The grandeur of Brandom’s book Reason in Philosophy (like that of his philosophical project more generally) lies in its ambitious and programmatic nature. The book tries to shed light on Selves, Norms, Concepts, Autonomy, Community, Freedom, History, Reason, Reality and Philosophy starting from a relatively small set of ideas constituting his (strong) inferentialist semantics and ideas about how norms are instituted. Part One of the book contains his Woodbridge lectures on the idealism of Kant and Hegel, showing how Hegel’s social and historical approach built on Kant’s normative approach to human mind, and Part Two has further essays on the nature of philosophy and reason today.

Brandom makes impressive points on all those topics, but given the restricted nature of the starting points, the resulting picture may remain one–sided but perhaps fruitfully so. In some cases, what he suggests as sufficient conditions are perhaps only necessary conditions, and in some cases the very problems discussed may be artifacts of the narrow restrictions accepted in the first place, but in many cases the only thing missing is more details. In what follows, I will focus on the first three chapters, and discuss Brandom’s striking explanation of intentionality in terms of rational integration of commitments (§2), the related view of subjecthood or selfhood (§3), and the views on normativity and mutual recognition (§4), and on community (§5), after briefly mentioning Brandom’s views on philosophy and reason that are more extensively developed in the latter part of the book (§1).

1. Philosophy and Reason

Kant rejected of questions of being and turned to the study of reason as the first philosophy.

Brandom sees the task of philosophy in a similar way:

“This book belongs to a venerable tradition that distinguishes us as rational animals, and philosophy by its concern to understand, articulate, and explain the notion of reason that is thereby cast in that crucial demarcating role.” (p. 1)

The obvious question this raises is why philosophy should focus on nothing but reason, and not for example on the nature of rational animals, including the question how the “animality” of rational animals differs from that of other animals. And indeed, why should philosophy focus merely on us, and not the rest of what there is.

It is indeed a necessary and central task of philosophy to understand the nature of normativity, responsibility and reason, and Brandom may be right that premature ontological speculation will not help our understanding of normative matters. But one may note that good metaphysical questions remain, for example placing reason so understood in nature. What does it tell us about the natural reality, that it can evolve into creatures capable of all that? How do the normative and the natural hang together in the widest possible sense of the word? To have this curiosity is to share the Sellarsian view about philosophy as an attempt to arrive at a stereoscopic vision; Brandom here seems to promote a view of philosophy which is slightly narrower and limited only to analyzing reason, sapience or normativity and what goes with it. On the broader Sellarsian view, this is indeed necessary, but not yet sufficient.

Brandom’s understanding of reason and normativity is further deliberately sharpened and narrowed in its starting point. He stresses inferential relations and, as a pragmatist, sees these as emerging from practices and processes of inferring. He explicitly puts aside possible other forms of reasoning, and quite centrally, puts aside any assumption that there might be an independent primitive notion of a normative reason such as a fact or consideration standing in favour of an action, intention or belief (suggested e.g. by Scanlon, Parfit, Dancy, Raz), or a related notion of what one overall ought to do given the normative significance of all such relevant facts. In Brandom’s view reasons are premises from which conclusions can be drawn, so it is commitments made (and their implications), and not facts that provide rational guidance (note that this meta–conception concerning the nature of reasons has substantial repercussions: those starting with reasons have room to assume that there are some reasons independently of one’s commitments — such as reasons to avoid causing suffering).

So there may be a legitimate worry whether Brandom manages to capture all of normativity, or whole reason, with his inferentialism. Brandom takes a relaxed view:

“Even in the light of these considerations, I am concerned to see what sort of story can be told, what sort of illumination one can get, by focusing to begin with on the central inferential kind of reasons and the dimension of reasoning they pick out.” (p. 4)

2. From the rational unity of commitments to intentionality?

The central concern in the first chapter is to articulate Kant’s idea of the normativity of the mental.

“what distinguishes judging and intentional doing from the activities of non-sapient creatures is not that they involve some special sort of mental processes, but that they are things knowers and agents are in a distinctive way responsible for. Judgments and actions make knowers and agents liable to characteristic kinds of normative assessment.” (p. 14)

The mind in seen in terms of normative tasks of maintaining a rational unity (of apperception). The task is to show how that normative process can provide us with a view of not only propositional (and conceptual) content, but also intentionality (that the judgments or commitments purport to be about objects), and a view of selfhood or subjectivity (the locus of whose commitments are at stake). These are to be explained pragmatically in terms of normatively responsive activity of judging.

Brandom summarizes the four questions he discusses in Chapter One as follows. His distinctive strategy is to make sense of each of these elements in terms of those that precede it. I’ll quote:

“(1) What one must do in order in the relevant sense to be taking responsibility for or committing oneself to a judgeable content (or practical maxim). This is engaging in the activity of synthesizing an original unity of apperception, by integrating the content in question into the whole that comprises all of one’s commitments in the light of the relations of material inferential consequence and incompatibility they stand in to one another.

(2) What one creates, sustains, and develops by doing that: the constellation of commitments that is an original synthetic unity of apperception (OSUA).

(3) The elements of that synthetic unity, what one takes responsibility for or commits oneself to. These are the judgeable contents that are integrated into the OSUA.

(4) What one thereby makes oneself responsible to. These are the objects that one comes to represent, in the sense of making oneself answerable (for the correctness of the endorsed judgeable contents that make up the OSUA) to objects, which one in that normative sense thereby counts as thinking (talking, judging) about.“(pp. 40-41)

(Claims 1 & 2): Brandom stresses the Kantian view, that in endorsing a judgment one has made oneself liable to distinctive kinds of normative assessment. To count as judging in a responsible manner, one should take on certain tasks: the prospective tasks of maintaining a rational unity of such commitments (taken as a synchronous constellation of commitments), and the retrospective task of justifying the current set of commitments comparatively as better than its predecessors (and thus seeing some rationality in the development of the constellation).

Brandom puts the prospective task in terms of Kant’s “synthetic unity of apperceptions”:

“What one must do in order to be taking responsibility for or committing oneself to a judgeable content (or practical maxim) in the sense that matters for apperceptive (sapient) awareness is synthesize an original unity of apperception, by integrating the content in question into the whole that comprises all of one’s commitments, in the light of the relations of material inferential consequence and incompatibility they stand in to one another.” (p. 14)

 

“It has a rational unity in that the commitments it comprises are treated as reasons for and against other commitments, as normatively obliging one to acknowledge some further commitments and prohibiting acknowledgment of others.” (p. 14)

Three tasks in more detail, are,

“One’s critical responsibility is to weed out materially incompatible commitments”(p.36),  “One’s amplialive responsibility is to extract the material inferential consequences of each commitment, including new ones, in the context of the auxiliary hypotheses and collateral premises provided by the rest of one’s commitments.”(p.36),  “One’s justificatory responsibility is to be prepared to offer reasons for the commitments (both theoretical and practical) that one acknowledges, by citing prior commitments (or undertaking further commitments) that inferentially entitle one to those new commitments. Seeking to fulfill the first sort of responsibility is aiming at a whole constellation of commitments that is consistent. Seeking to fulfill the second is aiming at one that is complete. And seeking to fulfill the third is aiming at a constellation of commitments that is warranted.”(p.36)

While the critical and justificatory tasks are clearly central, it is not entirely clear that we ought to aim at a complete constellation of commitments — as it is often pointed out, why bother in cases the consequences are of no significance?

This prospective rational task is later complemented with a retrospective assessment of comparing the current set of commitments to past ones, leaving open the possibility that in future the current best set of commitments so far will be superseded.

“What Hegel adds is a retrospective notion of rationally reconstructing the process that led to the commitments currently being integrated (not just the new one, but all the prior ones that are taken as precedential for it, too). This is a kind of genealogical justification or vindication of those commitments, showing why previous judgments were correct in the light of still earlier ones-and in a different sense, also in the light of subsequent ones. Hegel calls this process ‘Erinnerung,’ or recollection.” (p.90)

One way to see this is as broadening the Kantian idea,

“the rational unity that must he synthesized (the ‘original synthetic unity of apperception’) comprises the whole developmental process by which one arrived at one’s current commitments, and not just the current time-slice of that ongoing enterprise.” (pp.91–92)

Note that here Brandom gives the impression that the task of rational reconstruction is personalized. He may however mean it to concern whole communities, or traditions. Indeed, there is some unclarity in his views on whether a community is a context for individual commitments, or whether communities are loci or commitments of their own, see below (§5).

(Claim 3) A central point for Brandom is to ask whether the meaning or content of judgements, beliefs, or desires is given (“outsourced”) from the viewpoint of one’s account of reasoning or rationality (as Carnap or Kant assume), or whether meanings are normatively (inferentially) shaped as well (as Quine and Hegel, and Brandom assume). In this latter picture,

“justification (and so its cousins reason and inference) is not only a key concept in epistemological investigations of the nature of knowledge, but also and equally a key concept in semantic investigations of tile nature of meaning.“(p.5) “the inferential relations sentences stand in to one another are an essential element of the meanings that they express.”(p.7).

Inferentialism comes in two main variants. Weak semantic inferentialism claims only that inferential articulation is a necessary condition of conceptual contentfulness, whereas Strong semantic inferentialism claims further that inferential articulation is a sufficient condition (p.8). Given the wider appeal of weak inferentialism, many are bound to think that what Brandom suggests as a sufficient condition is really merely a necessary one. Brandom has defended strong inferentialism in his Making it Explicit, 1994, and in his other publications since, and is here concerned with some of the motivations and consequences of the view.

 

(Claim 4) Brandom’s pragmatist and holist approach tries to cash out the very idea that our thoughts even seem to refer to objects, or the “representational purport” or aboutness or intentionality of the mental, in terms of the rational unity of the judgments:

“the relations of material incompatibility and inferential consequence among judgeable contents that we have seen are a necessary condition of synthesizing a rational unity of apperception (which is to say judging) already implicitly involve commitments concerning the identity and individuation of objects they can accordingly be understood as representing or being about. Why? The judgment that A is a dog is not incompatible with the judgment that B is a fox. The judgment that A is a dog is incompatible with the judgment that A is a fox. That means that taking a dog-judgment to be materially incompatible with a fox-judgment is taking them to refer to or represent an object: the same object.”(43)

It is one of Brandom’s main ideas, and main claims to fame, that he thinks that rational integration can explain “representation” or intentional aboutness, of-intentionality. He rightly thinks he manages to shed light on “Kant’s dark but central claim that ‘it is the unity of consciousness that alone constitutes the relation of representations to an object'” (p. 15; Kant quote from B137).

In Brandom’s Copernican view this kind of sapient consciousness, its intentionality, reference to objects, can be fully cashed out in terms of inferentialist connections. He asks:

“What does one have to do to count as taking or treating it as a representing of something? The answer is that treating it as standing in relations of material incompatibility and inferential consequence to other such things is taking or treating it as a representation, as being about something.”(p.45)

This is an ingenuous answer, but it is not clear that there is a genuine question. For example, the step to sapience need not bring with it intentionality, if a non–sapient relation to world is intentional already. On a rival view, a horse can see the cart before it if there is one, and its conscious life is not mere “organic feeling” or booming buzzing confusion.  [Cf. Brandom’s remark on merely “organic feeling”, which I take is a phenomenon without intentionality: “Such discursive activity is the exercise of a distinctive kind of consciousness. It is sapient, rather than merely sentient, consciousness or awareness. For it depends on the sort of conceptual understanding that consists in practically knowing one’s way about in the inferentially articulated space of reasons and concepts, rather than the sort of organic feeling we share with animals that are not rational animals.”(p. 10)] As theorized say by Gibson, The Ecological Approach To Visual Perception (1979), non–linguistic animals can perceptually locate objects in relation to themselves. The intentionality of the mind can be independent of the rational unity of one’s commitments. Whereas Brandom might think it is a scandal of philosophy that representational purport isn’t demonstrated, others may well think it is a scandal to think it needs demonstration. Note however that even if the rational unity of commitments may not be all there is to the idea that our thoughts are about objects, it may well be a necessary element of sapient intentionality.

3. Selves and subjects

The process of synthesizing judgments into a constellation of commitments has not only an object pole (the objects represented) but also a subject pole. Both objects and subjects “repel” incompatibilities, but in a different manner. 

“Subjects are what repel incompatible commitments in that they ought not endorse them, and objects are what repel incompatible properties in that they cannot exhibit them. (Subjects are obliged to endorse the consequences of their commitments, and objects necessarily exhibit the properties that are consequences of their properties.)” (p.53)

Treating someone (e.g. oneself) as a single subject, analogously to treating something as a single object, is a matter of what excludes what:

“Committing myself to the animal’s being a fox, or to driving you to the airport tomorrow morning, normatively precludes me from committing myself to its being a rabbit, or to my sleeping in tomorrow (in the sense that I cannot be entitled to such commitments), but it does not in the same way constrain the commitments others might undertake.” (p.34)

 

In this book, Brandom’s formulations seem to be about “subjects” or “selves” in two or three senses; I’m not sure whether the first one is really intended by him:

First, Brandom sometimes writes as if the “constellation of commitments” is what the self or subject is (resembling views of the “thick” self or practical identity which take it that one’s self or “identity”, who one is, is to be cashed out in terms of one’s goals and commitments).

“Because the kind of normative unity distinctive of the synthetic unity of apperception must be understood in terms of the synthetic-integrative activity that produces it, the cognitive-practical subject or self that is identified with a synthetic unity of apperception is not happily thought of using the traditional category of substance.”(41), “Engaging in those integrative activities is synthesizing a self or subject“(52).

A similar idea of the person as a constellation of commitments has been put forward by Carol Rovane (The Bounds of Agency, 1998), and it is a kind of “rationally integrated bundle view” of a subject. The subject is an “integrate” (to use Philip Pettit’s terminology), not a “mere” bundle.

Certainly such a constellation of commitments may have interesting features (more or less coherent, more or less focused on sports, etc), but they are different features from what a thinker has (quick, perceptive, patient etc). So definitely the thinker seems to be a different thing from the resulting set of commitments, however integrated.

What, secondly, is the subject then the one doing the thinking, committing, criticizing, reflecting? At least Brandom often refers to that agent with personal pronouns, and the whole unity of commitments rests on the activity and practices, which are presumably undertaken by someone. So another sense of “subject” refers to that someone or something, who actually does the things in question. But that active subject has priority to the resulting rational unity of constellations (just like a painter has a kind of priority to the painting — the painter is not fully a result of the painting).

But there is a third sense in which the category of subject is at play in the task of maintaining a rational unity, that is, the locus of the commitments of the question. Just like the synthetic unity refers to an object, the commitments are someone’s responsibility.

“Engaging in those integrative activities is synthesizing a self or subject, which shows up as what is responsible for the component commitments into which it is articulated.”(p.52)

This subject could in principle be different than the active committer, for example in cases of collective commitments — a representative can do the judging, but the whole group gets the responsibility. The obvious question then is how these two or three kinds of subjects or selves are to be integrated with one another. A similar kind of challenge is probably faced by all “self–constitution” approaches to subjectivity and agency — they are likely to view all three (the active subject, the locus of commitments and the web of commitments made) as three “aspects” of the self in question, but one would like to hear more on how this is done.  [Brandom puts forward an explicit view on this in his earlier paper “The Structure of Desire and Recognition”, 2007.]

4. Normativity: attitude–dependence and mutual recognition

Brandom defends what he calls “Enlightenment view” of attitude–dependence of normativity. There is a basic set of concerns that any attitude–dependent views must face, and the concern can be put in terms of Euthyphro question: is something normatively correct because it is taken to be so by some relevant X? Is the X free of any normative constraints it does not impose on its self? If yes, it seems that anything goes, and if no, it seems that X’s attitudes are not the ultimate source of normativity. Brandom is consistent in rejecting any given constraints — all normativity is attitude–dependent. He nicely shows how past commitments build up to an elaborate structure which significantly narrows down one’s options — but within these options, valid normative claims are brought into existence by fresh decisions or committings to take them as valid.

Those of a more ‘objectivist’ sentiment might object to this picture of historically accumulating unrestricted commitments, and opt for attitude–independent views of normativity. Note that they can nonetheless have an attitude–dependent view about positive norms, voluntary commitments and exercises of normative powers, and can hold that they are very important subspecies of all normativity. Those positions would grant that what Brandom gets at is something necessary, but not sufficient. And they would have at their disposal a direct explanation (in terms of the attitude–independent normative significance) to how such positive norms can be better or worse, and how the decisions made by the institutors can be better or worse.

On the follow–up question on whose attitudes are constitutive, Brandom further proposes a seemingly democratic or universalist “mutual recognition model” which combines elements both of the Kantian “Autonomy-model” and the “Obedience-model” it seeked to replace. The Kantian autonomy model holds that one is only subject to norms that one acknowledges oneself, whereas the obedience model holds that one is subject to norms instituted by authorities other than oneself. Brandom suggests that the Hegelian mutual recognition model combines the best of both.

Brandom points out a central problem for the autonomy model: anything would be right, if one could re–define the contents of the commitment oneself as one goes. In the mutual recognition model this can be solved, as the others have a say as well. And in the obedience model, there is the obvious problem that one is at the mercy of others, whom one is normatively bound to obey, whereas the MR model avoids this — one need not obey orders from anyone whose authority one does not acknowledge.

The MR view is that a subject is bound by norms that are accepted by both the agent, and everyone the agent authorizes as relevant norm–institutors. The basic idea seems to be that of direct democracy with everyone having veto–rights on all issues: what people together accept as a norm is the norm.

“Taking someone to be responsible or