The threat of regress

and use as essentially normative stances and actions in a field of material commitment-entitlement inferential relations, where some inferential relations are imposed, shows is that all oughts in play are contingent.

Playing the game is a necessary and sufficient condition for counting as having and using concepts but one cannot directly derive categorical oughts from playing the game because oughts are contestable.

I promised earlier to discuss Glüer and Wikforss’s criticism of Brandom’s understanding of content as normative. Defending his view, with the material added by fundamental normativism, against their criticism is my aim in what remains.

writes,

propositional contents should be understood in terms of their social articulation—how a propositionally contentful belief or claim can have different significance from the perspective of the individual believer or claimer, on the one hand, than it does from the perspective of one who attributes that belief or claim to the individual, on the other. The context within which concern with what is thought and talked about arises is the assessment of how the judgments of one individual can serve as reasons for another. The representational content of claims and the beliefs they express reflect the social dimension of the game of giving and asking for reasons. (2001, pp. 158-59)

Brandom is here arguing not that it is either necessary or sufficient for anyone merely to take something to be correct according to a practice, but that there is an essentially social dimension involved, such that content is determined by being caught up in the interpersonal practice of giving and asking for reasons. Making an assertion, e.g., is understood as playing the pragmatic role of undertaking a commitment whose content is articulated by what other assertibles it is inferable from and what other assertibles are inferable from it. This means that no one individual’s attitude of taking some claim to be correct in the sense of being entitlement-or-commitment-inferable from other claims is necessary or sufficient for it be an articulation of the content of the claim. What is necessary and sufficient is that the claim serves the pragmatic function of committing the speaker to inferences for which she can be held responsible by listeners that are in position to ask the speaker for reasons for the claim made. For instance, the content of the claim “X is red” is socially inferentially articulated by what it commitment–entitlement-entails the speaker to in the ears of listeners for whom the claim can serve as a reason for further claims (cf. ibid, p. 192).

Now, the ‘possibility of an infinite “hierarchy of critical stances”’ that Glüer and Wikforss (2009, p. 62) complain about is not such that a regress threatens. Instead, commitment-entitlement inferential relations through which contents is articulated level out in the social dimension in which what reasons a claim gives, and what reasons can be demanded for it, is a

is made (Brandom 1998, p. 626). In this sense, there is no and indeed need not be an ‘infinite hierarchy of critical stances’ or normative attitudes in order that content or meaning be determined. Instead, what is needed is a field of socially contested implicit commitment-entitlement material inferential relations in which claims are embedded. Correctness is determined in the context of the social contest over implicitly normative inferential relations between claims. We have in this context no reason to ask for, as Glüer and Wikforss do, a further or ultimately final level at which correctness is instituted. Insofar people have attitudes and assess each other’s performances in terms of what follows from what—what Brandom calls ‘scorekeeping’ (Ibid, pp. 165-67)—and insofar this is an on-going contest over the field of such inferential relations, there need be no further level.

If the notion of ‘an infinite hierarchy of levels’ of attitudes of taking-to-be-correct is thought of in ‘vertical’ terms, where ‘at some stage in the hierarchy’ (Glüer and Wikforss 2009, p. 62) we must come to an end and say in non-normative terms what correctness consists in, then the answer is:

the hierarchy levels out in the ‘horizontal’ field of inferential relations whose normative significance consists in people accepting or rejecting claims as providing reasons for other claims. Below this field it makes no sense to dig for conceptual content. It seems that this is precisely what Glüer and Wikforss do; they seem to suppose that access to a point of view

‘beyond’ or ‘outside’ of a community of speakers is necessary in order that we can interpret the community as making meaningful noise. It is quite unclear why this should be the case though.

Perhaps this halting of their argument will not convince anti-normativists. I am not sure what they would then be asking for. It might be that they want a reduction of the normative to a behavioural, functional, or other suitable level of description; that ‘the regress above, be it ever so benign, at least indicates a serious flaw’ (ibid) in Brandom’s non-reductive normativism. In this case I have no quarrel with the anti-normativist’s concern. But I do not see why the possibility of speaking about non-normative behaviour below the field of the social game of articulating

bestow content and meaning should imply that content and meaning is non-normative. If the anti-normativist point is that a story about the natural evolution of language among animals can be told without allusion to norms, including a story about how animals pass from mere reliable differential noise-makers to stimuli to mastering inferential relations in which claims stand that make them contentful (cf. Brandom 2001, p. 162), then their project would take us far, far afield indeed. And if such a project were successful it still would not be incompatible with the notion that to speak about meaning and content is to speak about norms (and, indeed, that to speak at all conceptually presupposes norms). Meaning and content can be fully analysed in normative terms, but of course there is much going on in thinking and speaking, e.g., neural firings and stretching of vocal cords, as investigated in the special sciences, that we can also speak about. It is far from clear, though, that our being able to speak about the latter should induce a conviction that, therefore, when we speak about meaning and semantic content we are certainly not speaking about norms.