very possibility of new accounts overcoming that scepticism, is thus generated by terms set by the account itself.

This relatively abstract focus on content might, however, give occasion to reintroduce and qualify Lumsden’s charge of ‘discursive bias’ concerning a too restricted account of ‘negativity’ and a deficient account of the notion of experience in the Phenomenology (Lumsden, 2008: 59). In particular, when negativity is said to be introduced ‘into the form of life’ (Pinkard, 1994: 221–2) due to contributions made through an institutionalized reflective practice, this defocuses other levels and modes of practice otherwise recognized and distinguished by Pinkard’s Hegel.12 Moreover, the focus on scepticism generated through reflective accounts of normative authority gives priority to a rather abstract notion of human agency. At least this suggests a notion more abstract than the one recently proposed by Pippin in qualifying the developmental project in the Phenomenology as a ‘logic of experience’: Pippin here conceives agency and action in terms of ‘a kind of self-negation’ (Pippin, 2008a: 212; emphasis added) that historically situated agents find themselves to be in when acting on their claimed commitments and principles.13 Taking our clue from Pippin’s notion of action as ‘self-negation’ we may argue that a non-metaphysical interpretation consistently accounting for normative authority and agency in terms of participation in social practices needs to focus on interdependencies between ‘reflective institutions’ and pre-reflective modes of practice, and between the various modes of reason-giving in a form of life. Such interdependencies seem to be required if scepticism about accounts of normative authority is to become historically effective and motivate agents both collectively and individually. Such thoroughgoing scepticism would then depend on participants’ enduring perception of breakdowns in the

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various modes of reason-giving in a form of life. Fortunately, Pinkard’s detailed interpretation provides opportunities to substantiate these claims.

An instructive historical case can be found in Hegel’s story of the breakdown of the aristocratic ethos of honour in early-modern Europe.14 Pinkard qualifies this historical transition as an ‘experience of ‘‘groundlessness’’’ (Pinkard, 1994: 166), a loss of authoritative ways of justifying beliefs and actions. Admittedly, his emphasis is on an abstract ‘dialectical logic’ (ibid.: 162) of the accounts the aristocracy gives of itself and its authoritative reasons for belief and action, and of which the disillusioned account in Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew is seen as ‘the logical conclusion’ (ibid.: 163). Nevertheless, such ‘dialectic’ is enabled by institutionalized reflective practices ‘in the form of plays, poems, and philosophy’ (ibid.: 151), and Pinkard’s interpretation also makes the breakdown intelligible in terms of interdependencies between various modes of reasongiving, and in terms of tensions in the overall normative structure of the aristocrats’ ‘social space’.

The aristocratic ethos consists in a set of practices structured by ‘the Good’ of state power15 and an obligation to serve it. The aristocrats may thus distinguish themselves from the bourgeois commoners seen to seek merely private Wealth, which is ‘the Bad’.

Through serving the authoritative political body or person aristocrat seeks to justify an account of himself or herself as honourable; honour is in turn conceived as the universal aim of cultivation [Bildung] through which they are to lift themselves up from the ‘particularity’ of all base motives otherwise attributed to the bourgeois commoner. As the story goes, however, the norms structuring the aristocrat’s ‘social space’ cannot provide coherent and independent criteria to support his or her judgement: the norms cannot provide coherent criteria since wealth is seen ever more to structure the practices of reward sustaining the aristocratic way of life economically; and they cannot provide criteria independent of his or her judgment and choice of way of life in the absence of sustaining institutional-political structures and of some given, natural hierarchy distinguishing noble from ‘base’ ends of life. The aristocrat thus makes a ‘criterion-less choice’ (Pinkard, 1994: 154).

The emerging ‘groundlessness’ can be made intelligible in terms of interdependencies between different modes of reason-giving. As Pinkard points out, aristocrats ‘were displaying their own cultivation in ‘‘conversational warfare’’’ (Pinkard, 1994: 158) in the court of Louis XIV: here they sought to defend and justify themselves as honourable, a status obtained, however, only through others’ recognition. In such verbal activity participants used accounts given of aristocracy in the dramatic plays of Pierre Corneille as authoritative reasons for belief and action. The aristocrats also turned to the theatre to find out ‘how they were to behave and feel’ (ibid.: 160). It thus becomes hard to make any principal distinction between independent modes of reason-giving in the very project of cultivation: indeed, as for the use of Corneille in the royal court of Louis XIV Pinkard points out that ‘life and theatre began to merge’ (ibid.).

Nevertheless, Pinkard’s story of the breakdown tends to give a rather abstract account of the aristocrat as a rational and reflective agent. Insofar as the role of the aristocratic agent in the breakdown is conceived in terms of participation in the verbal activities of cultivation, such participation is seen to issue in a ‘pure self’ [das reine Ich (376, § 508)] which ‘is ‘‘reflected out of’’ its practices and goals ‘‘into itself’’’ (Pinkard, 1994: 160).

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Still, the self of those practices is ‘for us’ the phenomenologists, not ‘for it’, ‘pure’ and self-identical (391, § 527); as participant in the verbal activities of cultivation it is described as the consciousness disrupted or torn apart by its conflicting ends and statuses [das zerrissene Bewusstsein (386, § 521)]. Adapting Pippin’s terminology, such alienated consciousness consists in a self-negation in virtue of its own judging or reasongiving activity through which the very aristocratic ethos dissolves and brings about what Hegel calls its truth.16 For us as phenomenologist interpreters to appreciate the rationality of this breakdown, and its paving the way for modern accounts of normative authority as a ‘self-grounding’ (Pinkard, 1994: 179), we need, as Pippin has pointed out, to see such ‘self-dissolving’ activity, not as something ‘fated, necessitated or caused’, since ‘Hegel . . . requires that this active ‘‘dissolution’’ of any ethical substantiality account for itself as an activity . . . intentionally undertaken for reasons’ (Pippin, 1997: 14). However, as indeed Pinkard’s own interpretation shows, in order to understand how various modes of reason-giving break down one has to take the overall normative structure of the ‘social space’ into account to see how agents, individually and collectively, may fail to appropriate and affirm for themselves the norms of their ‘social space’ as authoritative reasons for belief and action.

As for the latter, we note that Pinkard has recently conceded to using Brandom’s ‘deontic’ language of ‘entitlement’ and ‘commitment’ to characterize the overall normative structure of a ‘social space’.17 However, contrary to what Lumsden suggests,18 both Pinkard (2007) and Pippin (2005a) have rejected Brandom’s conception of discursive practice to account for how agents may give and ask for reasons for actions and beliefs, and for how ‘we moderns’ may recognize the rationality of historical breakdowns in former modes of reason-giving. We therefore need to ask: why would Pippin and Pinkard want to reject Brandom’s conception of discursive practice and thus his most original conceptual contribution to modern Hegel scholarship?

II Assessing Brandom’s conception of discursive score-keeping Although Brandom is a ‘non-metaphysical’ ally in maintaining, as Pippin acknowledges, that ‘the ‘‘realm of das Geistige’’ is ‘‘the normative order’’’ (Pippin, 2008a: 224), Pinkard and Pippin as well have concerns with their ally. The heart of the problem lies with Brandom’s conception of discursive practice as ‘deontic score-keeping’; a practice such that participants mutually keep score on changes in their normative statuses (more on which below). On Pippin’s criticism (Pippin, 2005a) Brandom’s conception fails to provide an account of the authority of norms that score-keepers rely on – and therefore of the scores too. Pippin thinks that Brandom’s recent qualification of score-keeping in historical terms19 does not seriously address this problem. In order to assess this criticism, however, we need to qualify the problem in terms of Brandom’s original development of the conception of discursive score-keeping in Making It Explicit.

Brandom’s notion of score-keeping accounts for how normative change takes place at micro-level through verbal or non-verbal performances.20 The significance of a performance is seen to lie in its altering the normative or ‘deontic’ status of the agent, i.e. the agent’s practical or doxastic commitments and entitlements. Such change is in turn defined

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in terms of the normative or ‘deontic’ attitudes of the agents in undertaking or attributing commitments and entitlements, and thereby mutually keeping score on such normative statuses. However, according to the idea of score-keeping as discursive practice the normative statuses attributed and undertaken may be articulated inferentially, and thus the entitlement to commitments undertaken or attributed may be justified or questioned; score-keeping is thus, to use Sellars’ idiom, a game of ‘giving or asking for reasons’.

Nevertheless, Pippin sees the normative authority of score-keepers’ attributions as a serious problem. In social and historical context score-keepers would rely on some norm, even a ‘paradigmatic normative principle’ (Pippin, 2005a: 394), such as those that are acted on or appealed to, but end up contested and dissolved in the Phenomenology.21 Brandom, Pippin claims, ‘cannot account for how an external interpreter or an internal participant can properly challenge the authority of norms on the basis of which [a scorekeeper’s] attributions are made’ (ibid.: 392). This inability is not due simply to the focus on micro-contexts as such; Pippin (ibid.: 395) locates a further source of this inability in the alleged ‘individualism’ of Brandom’s inferentialism about content: an inferential articulation of the content of normative statuses attributed or undertaken, and hence any attempt at justifying or challenging entitlement to commitments attributed or undertaken, is in the final analysis grounded in the score-keepers’ individual attitudes. So, if Brandom’s ‘meaning normativity’ is ‘reductionistic[ally]’ based in ‘the attitudinal states of individuals’ (ibid.)22 there will be little explanatory ground left to account for the authority of norms discursive score-keepers actually rely on.

Pippin picks an historical example of score-keeping from Making It Explicit to make his point. The example is, in Brandom’s own words, a ‘simplified and artificial version of an actual eighteenth-century British practice’ (Brandom, 1994: 162) which, more specifically, involves naval officers in search of recruits visiting taverns in disguise to offer ‘the queen’s shilling’/‘the king’s shilling’ to illiterate sailors who were drinking up their money. According to this practice, an acceptance of such ‘offer’ makes it appropriate for the officer to attribute the commitment of enlistment in the navy on part of the sailor, which in turn makes the sailor liable to punishment if he fails to fulfil that commitment. To Pippin this example shows that Brandom is ignorant of the ‘problem of ‘‘positivity’’’ (Pippin, 2005a: 393) which plays an important role in Hegel’s writings.

The problem is, when reformulated in Brandomian language, that of ‘subjection by others according to appropriate, public practices, to a status of ‘‘undertaken commitments’’ not recognized as such by the individual’ (ibid.: 395). Such ignorance on the part of Brandom, Pippin argues, is fortified by his semantic individualism anchoring inferential articulations of ‘deontic’ scores in individual attitudes. This individualism makes his pragmatics insensitive to ways in which score-keepers attributing commitments to others are inclined to follow some standing actual practice with its modes of social domination or coercion: hence the charge of ‘inferentialist positivism’ (ibid.: 392) or ‘social positivism’ (Pinkard, 2007: 166, n. 21). Unfortunately, however, Pippin fails to note that Brandom uses the ‘simplified and artificial version’ of the 18th-century practice to develop the very conception of a score-keeping discursive practice through levels of methodological abstraction and idealization. To understand the conceptual strategy motivating the use of the example is thus important in order to clarify the real issue between Brandom, Pippin and Pinkard.

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Brandom’s ‘simplification’ abstracts from historical context in order to analyse the normative structure of a discursive score-keeping practice. A defining element in such structure is what Brandom (following the moral philosopher Kurt Baier) calls taskresponsibility; i.e. ‘committing oneself to perform in a certain way’ (Brandom, 1994: 163). In a fully developed discursive practice, which ‘taking the queen’s shilling’/‘the king’s shilling’ is not yet to exemplify, this amounts to the more abstractly conceived conditional task-responsibility of justifying entitlement to a (doxastic) commitment undertaken by making a claim if the latter is challenged. The full normative structure of such practice further contains a dimension of responsibility with ‘a coordinate dimension of authority’ (ibid.: 164); undertaking task-responsibility is seen to provide authorization to attribute the commitment to perform and to sanction in case of non-performance.23 However, ‘taking the queen’s shilling’/‘the king’s shilling’ is of ‘the more primitive sort of non-linguistic undertaking of task-responsibility’ (ibid.: 180) and at best takes us only halfway in the analysis of the full normative structure of a discursive practice.24 On Brandom’s account of conditional task-responsibility, authorization to attribute commitment and to sanction springs from doing something that counts as the speech act of making a claim, an assertion. This abstractly defined normative (‘responsibility– authority’) structure is to account for the proprieties of the attitudes of participants in discursive score-keeping; and Pippin’s charge of individualist reductionism ignores that the score-keeping attitudes at stake are not simply those of an individual agent in some unqualified sense but those of a methodologically idealized participant undertaking justificatory responsibility, and those of a likewise idealized participant attributing ‘doxastic’ or ‘assertional commitments’. As for the real issue between Pippin (and Pinkard) and Brandom a first clue thus seems to be the modes of methodological idealization and abstraction involved in the conceptualization of the normative (‘responsibility–authority’) structure of discursive practice. Brandom makes such normative structure define a discursive practice as a normatively autonomous practice25 (or what Brandom, using a Wittgensteinian term, calls ‘the ideal Sprachspiel’ [Brandom, 1994: 179]); however, he first makes such autonomy intelligible in terms of a certain synchronic mode of abstraction and idealization in order to be able to account for (verbal and non-verbal) performances in a community in a normative way, assuming there to be ‘norms all the way down’ (ibid.: 44).26 Such mode of abstraction, however, seems seriously to sever the connection between Brandom’s abstract normative structure and the issue of normative authority in Hegel since, according to Pippin, the latter can only be dealt with along the historical dimension. In fact, as Pippin points out, the project in the Phenomenology is to account for historical alterations of ‘the nature of normative authority itself’ (Pippin, 2005a: 400). Even Brandom’s recent qualification of score-keeping, and of the very normative structure of discursive practice, in diachronic terms27 does not pay attention to such alteration and, more specifically, to the ways in which the historically developed institutional structures of modernity provide sources for the authority of particular normative commitments and ‘scores’.28 Still, it is crucial for assessing the charge of positivism to understand how participants in Brandom’s discursive score-keeping are to be seen as situated in some ‘social space’ at all. The conception of discursive score-keeping famously assumes the I–you relation as the ‘fundamental social structure’, not the I–we relation (Brandom, 1994: 39). Yet, we need to know how thus socially defined discursive participants stand in relation to

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participation in non-reflective practices where attributions of commitments largely remain implicit, and where justification for entitlement to commitments attributed is not asked for, perhaps due to the ‘default authority of superiors’ (ibid.: 242). It is useful here to consider how discursive score-keeping is generally to establish entitlement to practical commitments, commitments to act in a certain way.

Brandom models practical commitment on the notion of doxastic commitment,29 and entitlement to such commitments is to be justified through making claims in a game of ‘[g]iving and asking for reasons for actions’; which, for Brandom, is a practice of ‘making and defending claims’ generally (Brandom, 2000: 81). Pippin’s concern is that scores made discursively through inferential articulation of content would still rely on the authority of some implicit norm or principle, and that ‘the question of the authority of the articulation scored in certain ways at certain times is also indispensable to the question of such content’ (Pippin, 2005a: 394). However, Brandom’s pragmatics does not only account formally for the possibility of making implicit commitments challengeable through ‘propositional explicitness’;30 also, in sorting out different ‘patterns of practical reasoning’ Brandom distinguishes between types of normative contexts when discussing how justification of entitlement to practical commitments is to be achieved.31 Briefly, he distinguishes a practical-instrumental context, where individual preference (‘prudential norm’) provides reason for action; a workplace context where status as professional person (‘institutional norm’) provides a practical reason; and, finally, a moral context where an ‘unconditional’ moral norm may provide reason for certain ways of (not) treating others.

While Brandom primarily emphasizes the irreducibility of types of normative contexts for practical reasoning, particularly criticizing the ‘reductionism’ of the rationalitymaximizing theory of David Gauthier (based on the notion of individual preference or utility),32 the difference in generality of the types of norms also suggests priority as to the authority of the types of norms as reasons. Discursive score-keepers may thus generally take and acknowledge certain ‘unconditional’ moral norms as good reasons for action in ways they neither need nor should always acknowledge ‘prudential’ or professional, institutional norms as good practical reasons.33 Insofar, Brandom may counter the charge that his idea of discursive score-keeping leaves the issue of the appropriateness of attribution of commitments simply as ‘a matter of standing actual practice’ (ibid.: 395).

Both Pippin and Pinkard have, however, a further, serious charge regarding the objectivity of norms (or ‘deontic statuses’) articulated discursively. Brandom’s pragmatics famously construes such objectivity by a formal, social-perspectival distinction, based on the I–you type of sociality, between attitude and status, i.e. between taking someone to be committed to something and (really) being committed to something – so that ‘[o]bjectivity appears as a feature of the structure of discursive intersubjectivity’ (Brandom, 1994: 599). However, such formal approach, Pippin claims, is far from sufficient to ground a distinction between the mere ‘purported authority of an appeal to a norm and actual authority’ (Pippin, 2005a: 394) of agents’ score-keeping in social and historical context. Although Brandom qualifies discursive practice as ‘egalitarian’ (Brandom, 1994: 241), allowing no ‘privileged perspective’ on the objectivity of norms (ibid.: 599), Pippin again sees the problem of ‘positivity’ coming up: Brandom’s account of discursive score-keeping cannot ground any proper distinction between ‘the fact of power and the fact of reason’ (Pippin, 2005a: 398). Yet, Pippin is careful in stating his criticism to avoid inviting metaphysical assumptions.

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Pippin adopts Hegel’s terminology of ‘Reason’s actualization’ to the problem of the objectivity and the authority of discursive scores, and he maintains that ‘we cannot understand that dimension [of the authority of the articulations scored] except in so far as the possible articulations are . . . ‘‘actualized’’, verwirklicht’ (Pippin, 2005a: 394).

One of the places in the Phenomenology referred to is the transition to active or ‘practical reason in the Reason chapter’ (ibid.: 405, n. 34); here the very concept of ‘the actualization of self-conscious reason’ is said to have its ‘complete reality in the life of a people’ (264, § 350). Qualified in terms of Pippin’s criticism the claim is that norms can be articulated as authoritative practical reasons only when they have become ‘actualized’ or are ‘at work’ in the social practices and institutions such that the norms of the latter play an actionmotivating role for the agent.34 Still, a necessary historical qualification of the ‘actualization’ at stake is that institutions can be seen to embody the results of a development of increasing freedom and mutuality between agents. As mentioned, Pippin’s point is that, for Hegel, ‘the nature of normative authority itself’ has altered historically (Pippin, 2005a: 400); and by appealing to the notion of modern ethical life [Sittlichkeit] in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right Pippin underscores how ‘the claims of reason’ have become increasingly ‘embodied’ in the norms of our modern legal, political and economical institutions (ibid.). In contrast, the normative (‘responsibility–authority’) structure assumed for Brandom’s discursive score-keeping is conceived in abstraction from such historical and institutional contexts. To Pippin, however, the institutional ‘actualization of reason’ further involves that institutionally enabled learning processes are required for entering a game of giving and asking for reason for action since, as Pippin has pointed out recently, . . . [t]he claims of reason can only be ‘actual’ in a common ethical life . . . because it is only if the formative institutions of that society are themselves rational that I, as their product, can actually experience the claims of others as reasons for me to act or forebear from acting. (Pippin, 2008b: 117).

The historically achieved ‘institutional rationality’ is thus what sustains discursive processes of justifying or challenging the authority of practical reasons, and what makes reasons ‘effective’ as action-motivating reasons for participants.

Again, this suggests that the real issue is not Brandom’s alleged methodological individualism but the modes of abstraction assumed for the normative structure of discursive practice: the ‘responsibility–authoritative’ structure, with its I–you type of sociality, is abstracted from such forms of ethical relationships that we find in the modern family, in civil society and in politics. While Brandom quotes the Phenomenology saying that ‘language is the existence [Dasein] of Spirit’ (Brandom, 2009: 145)35 to provide support for the conception of a normatively ‘autonomous’ structure of responsibility and authority, such conception conflicts with Pippin’s and Pinkard’s developmental accounts of normative authority.

Nevertheless, Pippin’s and Pinkard’s developmental accounts of normative authority have limited value for an account of practical rationality insofar as the latter draws mainly on Hegel’s The Philosophy of Right. As both indeed seem to accept, philosophical accounts of the development of normative authority would have no direct import on the question of how modern agents may find reasons for actions through participating in

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the practices and institutions of modern ethical life and thus may live a free, self-determined life.36 We will end with some considerations of how Pinkard and Pippin answer that question.

III Discursive practice and practical rationality To both Pinkard and Pippin, Brandom’s discursive score-keeping would fail as a Hegelian model of practical rationality. Nevertheless, insofar as both stick to the strategy of defining practical rationality in terms of participation in social practices, Pinkard’s and Pippin’s accounts of practical rationality betray divergent conceptions of the sociality of rational agents. We first turn to Pinkard.

To Pinkard Brandom’s alleged ‘individualism’ leads to an un-Hegelian account of practical self-determination and self-authorization. Seeing Brandom’s score-keeping model as congenial to the post-Kantian position of Fichte rather than that of Hegel, Pinkard takes Brandom’s model to allow practical self-authorization to be conceived only as a process going on between individual agents, their acts and attitudes. On Hegel’s account, Pinkard claims: ‘[I]t is not, however, to others as individuals that we necessarily turn, as we were always negotiating with others about our maxims’ (Pinkard, 2007: 161).

Rather, qualifying the notion of ethical life in terms of ‘a background set of norms’,37 Pinkard’s Hegel holds that for ‘practical reason to find its content and motivational force’ it is ‘to the non-chosen background form of life’ we turn (ibid.). ‘Background norms’ are ‘collectively authored’ (ibid.: 158); yet, using Hegel’s very words in The Philosophy of Right (§ 147), Pinkard argues that they are ‘not alien to the subject’ but ‘his own essence’ (Pinkard, 2007: 160). How should we understand this?

In Pinkard’s more extensive account of modern ethical life in The Philosophy of Right we find the outlines of a conception of practical rationality. More specifically, a notion of ethical ends is here to account for how an agent acquires practical reasons consistent with his (or her) being morally self-determined, although the content of such reasons is found ‘outside’ him, ‘in his social environment’ (Pinkard, 1994: 297). ‘Ethical ends’ provide the modern agent with action motivation reasons in ‘manifest[ing] the kinds of projects that the ‘‘social space’’ has for him and with which he identifies’ (ibid.: 298).

Practical rationality is thus to be conceived ‘in terms of the social institutions and practices of which [the agent] is a part’ (ibid.). Through their social roles in family and civil society agents can identify with and ‘acquire ethical ends’ (Pinkard, 1994: 322) both motivating and providing rational justification for action. However, given the private motivations of family life and the various particular interests motivating activities in civil society modern agents can only identify themselves with a coherent set of ethical ends if they are able as ‘self-conscious agents . . . to give accounts to themselves of the relation between their private and their public lives’ (ibid.: 326). Such accounts are possible only in virtue of ‘a political community’ (i.e. Hegel’s state) through which members are ‘provided with resources for those types of accounts’ (ibid.). Account- and reason-giving is thus conditioned and enabled by participation in institutionalized practices (such as ‘a general election’ [ibid.: 340]) that are mediated, however, through other ethical institutions of which the agent is a part; i.e. ‘institutions such as family, the economy’ (ibid.).

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We thus see the outlines of an account of practical rationality in terms of participation in social practices. Notably, to conceive participation as an acquiring of, and identification with, ethical ends seems indistinguishable from an account of a process of socialization and ‘Bildung’38 through which the agent acquires reasons that are both actionmotivating and socially authoritative. To use Brandom’s somewhat simplistic typology, this gives priority to a conceptualization of practical rationality in terms of an I–we type of sociality rather an I–you type. Insofar, Pinkard’s account may to some extent be contrasted with that of Pippin: in construing modern ethical life as ‘institutional rationality’ Pippin stresses that family, civil society and state make up overlapping institutional contexts conditioning and enabling reason-giving as an interpersonal process since, generally, ‘[Hegel] understands practical reason as a kind of interchange of attempts at justification among persons, each of whose actions affects what others would otherwise be able to do’ (Pippin, 2008b: 273). Practical rationality is thus defined by participation in ethical institutions and practices, but participation is here primarily conceived in terms of rule-following, rather than identification with ends. To Pippin reason-giving is thus ‘[j]ustifications . . . offered to others as claims that the rules governing their common practice are being followed’ (ibid.: 270). Although Pippin’s conception of rules and rulefollowing is not altogether clear, he wants to avoid a formal conception of rules (what Brandom would call ‘regulism’39) or a conception of rule or reason ‘actualized’ in modern institutions simply as ‘some propositional object of an attitude’ (ibid.: 263). As for the normative status of institutional rules, the discursive articulation of rules in practical contexts may be contestable as to its normative force and application, or, as Pippin says of Brandom’s discursive ‘scores’: ‘the question of the authority of the [inferential] articulation scored in certain ways at certain times is also indispensable to the question of such content’ (Pippin, 2005a: 394). Still, even in such cases, asking for reasons for action may be conceived as enabled by institutional contexts: doubting or contesting claims to the authority of rules as practical reasons may be seen as due to ‘tensions, pulls, and counter-pulls’ (Pippin, 2008b: 265) between different institutional contexts of reason-giving, ‘pulls’ that are experienced, however, from within a particular context, say, a workplace or a family. Such ‘institutional account’ does not abolish the interpersonal dimension of reason-giving; Pippin points out that local breakdowns in reason-giving may be resolved by ‘negotiating with others at a time better candidates for such rules, for normative status; that is, better motivating practical reasons for the participants, given what had broken down’ (ibid.: 267).

Having thus contrasted Pippin’s and Pinkard’s accounts of the sociality of practical reason, one might find exegetical clues for modifying this comparison. It is true that both interpreters concede to a certain notion of collective sociality: in recent works both have conceived participation in social practices at a level of historically achieved collective mindedness and they have thus updated the concept of Geist in terms of what Pinkard calls ‘the common attunements in our practices and our use of language’ (Pinkard, 2008: 114). However, whereas Pippin’s Hegel rather leaves considerations on spirit as collective mindedness as a part of a more general developmental account of norms and practical reasons as historical ‘results’,40 Pinkard makes the notion of primitive sociality bear directly on his conceptualization of practical rationality as such.

Two elements of Pinkard’s notion of mindedness are important here. First, there is the teleological element: human agents growing up as members of a particular historical

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form of life are practically and pre-reflectively oriented towards certain goods providing them with action-motivating reasons.41 Mindedness further involves a certain knowledge-constitutive element: an agent trained into a form of life acquires ‘tacit knowledge’ or various practical ‘skills’ (Pinkard, 2008: 114) in terms of which explicit claims or judgements may be articulated. Action-motivating reasons or goods may thus on reflection be articulated to rationally support moral claims.42 Pinkard’s use of the notion of mindedness has two further important consequences for a conception of practical rationality. First, like Alasdair MacIntyre (MacIntyre, 1999), Pinkard’s Hegel ties the notion of practical reasons (or goods) to a form of moral realism: while in a collective, historical perspective various goods are subject to change and ‘construction’, for the individual, reasons (goods) are ‘found in the social world and natural world’ (2007: 160).43 This might place Pinkard’s ‘non-metaphysical’ interpretation in a certain critical light: how do social and natural goods make up (or provide sources for) a ‘space of reasons’? While Pinkard is prepared to account for moral reasons in relation to both a social and a natural order, what separates the moral realism of Pinkard’s Hegel from that of MacIntyre or Charles Taylor is his insistence on an epistemological (rather than an ontological) account of the knowledge-constitutive role of mindedness. Systematically qualifying and updating Hegel’s notion of the soul (in his ‘Philosophy of Subjective Spirit’44) Pinkard argues that our collective mindedness constitutes a ‘middle-level of meaning’ and ‘normativity’ – between ‘purely organic embodiment’ and ‘more reflective, propositional forms of meaning that are appropriate to self-conscious mindedness’ (Pinkard, 2009: 11). Second, although Pinkard defines practical rationality in terms of participation in social practices, his most recent account raises some doubt as to whether a conception of distinctively discursive, reason-giving practices plays a defining role for the conception of practical rationality as such. In Pinkard’s earlier work, modern institutions provide, as we have seen, an ability to participate in specific kinds of ‘reasongiving practices’ (Pinkard, 1994: 340); by the constitutive role of collective mindedness it is not clear, however, whether or (at least) how such participation is to play a crucial role.45 This suggests that Pinkard’s conception of practical rationality is to be found further away from Brandom and Brandom’s Hegel than is Pippin’s conception. It also confirms, more generally, that the interpretations of the three scholars are more divergent than the label ‘non-metaphysical’ suggests.

Notes I am grateful to Terry Pinkard for permission to quote from an unpublished text and for making available an English translation of a text published in German.

1. Brandom’s use of Sellarsian ideas is well known from his two major systematic works (Brandom, 1994, 2000). As for Pinkard’s and Pippin’s acknowledgement of the influence from Sellars, see Pinkard (1994: 7, n. 12; 2006) and Pippin (2008b: 61, 236).

2. References to the Phenomenology are given in parentheses in the main text; for example, the page number of the German edition from the Suhrkamp Theorie-Werkausgabe, vol. 3, is followed by the paragraph number from the English translation of A. V. Miller: (56, § 78).

3. Lumsden (2008: 59; see also 2003: 51).

4. See Pinkard (1994: 8–9).

5. See Pinkard (2000a).

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6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

See also Lumsden (2008: 59).

Lumsden (2003: 51). ibid.

See Pinkard (1994: 7, n. 12, 47).

‘Only when . . . social practices are established whose function is to reflect on, and thereby to affirm and disaffirm that what a given form of life takes as authoritative reasons for belief and action really are authoritative reasons – can there be a teleological historical progression. . . .

[U]nless a form of life develops some way of reflecting on its reason-giving activities, it cannot generate the kinds of self-undermining sceptical discrediting that then require and make possible their resolution in some later form of life having its own distinct account of itself and its own set of reflective institutions’ (Pinkard, 1994: 221).

See ibid.: 7, 176, n. 87.

In recent articles Pinkard may be seen to balance or complement his former focus through his now stronger explanatory emphasis on Hegel’s terms ‘shape of spirit’ [Gestalt des Geistes] (see Pinkard, 2008) and ‘form of life’ [Gestalt des Lebens]: ‘[w]e ask not about the relative coherence of such forms of life, but about how those forms of life are most deeply experienced and ‘‘lived out’’ by its participants, and about whether some ways of life must . . . inevitably collapse under their own weight because they put impossible demands on the people actually living those lives’ (Pinkard, 2007: 157).

Pippin (2008a: 212, 220) here follows Hegel’s qualification of subjectivity as ‘pure, simple negativity’ in the Preface (23, § 18), as well as Hegel’s reference in the section on ‘Absolute knowing’ (580, § 796) to his account of action (in the section on ‘Reason’). Generally, ‘[t]he image is of a subject embodying a point of view or world-orientation or self-understanding or practice, which is born in such a way that such a subject . . . comes to create a dissatisfaction with its own deepest principles and commitments’ (Pippin, 2008a: 212). In fact, in laying out Hegel’s theory of action Pippin reaches out for Pinkard’s interpretative framework in seeing actions as ‘evolving and changing expressions of a subject’s intentions over an extended time, determinate only in extended confrontation and reaction within what Terry Pinkard has called ‘‘social space’’ ’ (ibid.: 220). An agent’s true commitments are thus seen to become ‘externalized’ and determined by subjecting ‘oneself to the reactions, counterclaims, and challenges of others’ (ibid.: 221).

See the section on ‘Spirit’, VI, B. (359–90, §§ 484–538).

Historically, ‘state power’ designates changing authoritative political bodies or persons over an extended period of time in European history; at an early stage, it is the feudal lord served by the knight; later, it is the absolute monarch, e.g. Louis XIV, served by aristocrats at his court.

See Pinkard (1994: 152, n. 44, 158–61). ‘[Das] Dasein [des warhes Geistes] ist das allgemeine Sprechen und zerreissende Urteilen, welchem alle jene Momente, die als Wesen und wirkliche Glieder des Ganzen gelten sollen, sich auflo¨sen und welches ebenso dies sich auflo¨sende Spiel mit sich selbst ist. Dies Urteilen und Sprechen ist daher das Wahre und Unbezwingbare, wa¨hrend es alles u¨berwa¨ltigt; dasjenige, um welches es in dieser realen Welt allein wahrhaft zu tun ist’ (386, § 521). ‘[A]scriptions of knowledge . . . are moves within a social space structured by responsibilities, entitlements, attributions, and the undertakings of commitments’ (Pinkard, 2003a: 5; see particularly n. 14). Note also: ‘[w]e begin within a way of life, as ‘‘one among many’’, and the self-consciousness of each consists not only in his locating himself in that ‘‘social space’’

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

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19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

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of shared norms, entitlements, and commitments, but in each also being self-conscious of the other’s self-conscious status’ (Pinkard, 2000b: 343).

See Lumsden (2003: 51; 2008: 59).

See Brandom (2002: 226–34).

See Brandom (1994: 45, 166).

According to Hegel’s story in the Phenomenology these are principles such as ‘the divine’ and ‘the human law’ in ancient Greece, and ‘state power’ and ‘the law of heart’ in early-modern Europe.

See also Pinkard (2007: 164–6).

See Brandom (1994: 165).

The example has serious limitations in two respects. First, in locating the source of normative authority in some ‘systems of interdefined practices’ (Brandom, 1994: 163), Brandom defines normativity only in terms of attitudes to sanction that are defined internally to the systems of practices or norms (see also ibid.: 44; and see note 26 below). Second, a further limitation is that doing something that would here be qualified as undertaking commitment, to quote Brandom at some length, ‘entitles other authorities – those who according to the antecedent score already had undertaken various commitments or duties and entitlements or sorts of authority, those who therefore play a certain role or hold a certain office in the system of practices in question – to punish the performer in particular ways under particular circumstances’ (ibid.: 166; emphasis added). Such description is troublesome indeed: although change in normative status is said to be due to score-keeping (‘antecedent score’) or change in normative attitudes, Brandom’s account rather suggests that authorization to attribute commitment and to sanction is established in virtue of what Brandom elsewhere calls a ‘hierarchy of authority’ (ibid.: 160) and thus of some given social status.

On Brandom’s account, a discursive practice, as well as the linguistic practice of promising, thus ‘exhibit[s]’ its own normative structure (Brandom, 1994: 165). In an earlier work he formulates the point in this way: ‘The speech act of asserting arises in a particular, socially instituted, autonomous structure of responsibility and authority’ (Brandom, 1983: 640).

Autonomy thus first applies to some ‘system of norms’ (Brandom, 1994: 44) which is to account for sanctioning responses to performances, and thus for the significance of the performances themselves, in normative terms: it is thus to be ‘norms all the way down’ (ibid.). In an earlier article (Brandom, 1983) where such notion of autonomy is likewise applied to the conception of discursive practice, the former notion is formulated in somewhat more general terms suggesting, however, the same kind of (synchronic) abstraction and idealization, having structural similarity to an approach typical of synchronic linguistics since Ferdinand de Saussure: ‘If the responses defining each kind of significance a performance can have in some social behavioral system are in this sense themselves performances whose significance is constituted by how they can appropriately be responded to (rather than by objectively definable responses such as cutting one’s throat), we may call the system of social practices autonomous. . . . The inferential-justificatory system of practices comprised by asserting is autonomous in this sense’ (Brandom, 1983: 645, n. 15; see also ibid.: 645, n.

17). One might perhaps reply that Brandom’s recent diachronic qualification of the ‘responsibility–authority’ structure through his Common Law analogy shows that his conception of discursive practice as a normatively autonomous practice is not tied to a synchronic mode of abstraction (see Brandom, 2002: 230–3; 2009: 84–94); however, this analogy has much

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27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

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of its force of appeal through there already being a normatively autonomous practice in place, in virtue of historically developed legal institutions. An account of the normative authority of such institutions, however, is exactly what Pippin finds missing in Brandom’s Hegel (see Pippin, 2005a: 400).

Brandom (2002: 233–4).

See Pippin (2005a: 400).

See Brandom (1994: 233).

See Brandom (ibid.: 248).

See Brandom (ibid.: 245; 2000: 84–7).

Brandom (2000: 92).

See ibid.; and the comment: ‘Some kinds of reasons for actions, paradigmatically moral ones, have a permissive or committive force that is independent of interpersonal differences’ (Brandom, 1994: 240).

The latter qualification is of course necessary not to invite again the issue of ‘positivity’.

Pippin has elsewhere stressed both these qualifications of practical reason being ‘actual’: ‘[T]o say that practical reasons must be ‘‘actual’’ to count as reasons is not only to make reference to the objective, historical condition; it is also to say that the considerations must be able to be motivating or ‘‘internal’’ reasons for a subject and cannot be merely or exclusively ‘‘external’’ reasons’ (Pippin, 2008b: 155).

See the Phenomenology (376, § 508; 478, § 652).

See Pinkard (1994: 341–2; and 2008b: 269–72).

For a justification of this qualification, see Pinkard (1994: 123–4).

See Pinkard (ibid.: 302, 324–5).

See Brandom (1994: 18–20).

‘Someone’s being a partner in a contract, a mother, a businessman, or a citizen just thereby gives him or her reasons to do or forebear from doing (if he or she has been properly socialized). But such ‘‘reasons’’ do not and cannot play the particular role they play ‘‘on their own,’’ as it were. They are results. Indeed, as Hegel says, a common human-mindedness, Geist, is essentially a ‘‘result of itself’’’ (Pippin, 2005b: 220).

Pinkard finds a source for Hegel’s notion of (mindedness as) ‘pre-reflective orientation’ in Friedrich Ho¨lderlin (Pinkard, 2000b: 134–5). Pinkard makes this notion bear on Hegel’s conception of practical rationality in The Philosophy of Right in the sense of a ‘prereflective orientation [that] has to do with our socialisation, with the ways in which we are formed by our education and form an implicit, even at first unclear, sense of what we are about, what our identity calls on us to do’ (ibid.: 476). Pinkard’s Hegelian account of practical rationality in terms of mindedness seems to come close to how he understands a central trait of Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of practical rationality (MacIntyre, 1999); see Pinkard (2003b: 192). ‘[P]ractical reasoning, Hegel concluded, must itself therefore come out of some type of prereflective orientation that establishes certain goods as first premises, which in turn feature in the agent’s project for his life and . . . which the agent can later, through reflection, come to see as rational’ (Pinkard, 2000b: 476).

See also Pinkard (2003b: 192–3).

See Hegel (1986: §§ 387–411).

Pinkard tends to conceive rational agency more abstractly, in terms of how self-conscious agents, individually or collectively, reflect on their goods or ends: ‘we must be able to satisfy

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ourselves reflectively as to whether those ‘‘projects’’ into which we have been socialized can themselves be rationally sustained, can maintain our allegiance to themselves’ (Pinkard, 2000b: 476).

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