The following is slightly revised set of questions I posted over at Words and Other Things. Since dipping my toe into Brandom’s inferential-role semantics about ten years ago, these are the questions that still linger. Most of them stem from the fact that (at least in the bits I’ve read) he doesn’t spend much time discussing how evidence from psychology or neuroscience relates to his theory.
For those that haven’t waded into the murky waters, his view is (roughly) that propositional contents are fixed by inferential role, and inferential role is ultimately to be grounded in a ‘deontic scorekeeping’ whereby interlocutors keep track of the permissible, obligatory, and disallowed propositions that follow from other propositions. Feel free to supplement this bumper sticker description which I’m sure doesn’t do it justice.
For all I know, he has addressed the following questions. If so I would very much appreciate any references to his works where he takes them on.
1. How can we apply his theory to nonhuman animals? In particular, what are the empirical hallmarks to look for that would tell us if a bunch of critters is engaging in the deontic scorekeeping required to create propositional contents?
2. To what types of objects does deontic scorekeeping apply? Assuming it applies to sentences, as suggested in Making it Explicit, how are we to demarcate nonsentential communication systems (as in dogs,arguably) from sentential communication systems (as in humans)? That is, how do we tell if a communication system produces sentences?
3. Could someone be a Brandomian but claim that the objects whose score is kept are not public utterances, but sentences in a language of thought? That is, import the whole Brandomian pragmatist machinery into the head of a single creature, where there is a kind of deontic scorekeeping among the thoughts. The role of the scorekeeper could be played by some additional neuronal structure, a structure that must learn the score during ontogeny, must learn the material implications of its internal sentences, as the creature interacts with the world.
4. Has Brandom written anything about the extensive literature on child language acquisition and how it jibes with his theory? There is a rather extensive literature on how children behave with language, and Brandom’s theory is basically about behavior. So, when during development do children make the transition to expressing propositions? This is a special case of Question 1.
5. How would Brandom explain why children and other animals seem to have rather complex internal representational systems prior to, or in the absence of, language? For instance, it seems natural to describe honeybees as employing neuronal representations of the location of nectar to explain their waggle-dance after arriving from a nectar-rich flower. Birds retain memories of songs they learned as fledglings, only to recreate them with remarkable accuracy much later in life even though they didn’t vocalize in the meantime. I don’t need to go over all such evidence at this blog.
In Making it Explicit, he writes as if the ascription of representational states prior to the emergence of deontic scorekeeping gets things backwards, that conceptual contents emerge via deontic scorekeeping that operates over sentences. How does he justify something seemingly at odds with the evidence from neuroscience and psychology?
Note added: The closest I have seen a philosopher get to these empirical issues about pragmatic theories of meaning (in particular Question 4) is Rita Nolan’s wonderful and strangely neglected book Cognitive Practices. Nolan argues that children do not engage in predicative thought until they begin to make inferences about what words follow from other words. For instance, there is a point when they realize that ‘bird’ can be inferred from ‘Cardinal’. It is with this general achievement that they are pulled into the space of reasons. They become aware of a set of hierarchically organized categories via language, and this is the basis of predicative thought. Before this developmental milestone, she thinks they use a more crude representational system whereby classification is based on perceptual similarity.
I say more about Nolan’s work in the comments section. It would be very cool if she reissued an updated version of the book, as there has been a good deal of progress in the relevant literature. Note there’s a lot I disagree with in her book (there is what I consider a fair and critical review from Michael Antony), but I found her empirical approach refreshing.
In his website, there is a paper called “How analytic philosophy has failed cognitive science”, or something like that. I think we can find some tips for those questions there. Specifically, the difference between the normative and the descriptive is crucial to Brandom’s account of how philosophy of language and epistemology (including his philosophy) is related to cognitive science. Cognitive science, according to Brandom, aims to answer the descriptive question: “how can we do that trick (namely, the trick of cognition)?” Philosophy asks about the normative side of the question: “what counts as doing that trick?”. Philosophy has failed cognitive science in the moment analytic philosophers took the descriptive path of an answer to the relevant questions and forgot the normative path set out by the work of Frege.
Of course, you need more elaboration to answer the questions you posed, but I think Brandom would take these lines in an answer to them, I mean, the lines drawn in that paper on his website.
Thanks for this insteresting blog!
Good find, thanks for the poiner. For those interested, you can find the link to the manuscript (in MS Word format) here (the version there right now is dated April 18, 2008). I am going to give my thoughts in response to your post before reading his manuscript, so as not to forget my first reaction.
That would be an interesting move for him to make, and seems resonant with his Sellarsian tendencies (for Sellars, when ‘characterizing an episode or state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing int in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says’) [quote is from Section 36 of Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind].
Because for Brandom building meaning is (by definition) being in the space of reasons, which is irreducibly normative, meaning is normative in some deep sense. This is indeed a key theme of his book.
Still my questions 1-5 would stand without much modification. Perhaps I would have to expand on number 5.
1. How do we tell if a creature engages in deontic scorekeeping?
2. What are the objects of such scorekeeping (e.g., sentences)? How can we tell if a communication system produces such objects? This, I take it, is partly an empirical question.
3. Can such scorekeeping happen inside a head?
4. At what stage in development do children enter the space of reasons? Is this determined by when they begin to keep score of linguistic transitions?
5. What are we to make of talk of representations in nonlanguage using critters? Such representations seem to have conditions of satisfaction, thereby suggesting something is incomplete in his story that requires systems of deontic scorekeeping prior to the emergence of predication.
The closest I have seen a philosopher get to these empirical issues, in particular question 4, is Rita Nolan’s wonderful and strangely neglected book ‘Cognitive Practices’. She argues that children do not engage in predicative thought until they begin to make inferences about what words follow from other words. For instance, there is a point when they realize that ‘bird’ can be inferred from ‘Cardinal’. It is with this realization that they are pulled into the space of reasons. They become aware of a set of heirarchically organized categories via language, and this is the basis of predicative thought Before this developmental milestone, she thinks they use a more crude representational system where classification is based on similarity.
I love her book because it attempts to be sensitive to empirical issues, and frankly I think she describes what could be a very important cognitive milestone for kids: realizing that if one word applies, this implies another word applies. This seems to have obvious and interesting relevance for Brandom’s project.
If I remember correctly, my main problem with Nolan’s work was that after it came out, there emerged evidene that children classify things at a fairly high level, and this is well before they have language. For instance, if you play with a plastic model of an airplane in front of a prelinguistic child, and then hand the child two objects (a toy helicopter and a toy bird that looks quite similar to the plane), the child will tend to pick up the helicopter and play with it like you played with the plane. This suggests they have a fairly high-level understanding of the categories (animal versus flying machine), and that their classificatory behavior is not based on similarity. (The work is from Jean Mandler at UCSD).
However, these are details that we could argue about. For instance, are such children really engaging in predication? Clearly something interesting must happen when children start to recognize “norms” about language. When do they do this? At what stage of linguistic development? What cognitive achievements are happening at the same time? What is refreshing and helpful is that Nolan not only realized that pragmatic semantic theories should have empirical implications that can be compared against the child language acquisition literature, but actually did the work to connect the two disciplines.
I’ll take a look at Brandom’s paper over the next few days.