In Defense of Semantic Holism

- In Defense of Semantic Holism -
 Brandom vs. Fodor/Lepore

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Introduction
    In this paper I propose to assess Jerry Fodor's and Ernest Lepore's (Fodor 2000; Fodor and Lepore 2005) arguments against conceptual role semantics (henceforth CRS). In the first section I present their main contention against those forms of CRS which hold that the internal role of a symbol(s) determines its content or meaning (henceforth CCRS). Their core argument is designed to establish the implausibility of all versions of CCRS, by showing how the latter is forced into an irresolvable dilemma concerning precisely to what the extent conceptual role determines conceptual content.  I follow Greenberg and Harman (2005) in arguing that their argument fails to establish that such implausibility obtains, showing that the dilemma that CCRS is allegedly forced into is a false one, and proceed to qualify some of their contentions.

           In the second section, I focus on Fodor and Lepore's (2005) arguments against a particular brand of CCRS in the inferential role semantics (henceforth IRS) advanced by Robert Brandom (1995, 2005). First, I take issue with Fodor and Lepore's claim that IRS is incapable to give a behavioral account of concept use, being forced to a quandary concerning underdetermination which renders the functional account of conceptual specification in terms of rule following  explanatorily vacuous. I then dispute their claims for semantic atomism and compositionality, waged against IRS and the latter's commitment to semantic holism. I refute the claim that IRS is incapable of explaining how concept acquisition is possible, on pains of circularity, and that as a result it sets insuperable obstacles for a theory of learning. My contention, following Brandom (2005), is that IRS can provide an account for those processes required for learning without  advocating compositionality. In other words, within the framework of IRS, all the standard features associated with learning obtain while endorsing a semantic holistic account, thus showing that semantic atomism is not the only plausible candidate for theorizing learning.

I - Semantic Black Boxes?

     One may characterize CRS as a thesis about semantics, or one about the philosophy of mind. In the former sense, the meaning of a linguistic expression is nothing but the systematic relations it bears to other expressions in the language. In the latter sense, the content of a mental state is nothing but the systematic relations it bears to other mental states. In both cases, these relations may be broadly understood to be informational, causal, inferential, or otherwise. This is important to note, since Fedor and Lepore reserve the name CRS for those theories which deliberately conflate the two levels of explanation, and so for them crucially information-theories are not a species of CSR, but actually in conflict with it. For them, it is the confusion between the mental and the semantic that is a "bad idea" wholesale, since it results in a view of conceptual content delivered entirely to an internalized symbolic economy, which results in creating spurious epistemic impasses for any theory of communication. Since information-theories do not depend on anything like a pragmatics of language delivered to an internalized system of inferences or rules, they don't have to run the epistemological gauntlet Fodor and Lepore deem fatal for CSR, in creating an insurmountable gulf for communication. It is the construal of this epistemic gulf, allegedly besieging CSR, that shall occupy me for the rest of this section.

       In both its semantic and mental aspects, CRS has it that the role that a symbol plays is to be understood in holistic terms, or what we might call a 'top bottom' approach: rather than construing content from the 'bottom up' taking it to be derived out of semantic primitives from which complex expressions are composed, CRS denies that content is intrinsic to any symbol or state prior to its use within a symbolic economy. In this regard, CSR is the likely position to hold for anyone who, following Quine or Sellars, adopts deflationary standards for representation, truth, or reference. More precisely, rather than construing representations as higher-order abstractions which derive their content or meaning from foundational semantic primitives, conceptual representations are to be construed as rules for relating symbols to other symbols[1].

         In this regard, notwithstanding Fodor and Lepore's reluctance to conflate issues of semantics with those of epistemology or psychology, it is instructive to note that CRS originates as a way to rework the problematic of representation in an epistemological context. Both Quine and Sellars are reacting to peculiar iterations of foundationalism, and they take the latter to be their primary targets. For the former, the main interlocutors were those in favor of the rationalist position according to which representational content was negotiated through the distinction between analytic and synthetic truths, as well as dubiously inflated conceptions of meaning, synonymy and reference[2]. For the latter, the main interlocutors were those empiricist forms of foundationalism that began by distinguishing that which was immediately given to the mind, from that which was added by the mind[3]. Although in its full scope, CRS needn't be aligned to the strong behaviorist bent of its forefathers, it should be stressed that the articulation between the semantic and mental aspects of CRS hinges precisely on whether epistemology ought to be thought about in continuity with such deflationary standards. Such an alternative has it that any theory of knowledge will not concerned with concept possession, but rather with a functional account of concept use or role. As Brandom puts it elegantly: "I accept what I take to have been a lesson Kant taught: to think of concepts as rules or norms we bind ourselves by... For us (post-) Kantians, the principal question does not concern our grip on concepts (e.g. are they clear and distinct?), but their grip on us." (Brandom, 2005, Pg. 334). And again, despite the pragmatic bent that Brandom's inferentialist program gives to what is a variegated assortment of positions under the label 'CSR', the core idea that remains in every case is that understanding representations in terms of conceptual role in the philosophy of mind is just the obverse of taking the semantic content of a symbol or expression to be defined by the role it plays to other symbols. In any case, in what follows I continue Greenberg and Harman's (2005) liberal use of the term CRS to understand "any theory that holds that the content of mental states or symbols is determined by any part of their role or use in thought." As indicated above, this needn't be constrained to inferential role, although it is the latter that will ultimately be my focus. Fortunately, nothing in my argument will depend on this difference in terminology, although I hope to have indicated why the discrepancy is philosophically grounded, and not just a stylistic divergence.

    That being said, Fodor and Lepore's main line of attack against CRS attempts to target those variants of CSR for which conceptual role constitutively involves something like the internal usage of terms, i.e. where having a concept would imply having internalized the systems of rules, inferences or implications tethered to such a concept. Such an economy would entail that the meaning of a symbol is holistically articulated, insofar as its content derives from the relations it bears to the other symbols in the theory. It is in this sense in which CSR stands for a semantic holism. The argument they offer is relatively straightforward: how is it possible for two people to ever share a concept, and so how is it possible that communication could ever take place, if it is thoroughly implausible that one's internalized system of inferences and implications, associated with a given word/symbol, is shared in its totality? Since the notion of a shared language becomes immensely problematic, so does communication as an intersubjective capacity. The argument is thus one which is simultaneously about communication and one about psychology; it is formulated in the following passage: "How can we use the form of words “It’s raining” to communicate to you our belief that it’s raining unless the word “raining” means the same to all of us? And, how can it mean the same to all of us if, on the one hand, its meaning is determined by its inferential role and, on the other hand, no two people could conceivably agree on all the inferences in which “raining” occurs (to say nothing of all the “correct inferences” in which it occurs)?" (Fedor and Lepore, 2005, pp 186). As interpreted by Greenberg and Harman, the genera gist of the argument that Fodor and Lepore provide can be synthesized as follows, qualifying their reconstruction for clarity (Greenberg and Harman, 2005, pp 28):

    The Argument for Epistemic/Semantic Opacity

  1) Empirical Prediction - For any pair of concept-mongers, S and S', the set of inferences/implications that they internally associate with a symbol x in a given language L are (likely) to be dissimilar.

With this in mind, CRS may pursue one of two possibilities. Either:

2)  For any given pair of symbols a and b in a given language L, a has the same conceptual content than b if and only if there is no internalized relation of inference/implication from/to a to/from another symbol (or set of symbols) c that is not an internalized relation of inference/implication from/to b to/from another symbol (or set of symbols) c.

Or

3) For any given pair of symbols a and b in a given language L, a has the same conceptual content than b if and only if there is a subset d of specifiable internal relations of inference/implication from/to a to/from another symbol (or set of symbols) c that is coextensive with a subset e of specifiable internalized relations inference/implication from/to b to/from another symbol (or set of symbols) c.

 If (2) obtains, Fodor and Lepore argue that:

(4a) It is likely that for any two concept-mongers S and S' whose concepts are articulated in the terms of a language L, no symbol x of L has the same conceptual role for S than it does for S'.

(5a) As a result, no two people ever mean the same thing or convey the same conceptual role, given that their thoughts/expressions lack the same content.

(6a) No people deploy the same intentional laws, and so CSR fails as a theory of communication, i.e. no two people ever share or understand another person's concepts.

   Although Fodor and Lepore take (5) and (6) to be thoroughly implausible, it must be said that they offer no independent argument for it. For a proponent of CRS could consistently maintain that we may be able to clarify exhaustively the conceptual role of a given symbol within our linguistic economy, however difficultly, through progressive interlocution (for example, perhaps through what Brandom calls 'deontic scorekeeping'). It seems possible two people might come to agree with respect to their use for a subset of symbols that they share the exact same role, however minimal such a subset might be (perhaps some primitive forms of mathematical concepts might be of this 'clear and distinct sort?).  This might be true, even if we ought to accept that for the most part we do not really 'agree' with each other on the basis of sharing the same concepts or not, and even if we might naively believe that we do.

           Indeed, nothing in the abovementioned argument indicates what it is precisely about epistemic opacity that renders agreement impossible; it simply entails that, strictly speaking, it is overwhelmingly possible concept-sharing is not a reasonable standard to base our theories of communication. Yet, the CRS-defender would insist, this has no bearing on our capacity to agree with others or not; Fodor and Lepore confuse agreement which is a matter of assent, with knowledge. Let us pause in this issue for a moment.

     The tacit premise at work here seems to be that agreement presupposes knowledge, i.e. one cannot agree to x if one does not know what x is. And since, if (1) obtains, such knowledge would be so remotely accessible, it would follow CRS delivers us into an epistemological black box for intersubjective conceptual knowledge, as a result of its semantic commitments. But, again, this needn't be the case. For one might insist that all agreement requires is that some suitably restricted set of shared commitments about the inferential role that a symbol bears be sufficient to mobilize agreement or disagreement, without for this reason, accepting that only such a subset is relevant for the meaning of the concept in question, i.e. assuming that premise (3) fails. Thus, one might claim, all that agreement/disagreement requires is that one might be capable of suitably isolating those inferences/implications that might be relevant for the concept determination that the users of the symbol may in a given context.

         Greenberg and Harman stress this point in consideration of color concepts; there it is clear that concept boundaries might be dissimilar between two subjects, and this doesn't preclude them from agreement "... the boundaries between what counts for them as red  or orange are slightly different and the boundaries between what counts for them as green and blue are slightly different. Still, they disagree about a color when John calls it red and Mary calls it green." (Greenberg and Harman, 2005, pp. 19)

           In any case, nothing in Fodor and Lepore's argument seems to give reasons for why such opacity in the sense defined would be so remotely inconceivable, or lead to such calamitous epistemic consequences, or such dire constraints for communicational practice. Greenberg and Harman present another related defense for CRS,  by distinguishing an unstated assumption that motivates their case. The assumption in question is the following one:

(1a) If all aspects of internal use are relevant to meaning and the aspects of one person's internal use are not exactly the same as those of another person's, then the two people do not mean the same thing by their terms.

         The that point Greenberg and Harman wish to stress by pointing this assumption out is that it is consistent to hold that although all aspects of internal use are relevant to determining conceptual meaning/content, the question of which aspect(s) bears on the meaning of a term can be taken to be a contingent matter relative to contextual conditions or utterance/use. This means that, for any given specifiable implicational/inferential relation that a symbol holds to another,  saying that such a relation is relevant to its meaning is not to say that in every case a variation in those relations will result in a change of meaning. By the same token, just because any modification in such relation might not result in a change of meaning in a given case, it does not mean that in every case such a variation will not result in a change of meaning, i.e. that the relation is irrelevant to the internalized conceptual content. The examples proposed by Greenberg and Harman are excellent: "To say that a given aspect of internal use is relevant to meaning is to say that there is a possible case in which a difference in that aspect makes for a difference in meaning, not to say that a difference in that aspect always makes for a difference in meaning. (Similarly, whether the number of students in a class is odd or even depends on the number of students in the class, but that does not imply that two classes with different numbers of students cannot both have an even number of students)" (Ibid, pp. 19). And of course, such a revision is completely compatible with the idea that certain uses might be relevant to the meaning of the concept in every case, i.e. it is true for every case that the concept odd cannot be taken to be applied to the same situation as the concept even, or decimal (understood in their standard definitional roles). This means that (2) above ought to be revised to read the following:

2')  For any given pair of symbols a and b in a given language L, and in a given dialogic circumstance p, a has the same conceptual content than b if and only if for p there is no contextually relevant internalized relation of inference/implication from/to a to/from another symbol (or set of symbols) c that is not a contextually relevant internalized relation of inference/implication from/to b to/from another symbol (or set of symbols) c.

  Once this is pointed out, it turns out that contextually irrelevant relations of inference/implication may be altered without thereby changing the concept's meaning. This is obviously not analogous to (3), since the irrelevance of a set of given relations for a concept is merely contextually defined. The question here becomes how to understand 'relevance' in Greenberg and Harman's sense more precisely. The following is a proposal for (Relevance):

(Relevance): For every inferential/implicational relation R from/to a given symbol a to/from another symbol (or set of symbols) c, there is a circumstance p, such that a change in R entails a change in the internalized conceptual content associated with a, such that if the relevant relation R is altered, one wouldn't count as using that concept.

        The requirement for (Relevance) allows one to stipulate about the role that seemingly contingent relations bear for CCRS. Interestingly, this issue seems proximally to be part of what motivates Fodor and Lepore's (2005) questions to IRS. They ask:

        "We’re also not clear what Brandom thinks about the status of utterly contingent inferences like “If it’s a plant in my backyard and it’s taller than 6 feet, then it’s a tree”. he does apparently endorse the idea that “[the concept-constitutive inferences] must include … those that are materially [sic] correct” (MIE, p. 657). But what he gives as examples are two he borrows from Sellars: “A is to the East of B” --> “B is to the West of A” and “Lightning is seen” --> “Thunder will be heard soon”. We find this puzzling since the first of these strikes us as arguably conceptually necessary (whatever that means) and the second strikes as arguably nomologically necessary (whatever that means). So even if we granted that both are concept-constitutive, we would still want to know whether clear cases of purely contingent hypotheticals are too; and, if they aren’t, how Brandom proposes to do without an analytic/synthetic distinction." (Fedor and Lepore, 2005, pp. 183)

     This is of course the core of the dilemma for CCRS for the choice between (2) and (3). Greenberg and Harman's suggestion is that we can accept both that every inferential relation is concept constitutive, that is to say relevant, while accepting that contingent inferences obtain in the sense in that such relevance is capable of altering conceptual constitution within specific context of use. Or put the point somewhat differently: even if we accept conceptual role determines meaning, this needn't entail that meaning is identical to conceptual role.  To return to our earlier example: that the concept even numbered classroom members may be correlated at a given time and context with a cardinal extensional determinant (say, two) as what specifies its conceptual content, such a determinant could change without necessarily altering the integrity of the concept, e.g. say two more class members arrive late.   With this in mind, Fodor and Lepore might nevertheless insist that in order to isolate those inferential relations that are context sensitive requires something from CCRS which no proponent of the theory has been prepared to satisfactorily give. Namely, they would require, as they do for IRS, an explanation of why and how are the relevant contextual circumstances which determine conceptual content in the use of a symbol defined. In other words, on which basis ought we determine that it is still a concept that we are using and not another? How do we know which inferential relations support which conceptual content at a given time and in a given circumstance, without defining something like analytic and synthetic properties?

  Translational accounts of meaning, for example, define that the meaning of an expression a in a language L is determined by the capacity to find a paraphrase/translation for the term in another language L', nothing is said about which relations come to bear in which circumstances. Thus, is if a plays a functionally equivalent conceptual role to an expression b in a language L', such that they may be translated one into the other, it will not follow that every difference will result in a difference in translation. This leaves the problem of how to construe the role of contingent inferences/implications/relations unanswered, even if as Greenberg and Harman claim, the strategy of the argument is merely meant to indicate that Fedor and Lepore would need quite a bit more to discount the breadth of positions associated with CCRS than their argument provides.

    That being said, the second horn of the dilemma, that is opting for premise (3), fares no better in Fedor and Lepore's eyes, for reasons we can surmise from what we've said above. Their main claim is that if (3) obtains, then the CCRS is forced to accept that:

 (4b) For every symbol a in a language L, its conceptual constitution is merely a subset of the inferential relations that it holds to other symbols in the language (or other languages); such that those relations that do not form a part of this subset can be said to be contingent as opposed to necessary.

(5b) Therefore, for every concept, we can distinguish between the set of semantically constitutive relations which are context-independent (analytic), and those which are context-determined but by the same token not semantically constitutive (synthetic). Both sets together make up the whole of conceptual role associated with any given symbol.

(6b) Therefore, CCRS is committed to the synthetic/analytic distinction.

      We have already seen how Greenberg and Harman reject this assumption in their rejection of premise (3). Namely, by disambiguating conceptual role from meaning, they leave it open that the relevance that any given inferential relation may have to concept constitute won't entail that such a claim is analytic, i.e. context-independent for concept alteration. Additionally, they point out that although traditional accounts of analycity, as castigated by Quine and others, have it that analytic relations/truths are a priori, while it clearly doesn't follow for CCRS that knowledge of the conceptual role for a given symbol is also a priori, even if its semantically constitutive. I won't belabor these points, since they have been dealt with elsewhere. In the next section I propose to examine a second roster of arguments offered by Fodor and Lepore, geared this time towards a specific variant of CCRS, namely Robert Brandom's inferentialist program.

II - In Defense of Semantic Holism

    We have already seen how Fodor and Lepore question CCRS as a plausible candidate for a theory of communication on the basis of what they take to be excessive demands for conceptual constitution, resulting in cases of epistemic opacity that vitiate their plausibility. In what follows, I focus on their arguments to extend this line of attack against a specific version of CCRS, namely inferential role semantics, which are designed to show the implausibility of the "top-bottom" approach favored by semantic holism. By the same token, I seek to indicate, following Brandom (2005), that their arguments in favor of semantic atomism fail, i.e. why their presumed defense of a "bottom-up" approach depends on an unpersuasive case against the semantic holist of an inferentialist bent. With regards to semantic atomism, Fodor and Lepore claim that:

        "Qua “bottom-up” theorists, we think something like this: for non-idiomatic expressions in productive languages, the meaning of a sentence is ontologically dependent on the meaning of its subsentential constituents. This is to say, at the very least, that in such languages the sentences have the contents that they do because their constituent expressions have the contents they do, and not vice versa. In fact, we hold this principle in a very strong form; on the one hand, the meaning of a sentence S in a language L must be computable by algorithm from the meanings of its constituents on pain of L being unproductive or S being idiomatic. On the other hand, we know of no reason why it should be possible (algorithmically or otherwise) to recover the mmeanings of the constituents of S from the meaning of S." (Fodor and Lepore, 2005, pp. 182)
  

       By parity of reasoning, in epistemic terms, it will follow that just the content of words is prior to the content of sentences, the content of mental states is prior to judgment, and therefore to the capacity to engage in explicit inferences of the sort IRS thinks constitutes the basis for semantic holism. Put differently, this can be expressed by saying that it is possible to have knowledge-of prior to having knowledge-that, where we should understand that the latter in fact depends or supervenes on the former, both nomologically or ontologically (Ibid).  And although Fodor and Lepore think that sentential knowing-that may plausibly be stipulated to enjoy such priority for cases of radical interpretation or translation. In fact, they go even as much to suggest that even language-learning might also exhibit such a priority.

         This might seem intuitively at odds with their championing of semantic atomism, but it needn't be so. For it is coherent to claim that there is a basic class of semantic constituents which form the epistemic bedrock of the language learner, and that these constituents are nevertheless sentientially constituted. All that the theory requires is that the subject be capable of deriving the content of derived complex expressions by projection from semantic primitives, as well as analysis of simple constituents, e.g. that learning word-content requires the capacity to have acquired the relevant sentence-contents. This would hold while insisting that the epistemic dependence of word-content on sentence-content does not entail the ontological/nomological-dependence of the latter on the former. Semantic holism, in their view, requires both claims; while semantic atomism is potentially open to the former, and necessarily closed to the latter. As it turns out, their argument will run on the grounds that projectibility and so learning actually seems impossible from a semantic holistic perspective. So they claim, Brandom fails to meet the difficult requirement they set for holism: "Brandom has to show that (and how) word meanings might be ontologically dependent on sentence meanings (rather than vice versa) in a language that’s productive and systematic." (Ibid).        

       Their first (peripheral) claim is to dispute the plausibility that any Gentzen-based semantic account for logical terms could serve as a model for lexical or conceptual analysis. Recall that such a framework begins by specifying general operational parameters for logical constants in terms of introduction and elimination rules, in order to then generalize these to circumstance and consequences of application for a given expression in a language (Brandom, 1995, pp 653). Just to use the simplest examples: the introduction rule for the logical-constant for conjunction "&" is "P, Q --> P&Q". Similarly the elimination rule for the same would be "P&Q --> P, Q", etc (Ibid).

       From the start, Fodor and Lepore protest that it is thoroughly unclear how to deal with the meaning of non-logical terms within such a framework, i.e. singular terms such as "tree" or "red", that are not logical constants. That is, they find it utterly perplexing that one should expect to define introduction or elimination rules for these terms in natural languages, and fear that any such attempt might relapse into question-begging forms of verificationism or surreptitious identification procedures, e.g. "x is a tree iff it is a tree", etc (Fodor and Lepore, 1995, pp 183).

             Although this criticism is largely tangential to their main line of attack, we should preemptively notice that it actually misses the point of IRS, which requires that there is no content for a logical constant or singular term that is not definable in terms of its logical conditions for implication and consequence within a language. Therefore, the definition of logical constants is nothing but the grounds on which any such term might acquire any meaning whatsoever, by entering within the inferential economy. Thus, the 'top-bottom' approach advocated by IRS is crucially not concerned with the formal semantics of specified terms within an already given language, but rather with giving a philosophical semantics where the task is to define generally how specifiable items must function in order to be counted as semantically contentful for any language user. The former concerns questions of composition/decomposition and association for the computation of semantic value on the background of an accepted notion of semantic content, while the latter concerns the procedural or pragmatic consideration of how semantic values are correlated with semantic interpretants at large, and not just a specified subset. The latter concerns the articulation between questions of meaning and understanding that, following Dummett, IRS deems essential; Fodor and Lepore elide the distinction.  Brandom's own disambiguation of this distinction is highly illuminating: "I am recommending a “top-down” order of semantic explanation, which talks first about what sentences express, and only later about the contribution that the presence of individual words makes to what sentences containing them express. The context is the project I have been calling “philosophical” semantics, by contrast to “formal” semantics. The former concerns how expressions have to be used, or how items must function, in order properly to be thought of as semantically contentful. The latter concerns how, once semantic interpretants of some sort have been associated with some expressions or other items, they can be understood as determining what semantic interpretants are associated with others." (Brandom, 2005, pp 332)

         In short, Brandom insists that while formal semantics can obviate the philosophical-semantic issue about how to coordinate questions of meaning with questions of understanding, and thus the question of how this can be obviated by the formal semantics since it rests on pre-established notion of semantic content. Here the inferentialist focus on the pragmatics or use conditions which are proper to the investigation of philosophical semantics belie the worries that Fodor and Lepore think must apply when defining possession conditions; to 'have' a concept is nothing but to be able to use it and the task for the philosopher then becomes to specify what it means to use the concept correctly in terms of the user's doxastic commitments, e.g. "... to define the inferential role of an expression "&"... one thereby specifies that anyone who is committed to P and committed to Q, is thereby to count also as committed as to P&Q, and that anyone who is committed to P&Q is thereby committed to both P and to Q" (Brandom 2000, pp 62)  In this regard, the threat of having to run a specter-invoking slew of verificationist standards come to bear by running a Gentzen-style semantics is moot: the deflationary strategy pursued by IRS renders these terms explanatorily irrelevant, and explains content-preserving use in terms of inference rather than reference, or truth, and so irrespective or any stipulated verification procedures. And although terms such as 'true' or 'reference' might come to bear within the scope of a well-defined formal semantics, as we suggested above,  Brandom insists in that they play no part in a philosophical semantics of the sort he is proposing for his IRS. In response to Dummett, he claims: "Formal semantics must be done in an expressively powerful meta-language, and in that context it can be all right to appeal to the expressive capacities of terms such as ‘true’ and ‘refers’. Doing so only becomes a problem when one seeks to appeal to them at the outset of one’s explanatory enterprise in philosophical semantics...My explanatory deflation of ‘true’ and ‘refers’, based on an anaphoric account of their expressive roles, disqualifies them from playing a certain kind of explanatory role in philosophical semantics." (Brandom, 2005, pp. 343)

     Incidentally, the issue concerning the split between possession and use conditions maps back onto issues concerning the status of contingent inference within CCRS, within the inferentialist program. In continuity with their earlier attack, Fodor and Lepore argue that the status of contingent sentences remains opaque in Brandom's account at a loss for a analytic/synthetic distinction. I believe Brandom could respond to these worries much like Greenberg and Harman do, as we surmised above, by simply disambiguating between meaning and inferential role; so that contingent sentences may be said to express the subset of those relevant relations/conditions which are context-sensitive, i.e. which although relevant, as all inferences are, to concept constitution, do not for this reason alter the meaning of the concept in every context of use. Of course, the strict inferentialist couldn't accept of contingent inferences if by these we mean that in every such context an alteration of such relation would not result in meaning change for the concept at hand. But this does not require reactivating the synthetic/analytic distinction, since contingent inferences would be simply be defined in terms of their role within context-sensitive contexts, without compromising their relevance for concept constitution. Since there is no difference between conceptual necessity and nomological/ontological necessity for Brandom, the argument we pointed out above deployed as a general strategy for CCSR fails even in its qualified form against IRS. This being said, it goes without saying that to stipulate that purely contingent sentences within an inferentialist account would be trivially true, since IRS systematically excludes any content that would be considered stricto sensu irrelevant for conceptual constitution. As Brandom himself puts it: "Making It Explicit is clear about not treating any inferences essentially involving an expression as in principle semantically irrelevant, in the sense of having no bearing on what one is saying by using that expression. This is a radical policy, which requires giving up many things we have become accustomed to say about conceptual content. Indeed, in a certain sense it involves in the end giving up the idea of conceptual content – since the essential contrast between inferences that articulate the contents expressed by the use of locutions and those that do not goes missing." (Ibid. pp 333)

       As it turns out, the distinction between the two kinds of semantic explanation comes to bear more definitively at a later stage of the debate, as we shall see. Before we go on to assess this, however, we should briefly diffuse one further argument that Fodor and Lepore make against Brandom's pragmatic account of conceptual competence, as opposed to accounts to conceptual use. They argue that any such account that privileges 'know-how' in describing one's conceptual abilities one is lead to a serious underdetermination problem with respect to which rules a specific occasion of overt behavior corresponds too. This objection should be taken to be tacitly supporting the claim against the plausibility of conflating the epistemology of translation and the psychology of leaning with semantics.  The argument may be reconstructed for clarity as follows (Fodor and Lepore, 1995. pp 185):

The Argument Against Behavioral Explanations of Intentional States

1) For any given overtly observable interpretable behavior where it might be said "S acts in accordance with rule R1" it follows that such behavior also is in accordance to any rule R2 that is equivalent to R1, i.e. to any rule that shares the same inferential content.

2) It is possible for any behavior-displaying agent to act in accordance to a rule without being thereby consciously aware of which rule they are acting in accordance to.

3) Inferential-role semantics has it that for any case where one observes that "S acts in accordance to R1", then irrespective of how many different rules may be said to be equivalent to R1, it is certain that their behavior  accords with R1 and not some stipulated equivalent rule R2, i.e. the underdetermination problem fails.

C1) Therefore, IRS proponents argue inconsistently since they claim that the specific rules which define concept use are simultaneously underdetermined by overt intentional behavior, and that such behavior only accords to some (arbitrary) rules.

C2) Therefore, IRS fails to account for the intentional content of mental states and concept use in terms in terms of overt behavior.

   The argument above conflates three crucial distinctions that Brandom disentangles in his account, namely: the capacity to accord to rules, the capacity to grasp rules, and the capacity to follow rules (Brandom, 1995, Chapter 1). The former is resolutely a case a non-intentional behavior which corresponds to what Sellars would have called sentience, but which also applies to non-organic capacity to register a semantic stimulus. The second and third terms pertain to beings who are already within the space of reasons and so qualify as sapient. Full-blown sapient creatures follow rules insofar as they undertake specific doxastic commitments, and can be challenged to justify and revise their beliefs by engaging in the game of 'giving and asking for reasons'. Machines, on the other hand, merely accord to rules, since they possess no intentional states, at least in principle. Once this is pointed out, it is easy to see why the argument offered by Fodor and Lepore falls apart without much trouble. Premise (3) can be rejected right off the bat; accordance admits un underdetermination of conceptual content, while grasping or following does not.  Non-sapient creatures, at a loss for intentionality, might be said to accord to norms, and perhaps an indefinite number of them, i.e. the underdetermination problem obtain, but none the worse for it. Accordance is transparent to the substitution of equivalents. On the other hand, sapient, intentionality-endowed creatures can be said to grasp or follow rules if and only they can be challenged to give reasons and justify their commitments, and in this territory equivalence substitution becomes (progressively) opaque. Thus while grasping an implicit norm (say, by infants) merely requires the capacity to evaluate and correct the functional dispositions one and others exhibit, following an explicit rule requires that such a capacity be extended to the point where it becomes possible to formulate what one is acting in accordance to. This entails competence in deploying conditional vocabulary, among other things.

           Observers might progressively learn, keeping track of their deontic scorekeeping, narrow down potential candidates until the intentional agent becomes capable of expressing his/her implicit following of norms in the form of an explicit rule. That being said, contrary to what Fodor and Lepore stipulate, although it is correct to say that salient behavior may accord to a variety of rule-candidates (both in intentional and non-intentional agents), social dialogic procedures for cross-examination allow one to specify and disambiguate which rules the agent is following, if they so happen to achieve this capacity. But this is a distinctively rational capacity proper to those subjects fully imbedded in the logical space of reasons, while mere accordance is weaker, exhibited by non-sentient beings as well as sentient and sapient beings, all in the same functional level of explanation. And although we certainly must model functional accordance in the same intentional terms that we in which we frame our normative vocabulary this is not to confuse the two levels by endowing it with an ontological status, i.e. it does not mean that we must attribute mental states intentional status to merely accordance-exhibiting behavior[4].  

     The final point I wish to stress in as brief a manner as possible concerns Fodor and Lepore's central attack against semantic holism in favor of semantic atomism. The core of the issue, they argue, is that semantic holism cannot explain how learning takes place, since by default it is not committed to semantic compositionality, i.e. in rejecting the latter is becomes impossible to account both for the projectibility and the systematicity of language, these being necessary features for any semantic theory that purports to explain how indefinitely many new compounds with determinate semantic values may be composed from semantic primitives. In other words, Fodor and Lepore contend that compositionality is necessary to account for how syntactic combinations with fixed semantics values can generate complex expressions which are also semantically determinate by being systematically related to those initial combinations. But the real stumbling block for IRS that results from this is in their estimation finally one about epistemic productivity. Compositionality is meant to explain how subjects can understand and compose indefinitely new expressions in a given language, by attaining mastery of the modes of formation and rules proper to the simple expressions in the language (what may perhaps be called 'lexical primitives'). Therefore, if such productivity cannot be accounted for, then it will not be clear how it is that subjects are ever in a position not just to learn new expressions in the language, but how they can learn at all. Since ""knowing-how" doesn't compose", the inferentialist owes us an account of how we can even begin to acquire and use new concepts if not on the basis of fundamental lexical primitives that ground the subject's capacity to respond to whatever circumstances might he/she happen to find themselves in. Fodor and Lepore argue that since IRS can't account for compositionality in using epistemological criteria to determine conceptual mastery, they will fail to explain the productivity required for learning:  "You can know how to recognize good examples of pets (in favorable circumstances) and how to recognize good examples of fish (in favorable circumstances) without having a clue how to recognize good examples of pet fish in any circumstances (for example, because the conditions that are favorable for recognizing fish may screen the conditions that are favorable for recognizing pets; or vice versa). We think, and we have said loudly, frequently, but to little avail, that this line of argument generalizes to the conclusion that there can be no epistemic conditions on concept possession. If that’s right, the question how an Inferentialist can account for compositionality is seen to be the crux that he must resolve." (Fodor and Lepore, 2005, pp 189).

    The argument above suggests the following reasoning:

      The Argument for Compositionality

1) IRS construes conceptual mastery in terms of capacity to reliably respond in the appropriate circumstances (circumstances where we are 'warranted' to respond in such a determinate  way).

2) A given subject S can be reliable in responding to two different circumstances p and q, without for this reason being capable of reliably responding to a compound situation p and q.

C1) Therefore, it is possible for a subject S to have the concept x that corresponds to p, and concept y that corresponds to q, without for this reason having the concept z that corresponds to p and q, i.e. the semantic value of "x and y" is not computable from the semantic values of the constituent concept x and that of the constituent concept y.

C2) Therefore,  reliable responsive dispositions are not compositionally generalizable.

5) Any semantic account suited to give a theory of learning requires that one be able to explain how a subject S may come to acquire/learn composite concepts on the basis of simpler ones, i.e. it will need to explain the projectibility and systematicity of language.

6) The capacity to explain projectibility and systematicity requires that we explain concept acquisition/learning compositionally.

C3) Thus, any account that construes conceptual-possession in epistemic terms, and in particular restricting the latter to the capacity to issue reliable differential dispositions, will necessarily fail to give a theory of learning.

C4) Therefore, IRS will not be able to account as a theory for concept learning.

         Notice that the argument above does not say anything about holism; it is left open that a behavioral account of concept possession as concept use might fail even if endorsing semantic atomism. The argument is thus to be supplemented by the claim, suggested strongly by (C2), that productivity demands compositionality, and the latter the priority of subsentential semantics to sentential semantics, i.e. it will require endorsing a 'bottom-up' approach to formal semantics. And although, as we saw above, Fodor and Lepore reserve judgment about whether semantic atomism obtains or not, they insist that either atomism or at least some qualified 'molecularism', as Dummett calls it, would help meet the demands of compositionality not met by an inferentialist account. Namely, they argue that "...if molecularism is true, then the content of a concept would not be sensitive to all the inferences it’s involved in, (or even to all the “correct” inferences it’s involved in) but only to the ones that belong to the same “molecule” that the concept does." (Ibid: pp. 190) Yet because they think that even molecularism requires a distinction between analytic/synthetic expressions, strict semantic holism won't do. This is clear if we keep in mind that the molecularist alternative would cash the compositionality requirement in terms of how 'molecular', rather than atomic primitives, determine the semantic values of complex expressions in the language. As a result, Fodor and Lepore seem to suggest that either IRS runs with something like the molecularist/atomist alternative, but thereby reactivate the analytic-synthetic distinction, or else they remain tethered to strict holism in which case they become incapable of accounting for compositionality, and thus fail to account for learning.

     As it turns out, Brandom's (2005) response to Fodor and Lepore allows us to see where precisely the argument for compositionality goes wrong. In his more recent work on formal semantics, Brandom shows how one can account for systematicity and projectibility, and so for productivity, without semantic atomism/molecularism of the sort that Fodor and Lepore deem inescapable. In order to do so, he accounts for logical, modal, and non-logical expressions in terms of incompatibility semantics: for set of sentences s that content of s is the set r of all sentences that are materially incompatible with s (Brandom, 2005, pp 335-336). A given sentence p entails q if and only if the set of those sentences that are incompatible with q are incompatible with p. The negation of p is the set of sentences s that follow from the set r of all sentences incompatible with p. As a result, that which is incompatible with not-p can change, while the semantic value of p remains fixed. As Brandom accordingly develops: "One consequence is that one can alter the semantic interpretant of not-p (what is incompatible with it), while holding fixed the semantic interpretant of p (what is incompatible with it), by altering what is incompatible with something, r, that is incompatible with p. So the semantics does not have the semantic sub-formula property; one cannot compute the semantic value of a compound expression such as not-p as a function of the semantic value of its component, p. In this specific sense, it is a holistic semantics." (Ibid, pp. 336)

     Yet the semantic value of logically compound sentences are derived from the semantic values of less complex sentences, and in this sense it constitutes a form of 'molecularism'. However, it is the value of many (and in the limit case all) of the simpler sentences in order to compute this, and not just those which are subformulae of the compound sentence the semantic value of which is in the process of being computed. Brandom's retort in this regard is definitive and necessary to disassociate learning from compositionality, and deserves to be quoted in full here:

 "The semantics is projectible and systematic, in that semantic values are determined for all syntactically admissible compounds, of arbitrary degrees of complexity. It is learnable - at least in principle, putting issues of contingent psychology aside, in the ideal sense we have been working with. For the capacity to distinguish the incompatibility sets of primitive propositions is, in the context of the semantic definitions of the connectives in terms of incompatibilities I have offered, sufficient by algorithmic elaboration for the capacity to distinguish the incompatibilities of all their logical (including modal-logical) compounds - and hence for the practical capacity to distinguish what is a consequence of what.

          What semantic projectibility, systematicity and leanability-in-principle require then, is not semantic atomism and compositionality, but semantic recursiveness with respect to complexity. That is entirely compatible with the semantics being holistic, in the sense of lacking the semantic sub-formula property, which is the hallmark of atomism and compositionality. " (Ibid: pp 336-337)

 This allows us to see precisely what is wrong in Fodor and Lepore's argument; namely premise (6) as tacitly supported in the jump from (C1) to (C2), i.e. the claim that if the semantic sub-formula property fails, and hence if compositionality fails, then projectibility and systematicity must also fail as well. What Brandom allows us to see is that one can agree in that the semantic value of complexes is determined from simpler constituents, without for this reason having the semantic value of such complex expressions be computable from its corresponding primitives, i.e. it explains projectibility and systematicity without the semantic sub-formula property. That a semantics modeled on incompatibility relations may explain productivity without compositionality entails that the requirement that learning require compositionality, and by extension semantic atomism, is a false one. Recursivity is weaker than compositionality, but none the worse for it, all it requires is the abandonment of an artificially constrictive property. At this juncture, one might wonder if there's any good reason to reserve the name compositionality for only those semantic models that strictly obey the semantic sub-formula property, although the stakes of the debate become mostly terminological at this juncture. For it is clear that while Fodor and Lepore's examples show that compositionality, in their terms, might in fact fail to obtain in certain cases, it certainly does not show that it cannot obtain in others. For it could be that a given concept behaves compositionally, without for this reason suggesting that one's semantics cash all concept-mastery out in terms of compositionality as a necessary condition. 

     On any account, what this entails is that while IRS has it that inferential role exhausts conceptual content, mastering inferential role requires more than the mere capacity to reliably respond to the relevant stimuli in cases of perceptual recognition. For while it is perfectly true to say that one might cannot compute the value of "p and q" from the semantic values of p and q, if even if one knows in which circumstances to respond to situations where p and q are warranted use by recognition, it doesn't follow that if one were to know the inferential role of p and q one wouldn't know the inferential role of p and q. As we have seen, inferential role, construed around an incompatibility semantics, requires that one be able to determine recursiveness "between levels", i.e. one needs to look at many or all of the lesser complex sentences inferentially related to a given sentence, and not just those in the sub-formulae of the compound (Ibid; pp. 336). Inferential competence exceeds strict compositionality requirements, while manages to meet productivity requirements Thus, the claim that because reliable responsive dispositions don't compose when recognizing ideal exemplars for concepts does not entail anything of importance. And with this in mind, one might insist that if one were to master the inferential role of p and q one would have thereby necessarily mastered the role for 'p and q' without for this reason endorsing the semantic sub-formula property, or letting go off semantic holism.

         Finally, although inferential competence must be construed as a kind of differential disposition in any case, what the post-Sellarsian CRS enjoins us to do is precisely to articulate a multi-leveled semantics capable of distinguishing between different kinds of dispositional transitions. Brandom follows Sellars (1954) in distinguishing between: a) perceptual/recognition (from non-sentential to sentential; language-entry transitions), b) intra-sentential (sentence input to sentence output), and c) action-producing (sentential inputs to non-sentential outputs; language-exit transitions). Inferential role comprises the articulation between all three levels while Fodor and Lepore's argument shows only that compositionality fails on occasion at the first level[5]. Once these three levels are in place, IRS is capable of  laying a multifaceted account of the possible kinds of inferential connection between sentences: 1) commitment-preserving inferences that generalize deductive inferences to material occasions; 2) entitlement-preserving inferences that generalize inductive inferences to material occasions; and 3) incompatibility entailments that are modally robust (Ibid, pp. 354). This is not the place to attempt to unpack the fine-grained details of such a semantic account or its feasibility, but it goes without saying that Fodor and Lepore's construal of the relevant reliable responsive dispositions in terms of recognition, and so restricting itself to the first level of perceptual reliability, for their claims about compositionality. I hope to have showed to some extent that these claims fall short of their pretentions, and so that the case against IRS and semantic holism fails as well.

---

[1] Brandom, Robert, Making it Explicit, Harvard University Press, 1998.

[2] Quine, W.V, Word and Object, MIT Press, 1964.

[3] These constitute, albeit not exclusively, iterations of what Sellars calls 'The Myth of the Given'.

[4] As Peter Wolfendale has put it elegantly, in the order of evolution we progress from accordance, to grasping, to following. In the order of explanation we go from following, to grasping, to accordance.

[5] This multi-layered account is crucial for the development of monotonic and non-monotonic inferences.

Two Routes to Idealism? Sellars, Inferentialism and Mathematical Ontology

TWO ROUTES TO IDEALISM?

- Sellars, Inferentialism and Mathematical Ontology -

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I have been exchanging ideas for quite some time with Peter Wolfendale, on a relatively regular basis, and it has been nothing but a pleasure. I find his command of the analytic tradition, and in particular post-Quinean ‘inferentialism’ to be of inestimable worth, in particular in sight of the project of rehabilitating representation within Continental thought begun by Ray Brassier recently. Perhaps I should say that it is not so much a rehabilitation of representation which is at stake, but rather a necessary re-consideration of the problems set forth by it. At its most general, the question concerns the putative displacement of epistemology in favor of ontology that has somewhat ubiquitously dominated post-Heideggerian Continental thought.  Of course, this displacement occurs in various ways, and part of Ray’s polemics with the Continental tradition examines this junction. But also with the analytic deflationary accounts inspired by behaviorism and which solidified in a formal semantics that castigated the valence of the notion of reference, flattening knowledge to semantics. From phenomenology, to vitalism, to deconstruction, to a certain pragmatism complicit with instrumentalism, to inferentialism, to mathematical ontology, Brassier’s work finds in the dissolution of representation understood as how conceptual thought relates to its non-conceptual exteriority a useful lever to motivate what is precisely the impediment for any realist or materialist philosophy in both analytic and continental circles, i.e. the elimination of epistemology inspired by the critique of metaphysics, and the elimination of ontology inspired by the post-Quinean inferentialist deflationary standards for existence, truth and reference. The former option takes representation to constitute one more iteration of the kind of ontotheological posits that require suspension (Husserl), destruktion (Heidegger), deconstruction (Derrida), destratificaiton (Deleuze), or dissolution (Lyotard). For these thinkers the result is either a post-critical restitution of the ontological problematic, or else a progressive de-legitimization of the propriety of the philosophical task tout court, which casts even ontology under questions. The critique of critique ends up in exacerbated forms targetting not just the Heideggerean ban against metaphysics of presence, but eventually all metaphysics, and with it philosophical ‘phallogocentrism’ (Derrida). For the vitalist post-Bergsonian inspired metaphysics, representation becomes the pivotal structure of thought which demands destitution, particularly in the work of Deleuze (inspired by Foucault) against the fourfold axis of conception: identity in the concept, contrariness in the predicate, resemblance in perception, and analogy in judgment. The 'return to Kant' which insists on the propriety of conceptual representation thus resists the displacement of the latter and of the primacy of conceptual knowing all being complicit in some form or other with a pre-Critical metaphysical reification, or an allegedly post-philosophical idealism or correlationism camouflaged under the banners of 'textuality', 'practice', 'thinking', or some other human-relative determinant.

On any account, the radicalization of the critique of metaphysics devolves into an ever aggravating critique of critique which restores metaphysical primacy or else tries to shut philosophy down for good. One of Brassier’s most relevant contentions is to insist, with Badiou, that even in their presumed ‘anti-philosophical’ radicality these thinkers finally display a philosophical complicity to idealism or correlationism. There where philosophy is said to stop, usually an anti-philosophy begins, which is philosophy after all.  However, Brassier thinks that what is necessary is not just a ‘forgetting of the forgetting of the forgetting’ of the restoration of the question on being is favor of a subtractive ontology, like Badiou claims against Heidegger. Rather, we also need a ‘critique of the critique of critique’ against the post-Kantian idealist conflation between thought and reality, the elimination of conceptual representation as relating mind and world, as well as the correlationist-idealist dissolution of the primacy of knowing. And of course this entails that we must ask again the Kantian question about possibility of preserving a relative autonomy between mind and world, without reifying this difference into a metaphysical dualism that falls short of the critical injunction to make their congruence contingent. But he must reconcile the realist requirement of plausible separation between thought and reality, while insisting in that this can be done without invoking metaphysics surreptitiously, obviating the need to explain not just what there is, but the critical question about how we know what there is. In this regard, he resists the Badiouan Parmenidean identification of being and thought, and allots the latter to the ubiquitous disavowal of representation of post-Kantian Continental thought. Representation turns out not to have only been illegitimately obviated, but that this obviation explains the correlationist and idealist incapacity to motivate a realist ontology, at a loss for an epistemological footing. For the question about the difference between concepts and objects, thought and reality, turns out to require the preservation of the scope of rational agency which ascribes normative valence to rational subjects. In this regard, the transcendental delimitation of thought retains methodological autonomy vis a vis the ontological, without inflating thought with a metaphysical status.  Having moved away from the ‘postural realism’ of Laruelle’s exacerbation of abstraction, Brassier’s current position motivates a Sellarsian revisionary naturalism. In it the necessary rationalist articulation of epistemology and metaphysics becomes necessary to dispel intuition (against all forms of self-legitimizing appeals to experience), but also to avoid the folding of being into thought in the inferentialist deflation of metaphysics, or thought into being  in the ontological ‘flattening’ of ideality which devolves from the dissolution of epistemology.             

  There is of course substantial overlap between Peter’s Brandomian vision and Brassier’s Sellarsian position, and so the connection between a (non-metaphysical) Hegel-inspired inferentialism, and a revisionary Kantian naturalism. While Peter agrees with the inferentialist extirpation of the metaphysical core from the deontological account of thought, he aligns himself with Sellars and Brassier in rejecting the wholesale disavowal of the metaphysical task, by insisting that a naturalistic ontology is both possible and necessary. Of course, it is Sellars who has emphasized this by insisting in the relative autonomy of the ontological and the normative, metaphysics and epistemology. A non-metaphysical deontology describing the transcendental structure of thought is methodologically propadeutic to a naturalist metaphysics, set to describe the univocal structure of being, including the ontological conditioning for the instantiation of thought. This last part is precisely what strict inferentialism proscribes.

     One of the interesting things is that Peter seems to accept this Sellarsian corrective to the Brandomian position, advocating a kind of Spinozist and Deleuzian-inspired metaphysics. There is much to be said about Peter’s startlingly brilliant readings of Spinoza and Deleuze, but that is best reserved for another occasion. I would just remark that although I remain skeptical about the plausibility of Deleuzian metaphysics as appropriate for naturalist metaphysics continuous with today’s science[1], I think that there is a more primary issue at stake, which follows from the methodological priority of epistemology, for both Sellars and Brandom.  Before we discern between the specific differences in the metaphysical alternatives themselves, or evaluate their internal conceptual coherency, we must explain the nature of objective knowledge in relation to deontological normative strictures which define the transcendental conditions for intelligibility, or thought as such. Much of Pete’s brilliant deontological project delineates a broadly Brandomian account of the use of conceptual norms, and his Essay on Transcendental Realism goes a long way in explaining how this works.

      For my part, the difficulty in coordinating the deflationary realism of strict Brandomian inferentialism with the Sellarsian alternative reveals interesting issues. To ask about whether inferentialism could support the rehabilitation of metaphysics cannot but provoke the further question about whether Sellars’ position could be described as endorsing a kind of inferentialism like Brandom thinks, and as McDowell, DeVries-Tripplet, among others, reject. Of course, one could say that inferentialism generally holds as a suitable account of thought, while insisting on the autonomy of metaphysics. And I think that this autonomy is surely of the capital features of Sellars’ philosophy. However, exactly how we should coordinate the separation between the metaphysics and the epistemology in Sellars’ case is quite controversial.

      In particular, much polemic has been generated concerning the precise evaluation of the role of perception. For example,  John McDowell (2005) seems to take issue with Brandom’s reading of Sellars, insisting that the deflation of experience to judgment is excessively one-sided, and eliminates a crucial empiricist component in Sellars’ naturalism. But even if we don’t agree with McDowell’s alternative reading, I think we can rescue some of his objections to Brandom’s reading of Sellars as advocating strict deflationary standards for perception. Now, I think that Pete and Ray are prepared to agree in that Sellars’ own account of perception and his account of picturing are not obviously reconcilable with the minimalist account that Brandom provides. A discussion of these two positions merits a full scoped investigation which I intend to carry out in coming work. My impression is that the restriction of perceptual experience to judgments, with no intermediary states of the sort McDowell’s polemical reading argues for to play any part, creates problems for any claims to realism. Specifically, the flattening of perceptual judgments to the general capacity to have the appropriate RDRDs deflates sensible experience in the way that vitiates the way perception serves to anchor us in a causally autonomous world. For one of Sellars’ most important insights is that while perception is conceptual, the ontological constitution of sensation, while remaining epistemically mute, permits us to rehabilitate a notion of correspondence and a theory of picturing in which concepts and so perceptual judgments are causally knit to  physical objects, thus exceeding a purely semantic account of truth. I quote Brassier in this regard:

     “It’s often assumed that Sellars’ critique of relational (or “matrimonial”) theories of meaning dispenses with the word/world relation altogether since conceptual role supplants reference.  But this is not so: he supplements his semantic account of truth as ideal conceptual coherence with a correspondence relation between utterances as “natural linguistic objects” and physical events: one must be appropriately connected to one’s environment in order to be entitled to issue certain utterances. It gets more complicated of course, but the key is that while correspondence is never transparent—it’s too opaque to be called “reference”--- it is still there, although not as a semantic relation.  This is the insight that Brandom expresses in his claim that sense dependence is not reference dependence: the conditions for the former ought not to be conflated with those for the latter. But unlike Brandom, Sellars has a positive alternative to reference as a semantic relation, which he calls “picturing”. 

     Now, it might seem premature to claim inferentialism conflates mind and world, but the primary issue becomes more evident upon considering some of the consequences, using Brandom’s own examples against McDowell. The one that comes to mind is the characterization of the scientist who learns to reliably report the presence and movement of ‘mu mesons’ by progressive refinement in his conceptual ability following the observation of a cloud chamber. For Brandom, the capacity to reliably report the fact that mu mesons are there, even at a loss for knowledge about what criteria one is using in the reliable use of the capacity, counts as a case of ‘seeing mu mesons’ just in case one knows that one is reliable in doing so.  I quote Brandom in this regard:

                  “Thus a properly trained physicist, who can respond systematically differently to differently shaped tracks in a cloud chamber will, if she responds by non-inferentially reporting the presence of mu mesons, count as genuinely observing those subatomic particles. She may start out by reporting the presence of hooked vapor trails and inferring the presence of mu mesons, but if she then learns to eliminate the intermediate response and respond directly to the trails by reporting mesons, she will be observing them. “Standard conditions” for observing mu mesons will include the presence of the cloud chamber, just as standard conditions for observing the colors of things includes the presence of adequate light of the right kind. And the community for whom ‘mu meson’ is an observation predicate will be much smaller and more highly specialized than the community for whom ‘red’ is one. But these are differences of degree, rather than kind.”

       I find this account largely consonant with a strict Sellarsian position in most respects, and particularly in insisting on the possibility of non-inferential knowledge which is not for this reason unmediated or unlearned, since all knowing requires participation within a complexly articulated linguistic community. But the account of observation predicates raises questions which are precisely of the kind that lead McDowell to read Sellars as one step, yet perhaps a decisive one, short of endorsing a full-blown inferentialism ala Brandom.

       To see why, we must just apply the same strictures set in the example of the physicist to a different situation, of the sort proposed by McDowell: a man learns to reliably report that their neighbor is home when he sees that his car is parked in the driveway. For Brandom, assuming the man knows that he is reliable, this counts as observational knowledge and he sees that the neighbor is home. However, the difference between the direct knowledge that is involved in seeing that the neighbor is home by having the neighbor before his eyes, and the knowledge that would be obtained in seeing the same fact when seeing the car, is obscured thereby. Both instances would count as cases of direct observational knowledge, having the same underlying fact as their reported, propositional content, i.e. both report that 'the neighbor is home'. And since they are both non-inferential states, one cannot appeal to the fact that the man ‘arrives’ at such knowledge by a prior consideration of the knowledge that the car is there, since then one must explain how this latter fact motivates the former in situ, which starts sounding a whole lot like inference again. Even if both cases could be construed as examples of non-inferential knowledge, it seems as if what Brassier describes above attests to a complicity between perception and sensible experience, i.e. natural linguistic objects are connected to physical events by the externalist requirement to be properly caused in relation to environmental conditions. Picturing describes a non-semantic relation between perceptual states and the world which, while enveloped conceptually, retains autonomy. And I believe that Sellars’ more acute observation consists not just in severing experience at large, but more precisely in refusing to construe it as the gulf for unacquired knowledge; that is, as cases of independent knowledge. And although he certainly endorses the inferentialist demand for the conceptual envelopment of perceptual experience and the form of judgment, this does not entail that the experience is reducible to the conceptual judgments or to semantic relation. For this is precisely the role that sensation plays, which allows one to level the ontological priority of experience, while preserving the relative autonomy of the sapient, conceptual envelopment of knowledge. Thus while Sellars is perfectly comfortable in accepting that non-inferential knowledge is possible, he denies that independent knowledge is possible, and furthermore insists that sensibility remains crucial for metaphysical reasons, and which illuminate how we ‘picture’ the world rather than simply merely relate to it in accordance to pragmatic norms. Thus the also emphatic interest in Sellarsian naturalism, and in particular in the neurophysiological ontological account of thought advanced by Metzinger and the Churchlands, while refusing tacit pragmatism through the inflation of ‘super-empirical virtues’ that are gratuitously prescribed rather than explained. Rather, while we must deem experience as being conceptually specific in nature, this does not mean that the ontological nature of experience is conceptual nor that understanding concepts means understanding the use of words; one cannot restrict experience to simply signify the capacity to reliably report a fact without completely obviating the naturalist side of Sellarsian philosophy. This is what has made other philosophers insist in the valence of empiricism in Sellars, which one might think is ultimately difficult to reconcile with inferentialism. Thus, for instance, McDowell thinks that perceptual experiences constitute a kind of belief states that are acquired non-inferentially once the subject comes to endorse the content of a perceptual experience. Yet the content of the experience is not by itself judgment, although it has propositional content. It is solely a ‘candidate’ for endorsement.  This is still not sufficient to explain how one comes to acquire such content as mere ‘candidates’, propositionally specific and yet not simple behaviorally fixed dispositions or RDRDs, anchored causally in an environing world. But this is just to say that it is highly controversial whether McDowell does any greater justice to Sellars on this particular point than Brandom does. DeVries and Tripplet seem to side against Brandom, while O’Shea reiterates that the role perception plays in Sellars must be closely understood in relation to his naturalism. I reserve judgment in these matters.

     The discussion around perception becomes a useful key to understanding how conceptual structures that fix our knowing of being are objective with regards to a world, while subject to rational norms for revision. The non-reviseable logic of rational obligation articulates the necessary rationalist rejoinder to all instrumentalist prescriptions of scientism, as necessary to explain how we acquire knowledge, given the primitive methodological priority of the normative space of reasons. And Sellars’ supplementary account of picturing is not clearly reflected in Brandom, particularly since it is not clear that he would allow for the ontological role sensation plays within our understanding of perception. And it is certainly not clear to me that McDowell’s own alternative fares any better. For even if McDowell is right in that reducing perception to judgment to deflate experience into a semantic relation once again conflates empirical content with conceptual form, one might insist that to introduce intermediary states between judgments and candidates for endorsement falls to the trap of thinking that what occasions judgment is a ‘act of will’ which supplements categorical synthesis. And this is precisely what Brandom finds unpersuasive about McDowell’s alleged commitment to empiricism.

    My own position on this matter is that Brandom’s strict inferentialism seems to reproduce the pragmatic conflation of thinking and being which already plagued Quine, and which ends up undermining materialism, not unlike Badiou, in lacking the sufficient resources to disambiguate between form and content. Content dissolves into propositional content, and what Pete calls a ‘thick’ sense of reality falls out the window. I think with Pete that a thick notion of reality is necessary, and that such a notion needs to be advanced without reintroducing the metaphysical dualism of thought and matter. Thus the key moment for Brassier remains the Kantian juncture between the non-metaphysical normative space of reasons and the ontological-natural-causal domain of natural scientific research, while for Pete’s more Brandomian, and by extension Hegelian, position (although I agree with Zizek in that Pittsburg Hegelianism is a misreading of Hegel) the primary task is to eviscerate the myth of phenomenological content in favor of the primacy of logical relation in a deflationary account of thought.

       I would suggest that inferentialism can be seen as a precedent of the problem that plagues structuralist-inspired contemporary French materialisms, like Badiou’s and Meillassoux’s, departing from Althusser and Lacan. And by this I would also mention thinkers like Gabriel Catren, or even the post-Landian neo-Deleuzians, like Reza Negarestani.  While the last two have taken over the Continental liquidation of epistemological primacy and followed the formalist tendency in tethering ontology to mathematics, the inferentialist camp meanwhile insists on the autonomy of the normative while tethering the latter to logic and semantic analysis. Indeed, while the former have folded into deciding the appropriate mathematical paradigm for metaphysics and resolving the relation between the branches of mathematics (differential calculus, set theory, category theory, logic, topos theory…) as part of ontology itself, the latter have insisted on reducing representational content to propositional content, understood as the inferential structure of thought. For them this reduces semantic content to the pragmatic examination of the relations into which normatively charged propositional attitudes enter with respect to each other within a community of rational agents.  It fulfills the promise of a transcendental philosophy that describes the structure of thought without relapsing into the metaphysical dualism of mind and world.

      What I find most striking is that both extreme poles, mathematical ontology and inferentialist epistemology, render their respective counterparts impossible, vitiating the possibility of distinguishing mind and world that realism requires, and that Sellars pursues. For Badiou, it becomes impossible to distinguish ontological from non-ontological situations without the surreptitious mediation of philosophical discourse, while for strict inferentialism of the Brandomian type, metaphysics falls out the window completely. The latter option basically eviscerates the metaphysical core of Hegelianism, while the former similarly extirpates the epistemological core of rational agency which annuls the possibility of thinking of a non-immediate congruence between thought and reality, having no choice but to endorse the Parmenidean identification of thinking and being. In both cases we get something like a cunning of reason against realism-materialism: the epistemological confine to the rational community which instrumentalizes the natural (like Habermas, but also possibly Brandom) into the social space of a rationalist pragmatics (which I take Badiou has sufficiently shown to be in complicit with a kind of idealism), and the ontological confine to a formal ideography with no account of the relation it holds to its denied exteriority. The critique of intuitional or experiential givenness is exacerbated to a deflation of all non semantic, empiricist notion of ‘content’ or reference, which has no option but to conflate being and thought.  In this regard, the violent anti-phenomenological vocation that drives both mathematical ontology and inferentialism, in annulling  experience, end up preemptively throwing the metaphysical baby with the epistemological bathwater (inferentialist dismissal of the necessity of metaphysics), or else throwing the epistemological baby with the metaphysical bathwater (post-Heideggerean strawmans against epistemology).

       What is also intriguing is that both alternatives remain surprisingly cogent with each other in that their respective formalisms entail a noocentric enclosure, which keeps philosophy from taking the empirical sciences sufficiently seriously, despite their protestations to the contrary. Thus neither Brandom nor Badiou seem to have much to say about what those sciences which describe human-independent phenomena are doing; where does physics fall for Badiou? Is it regional ontology, like Catren seems to be implying in his (brilliant) topology of the tasks for thought, the great ‘Outland Empire’? Perhaps it is no surprise that people like Rorty can simultaneously find appealing both anti-metaphysical inferentialism, and anti-epistemological ontology. To sum up, we can say that the strong anti-empiricism of rationalist ontology of the mathematical ends up resembling inferentialism in their mutual Hegelian trivialization of experiential content, which becomes ultimately complicit with the idealist indistinction of thought and being.

      Badiou in fact motivates this conflation from the start in castigating the unquestioned ‘third dogma’ of empiricism, in the dualism between empirical content and form, which has motivated the idea that formal axiomatic systems model reality. The restriction of ontological discursivity to the dialectics between mathematical forms and for which domains of interpretation model axiomatic systems, however, is given a crude quasi-Althusserian analysis of the intrication of philosophy, science and ideology, in the tripartite negotiation of concepts, functions, and notions. And the meta-ontological gloss of the later Badiou cannot but appear as yet another surreptitious normative injunction in favor of a subtractive ontology of the multiple, ultimately motivated by the need to introduce subjectivity in a gratuitous supplementation of the ontological by the evental, of the objective by the subjective, of the stasis of knowledge by truth, etc. But if this is not, like Zizek claims apropos the Pittsburg Hegelians, an ideological validation of liberalist capitalism, it is certainly an equally ideological political suture by Badiou’s own standards, assigning the subject the peculiar role to be the agent of all structural dynamism, of all change and for all truths. This is idealism with a vengeance, hybridizing the decisionistic fetishism of subjective freedom, while dislodging the requirement to argue for the distinction between ontology and non-ontology, the discursive intelligibility of being and the world, through the philosophical umbrella of ‘presentation’ mediating between the two. The emphasis on subjective creation, and of truth as production, also makes the dimension of discovery proper to science in particular difficult to understand.  Other options, like Catren and Negarestani, seem to run into similar problems to Nick Land. Having destratified the empirical transcendental-distinction, and having underdetermined representation by the unconscious thanatropism of intensive matter, it is not clear that anything like a subject remains. So it is not clear that a plausible account can be given to discern how conceptual structure relates to this primary material process. This seems to fold once again on a surreptitious prescription for a given metaphysics, which is itself strictly incompatible with the strictures under which subjective agency, decision, or ‘theorization’ could take place. It’s not clear one could even ‘accelerate’ under this scheme, since in refusing to re-anthropomorphize philosophy with a supplementary ethics of ‘subjective intervention’ along the immanent ubiquity of ontologically primary matter, post-Landians cannot discern between the world and discourse about the world, i.e. they cannot distinguish concepts and objects in their metaphysics as such. Calling it non-metaphysical practicism is simply to obviate the issue that now is resolutely another version of the idealist serpent of absolute knowledge, swallowing itself; only this time cashed out in terms of primary production and a logic of ‘expression’. Shorn of its vitalist residue, this materialism ends up making it extremely difficult to understand the peculiar ‘stratification’ that is theory in relation to the primary process it allegedly it has ceased to described, since no longer experience mediates in it.

     The inferentialist option on its part seems to reproduce the instrumentalization which follows from the extirpation of reference from verificationist standards. Here either metaphysics is in principle proscribed, or else ontology becomes a quite foreign matter, subjected to ideological prescriptions and legitimated extraneously through ad hoc appeals to super-empirical virtues of varied assortments. These finally end up, like Ladyman and Ross, but also Quine, being incapable of reconciling the deflation of reality to existential quantification with a robust realism or physicalism. And here the Sellarsian option stands as a necessary interruption, I think, of this line, through a more intricate idea of how perception mediates the knowing of the real. It insists on the importance of perceptual judgment in epistemology and of giving an account of sensibility within ontology, insofar as we must understand the composite intrication of the conceptual and the objectual. And I agree with Brassier in that ultimately the moniker realism becomes suspect at this stage, since at no point concepts ‘reach out’ onto things. But their difference and relation must be one that is possibly clarified without being metaphysically reified, and this is what I am not convinced strict inferentialism is prepared to accomplish. I think Pete would probably agree at bottom, and thus accept that a necessary corrective to Brandom would require recuperating a thick notion of reality, albeit I don’t think that this has been satisfactorily reconciled with a preservation of inferentialism which deflates perception.

    Here recent questions about aesthetics raised by Peter and Brassier become peculiarly interesting, since I think they can allow us to see how perception continues to play a role in the story in a way that illuminates the peculiarity of Sellars’ position. As I take it, Brassier endorses the modern severance of the beautiful from the sensible, thereby advocating the former’s allotment to the conceptual. Here I agree with Pete in that the intrication between the Beautiful, the Good, and Value brings Plato to the context of a rationalist epistemology with an inferentialist bent. The basic idea is that we can distinguish Beauty as a species of Value, with varying scales of Universality. Thus Pete distinguishes a broad sense of Beauty akin to that of Value-in-itself, or its pure form, which is independent of all rational interests, and a narrower sense in which different aesthetic values are pitted against each other within the conceptual norms of the sensus communis and which make possible the negotiation of aesthetic judgments.

      Here the account of artistic beauty in particular becomes interesting, insofar as it is related to production and intentionality. The idea is that in art, as opposed to nature, we seek to produce affect, and while presupposing communication, art must also resist being communicable, lacking determinate semantic content. This is relevant because this lack of semantic determinacy is meant to capture the Sellarsian rejection of the epistemic valence of sensible transparency as a variant of the Myth of the Given, but can also become a way to address the kernel of truth in the abused cliché about how art is in a way not about ‘mere communication or reproduction’, but about disruption and creation. The point is how to account for this experimental and creative dimension in art without falling into a mindless celebration of the affirmative will, which Brandom castigates rightfully, or a reification of sublimity by interrupting the rational order of causes through a pure experience, or some ‘aura’ which ordains aesthetics to the mystical quality in the work (from Benjamin to Heidegger, to Laruelle perhaps). Here the absorption of the beautiful to the conceptual can allow us to be continuous to the ideal of non-communication in both senses, rejecting givenness while accepting art’s disruptive character, thus embracing a dialectical historicity of artistic production intricate in the conceptual. And this would be the role of the ‘narrow’ sense of beauty of ‘lower order’ universality, in which the production of art would be dialectically imbued within the conceptual seal in aesthetic judgment. This unites one of Badiou’s salient virtues with a proper Sellarsian embedding of productivity within the normative: the semantic indeterminacy of art is to be understood in the sense in which artistic production makes possible new judgments and relations which are strictly irreducible to previous ones, by causing semantic interference with the state of the situation as it is.

    One might think that such a ‘conceptualization’ of the aesthetic deprives it of its link to experience; but here is where I think a Sellarsian rejoinder is necessary. We can salvage the link between the conceptual and the perceptual, accepting that the latter is anchored in the sensible, while insisting that beauty concerns only the conceptual. This is a striking reversal of common sense, since now it is the natural which remains refractory from the conceptual, and which concerns the sensible proper. Ihis reversal can be done by amplifying the account of ‘looks talk’ in Sellars, in a way in which I Pete has again made some headway; although I don’t know how it would fit with Brandom. The basic idea is to disambiguate a sense of looks-talk which is not merely emphasizing the epistemic withdrawal of endorsement before a proposition about the world, i.e. in which the function of ‘x looks y to S’ is not reducible to ‘x withdraws endorsement from x is y’. This can be exemplified by using predicates such as ‘looking fuzzy’, where it is clear that the role of ‘looking’ therein is to make a report about a fact concerning the functioning of our perceptual mechanisms, and not the epistemic withdrawal of endorsement. This means that we can accept that there is a role to be played for experientially specific judgments about perception which provide the anchoring on sensibilia without rehabilitating the valence of sense datum transparency, and which would thus be continuous with the conceptual envelopment of the aesthetic. The idea would then be that the semantic indeterminacy introduced in artistic creation would be the (dialectical) interplay in the production of new perceptual judgments and relations, and which include (albeit not exclusively) statements about how things produce affect as states relative to the functioning of our sensory organs, i.e. perceiver-relative facts.  These would constitute the specifiable content which relativizes aesthetic judgment to perceptual judgments, though not wholly, without losing grip on participation in the generation and negotiation of value. The trick here is to coordinate properly aesthetic judgments in art with perceptual judgments (whose content is determinate) to explain how the indeterminacy of artistic works themselves is to be understood relative to the articulation of conceptual norms within the sensus communis. The obvious question is whether this requires that we make aesthetic judgments in nature subject to the same sort of dialectics, and how the intentional stance ultimately weighs in. Again, this is a subject matter for a different occasion.

     As a provisory note, I would remark that the notion that value is ‘independent’ becomes quite difficult to cash out. On the one hand, I think that the distinction between the projection of value (which is our prerogative), and its construction (which we don’t make) is opaque for the moment. It also doesn’t seem clear to me what natural value consists in, beyond the trivial assertion that nature is not made by or for us. If by projection we simply mean that we need to deploy concepts to make aesthetic judgments, then it is not clear how these judgments are proper to art because of its intentional inflection. Clearly, some sort of projection in that sense would be necessary for natural judgment. This is ultimately a tangential matter.

       The main point is that the insurrectional component in art resists the fetishizing of formless sublimity, and imbues the perceptual within a dialectical understanding, in the narrow sense, wherein experience becomes configured and modified productively in relation to the subjective universality of the sensus communis. For art, there needs to be some non-reproductive element to realize the production of affect, by necessity, and it must not be in the trivial sense in which minimal difference at the level of perceptual content entails the production of wholly autonomous aesthetic value. The task lies in pinpointing the singularity of artistic works without relapsing into the theological frame of revelation still wed to givenness. It is not that the disruptive function of art is semantically indeterminate by being non-conceptual, but rather that it must be understood in relation to how it positions itself with respect to the community of rational agents. Art in this regard is what exorcises the Holy: it relativizes its local value to the rational negotiation of norms, underwritten only by the formal imperative of remaining true to value in-itself as its limit case and higher-order universality, and of rational purposefulness. Either one introduces beauty into the normative frame of reasons, or one pragmatically blocks the historical specificity and epistemic valence of art. We can't simply rejoice in claiming art is all about breaking the rules, and using the primacy of ‘pure’ intuition as the obverse of the affirmative will, against rationality. The conceptual negotiation of the manifest image in which aesthetic judgments are made exemplifies the possibility to think of a logic of change, local and structural, which can explain experimental novelty and semantic interference, without surrendering to irrationalism. The idea is how to coordinate a notion of perception as conceptual and epistemically apt, without deflating the sensible-ontological core of experience. But this is all very rudimentary, since it is not clear how to coordinate the predicates that describe the working of our sensory organs ('fuzzy') with a Sellarsian account of picturing, or something of the sort. But anyhow once perception has been understood as a mediated process the dialectics of historicity proper to it replace the quasi-mystical purchase of 'givenness' in experience championed by phenomenological and vitalist alternatives.

   In any case, here we can be Badioueans without the revolutionary rhetorical excess. Although the idea that truth diagonally subtracts itself from the situation in the construction of a generic subset does well to formalize a dialectics of change, rather than making it ex nihilo, we must insist with Sellars in that this cannot work within a realist register if one annihilates the autonomy of rational agency which guarantees the normative Universality as limit of value-in-itself. If one does, one inevitably ends up tacitly overruling the neutrality of subtractive ontology by regulating it with a higher order, undeclared, ad hoc normative meta-ontological discourse to explain the articulation between being and thought as that of revolutionary disruption in the creation of truth.  Of course, the latter is what Badiou really is after: to motivate the political revolutionary agenda which rejoices in the ‘great chaos under the sky’. As a result, set theoretical frameworks that operate without the axiom of foundation and admit of self-belonging are conveniently obviated rather than rationally discarded, in order to preserve the dialectics of illegality and of the event. Thus while Badiou moves a long way towards eviscerating the phenomenological myths of presencing, he grants too much to the structuralist deflation of the empirical, and the psychoanalytic allotment of the rational individual to the 'imaginary', along with its ontology fantasy.  If anything, I think it is necessary to show that this patronizingly dismissed 'imaginary' is not some secondary spook neatly absorbed as a linguistifying or logicist confusion, but a fundamental condition for any rationalism of the sort Badiou or Brandom pursue.

       On any account, this line of thought goes to show that, contra the predominant Continental doxa, representation need not be aligned to metaphysical skyhooks. All the variants of the critique of metaphysics in the 20^th Century simplify fatally in their dismissal of knowledge and representation, in the castigation of the understanding, and the apportioning of philosophy to ontology. Sellars’ putative force, beyond inferentialism and formalism, is to think the nature of experience without the slothful betrayal toward immediacy and first-person familiarity, all too conveniently aligned to armchair reflection. Of course this is why Deleuze in particular keeps obsessing Brassier, since in a way he has been the more articulate critic of the logic of representation, and in favor of the metaphysical priority.

       Two great limitations of continental thought are concentrated here: one, to think that thought ‘as such’ is rationally inaccessible because one must deflate transcendental metaphysical frames, and second that there is no suitably restricted notion of an object because the latter remains invariably secondary with respect to some linguistic/subjective/cultural constitution. So the object invariably gets destroyed, deconstructed, or destratified for being a testament to metaphysics of presence, of pure Vorhandenheit, derived extensity, secondary process, etc. And thought itself gets shafted for being the stillborn cunning of the same metaphysical reification of substance which lingers in the form of transcendental agency.

        By the same token, the inferentialist thinks that metaphysics as such is impossible since it must hypostasize ‘reference’ in a way that betrays post-Quinean deflationary standards for truth and existence, while insisting in that there is no suitably adequate vindication of experience beyond the pragmatic constriction to RDRDs. Thought on its part gets shrunk to its inferentialist core, while objectivity becomes a function of knowing.  But the point is that the object is not a function of thought, and that thought is itself objectifiable. Objectivity is precisely what allows us to understand the ontological priority of what is not thought, while the latter remains the condition for ascribing the rational responsibility to understand reality, to revise our beliefs in ways which are not merely prescriptive, or super-empirical whims by ideological-institutional agents, but rationally validated.

        The idea is finally to defend a sense of objectivity as part of metaphysics, without for this reason endorsing a neo-Scholastic metaphysics of objects, and a suitable notion of objective knowledge and so an epistemology, without for this reason endorsing a metaphysical divide between transcendence and transcendent.  And all of this while describing the nature of experience as involving a conceptually circumscribed role for perception as that which anchors our relation to the external world.

     Here the question of representation and hylomorphism that Deleuze criticizes apropos representation, which is supposed to hold since Aristotle, becomes an important challenge and focal point. The alternative realist account which rehabilitates perceptual judgment must do two difficult things on this terrain. First, it must resist the idea of a hylomorphic stapling of universal form on singular matter, since it must insist in that the specificity of objective matter is not external to itself, and certainly not a projection of our thought. Form is intrinsic to matter, while not being a function of conception, even if the latter remains necessary to know of it and yet external to itself. At the same time, we must accept that the conceptual traction on being must always ‘leave something out’, or that that, as Deleuze puts it, concepts are too baggy (since concepts are not things, and can never ‘touch’ reality), while rejecting that this constitutes an insufficiency before which we can supplant epistemology and the valence of the normative with a metaphysical account of individuating difference, and through a logic of expressive being, like in Spinozist-Deleuzian alternatives.

     Finally, in distinguishing between concepts and objects, thought and world, one must specificity the latter’ within a natural-causal order of explanation, in order to render it resolutely non-conceptual. This marks the ontological ubiquity of the scientific image, and its proper methodological autonomy. The way in which natural-causal description relates to its exteriority as developed in the account of picturing, however, remains obscure to me at present.

  

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[1] We could broadly understand the contemporeneity of science along Catren’s broad lines, by defining that philosophy would need to be simultaneously Galilean, Heisenbergean, Einsteinean, Newtonian, Freudian and Darwinean: “First, modern science is essentially Galilean, which means, in Husserl’s terminology, that mathematics is a formal ontology, i.e. a theory of the generic categories of being qua being, like for instance the categories of multiplicity (set theory), relation (category theory), quantity (number theory), localization (geometry), operativeness (algebra), symmetry (group theory), predication (logic), stability (dynamical systems theory), and so on6. In other words, modern science is essentially determined by the physical entanglement of mathematical logos and natural existence, an entanglement which implies both the Galilean mathematization of nature and the Husserlian (and Badiousian) ontologization of mathematics. Second, modern science is essentially Copernican, Darwinian, and Freudian, which means that the narcissistically wounded subject of science can no longer be considered a (self)-centred fundamental first or last instance. Third, modern science is essentially Newtonian, which means that nature is one, i.e. that the pre-modern (transcendental) bifurcation between the (unmoving) earth and the (noumenal) sky has been definitively removed. Fourth, modern science is essentially Einsteinian, which means that nature suspends itself in its (cor)relational immanence by absorbing (or physicalizing) any sort of transcendental or metaphysical (back)ground. And finally, modern science is essentially Heisenbergian, which means that the phenomenological objective consistency of nature depends upon a certain number of quantum categories, which define the general conditions of logical predicability, (in)deterministic predictability, physical individuation, temporal reidentification, experimental observability, and intersubjective objectivity.”