But this only works in contexts, the empirical or the logical, where it is decidable just what being warranted or justified consists in, — Janus

How are such contexts to be decided if not rationally ? This is as simple as offering reasons for claim that a context is or is not subject to rational norms. Admittedly people sometimes just stop talking and wage war.

What I mean by ‘not even temporarily’ is that only the actual interchange , in that moment, establishes the actual norm as what it is. — Joshs

I agree that something like a finishing touch or final spin is added at each moment, but it strikes me as unrealistic to ignore the weight of the past here. To have skill at speaking even basic English is the work of many days.

One man's fallacy is another man's phallus. — Janus

:up:

Folks can babble endlessly about mind and matter and mostly nobody minds, because it doesn't matter. There's very little semantic constraint. — igjugarjuk

Perhaps norms of intelligibility, which can be identified perhaps with semantic constraints, are too readily mistaken to Sunday School platitudes. All that's intended by the phrase are the mostly unwritten rules that we disobey at the risk not only of being misunderstood by others but also of not knowing ourselves what we are talking about in the first place.

For me, philosophy is a matter of ideas and insights, not warranted or justifiable claims and propositions. — Janus

We've discussed this some already, of course. To me philosophy is not simply constituted by (potentially) justifiable claims. It makes such claims about such claims. It discusses justification in the first place. This is human self-knowledge. We make explicit the nature of our behavior-coordinating 'chirps and squeaks.' This surely involves creativity. Where do shiny new hypotheses come from ? The strong philosopher is like a non-fiction poet, not only seeing human reality in a new way but making a case for this being better than a merely exciting madness and instead a deeper and truer rationality. I agree with you that the point is to put more life in to life, to live more vividly. It's not given that self-knowledge is the best path toward this goal, but I think it's a path.

I agree that something like a finishing touch or final spin is added at each moment, but it strikes me as unrealistic to ignore the weight of the past here. To have skill at speaking even basic English is the work of many days. — Pie

Like Heidegger, Derrida , Merleau-Ponty , Wittgenstein and others, I am a holist when it comes to how new context changes the past. Everything one has ever experienced , learned and committed to memory interacts with every other bit of one’s past, and the totality of one’s past is changed in drawing on any aspect of it. This change is extremely subtle so we ignore it and talk instead about the weight of the past, as if past were a present thing that holds us down. For Heidegger and Derrida , the past can’t hold us down if the past only ever exists as already affected by the present that it crosses with. When we say someone is stuck in the past they are not literally frozen in an archive, they are continuing to move forward every moment into fresh experience, but so ploddingly that it appears they are only regurgitating a ‘what was’.

Everything one has ever experienced , learned and committed to memory interacts with every other bit of one’s past, and the totality of one’s past is changed in drawing on any aspect of it. — Joshs

:up:

This change is extremely subtle so we ignore it and talk instead about the weight of the past, as if past were a present thing that holds us down. — Joshs

No need, in my view, to read a complaint into what's presented as a neutral fact.

For Heidegger and Derrida , the past can’t hold us down if the past only ever exists as already affected by the present that it crosses with. — Joshs

I don't see why the past wouldn't still be constraining. Indeed, I see both thinkers as acutely aware of such constraints.

The trace is not only the disappearance of origin — within the discourse that we sustain and according to the path that we follow it means that the origin did not even disappear, that it was never constituted except reciprocally by a non-origin, the trace, which thus becomes the origin of the origin. From then on, to wrench the concept of the trace from the classical scheme, which would derive it from a presence or from an originary non-trace and which would make of it an empirical mark, one must indeed speak of an originary trace or arche-trace. Yet we know that that concept destroys its name and that, if all begins with the trace, there is above all no originary trace. We must then situate, as a simple moment of the discourse, the phenomenological reduction and the Husserlian reference to a transcendental experience. To the extent that the concept of experience in general — and of transcendental experience, in Husserl in particular — remains governed by the theme of presence, it participates in the movement of the reduction of the trace. The Living Present (lebendige Gegenwart) is the universal and absolute form of transcendental experience to which Husserl refers us. In the descriptions of the movements of temporalisation, all that does not torment the simplicity and the domination of that form seems to indicate to us how much transcendental phenomenology belongs to metaphysics.
...
On the one band, the phonic element, the term, the plenitude that is called sensible, would not appear as such without the difference or opposition which gives them form. Such is the most evident significance of the appeal to difference as the reduction of phonic substance. Here the appearing and functioning of difference presupposes an originary synthesis not preceded by any absolute simplicity. Such would be the originary trace. Without a retention in the minimal unit of temporal experience, without a trace retaining the other as other in the same, no difference would do its work and no meaning would appear. It is not the question of a constituted difference here, but rather, before all determination of the content, of the pure movement which produces difference. The (pure) trace is difference. It does not depend on any sensible plenitude, audible or visible, phonic or graphic. It is, on the contrary, the condition of such a plenitude. Although it does not exist, although it is never a being-present outside of all plenitude, its possibility is by rights anterior to all that one calls sign (signified/signifier, content/expression, etc.), concept or operation, motor or sensory. This difference is therefore not more sensible than intelligible and it permits the articulation of signs among themselves within the same abstract order — a phonic or graphic text for example — or between two orders of expression. It permits the articulation of speech and writing — in the colloquial sense — as it founds the metaphysical opposition between the sensible and the intelligible, then between signifier and signified, expression and content, etc. If language were not already, in that sense, a writing, no derived “notation” would be possible; and the classical problem of relationships between speech and writing could not arise.
...
Without the difference between the sensory appearing [apparaissant] and its lived appearing [apparaître] (“mental imprint”), the temporalising synthesis, which permits differences to appear in a chain of significations, could not operate. That the “imprint” is irreducible means also that speech is originarily passive, but in a sense of passivity that all intramundane metaphors would only betray. This passivity is also the relationship to a past, to an always-already-there that no reactivation of the origin could fully master and awaken to presence. This impossibility of reanimating absolutely the manifest evidence of an originary presence refers us therefore to an absolute past. That is what authorised us to call trace that which does not let itself be summed up in the simplicity of a present. — Derrida

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/derrida.htm

These disguises are not historical contingencies that one might admire or regret. Their movement was absolutely necessary, with a necessity which cannot be judged by any other tribunal. The privilege of the phone does not depend upon a choice that could have been avoided. It responds to a moment of economy (let us say of the "life" of "history" or of "being as self-relationship" ) . The system of "hearing ( understanding ) -oneself-speak" through the phonic substance-which presents itself as the nonexterior,
nonmundane, therefore nonempirical or noncontingent signifier-has necessarily dominated the history of the world during an entire epoch, and has even produced the idea of the world, the idea of world-origin, that arises from the difference between the worldly and the non-worldly, the outside and the inside, ideality and nonideality, universal and nonuniversal, transcendental and empirical, etc.
...
Of course, it is not a question of "rejecting" these notions; they are necessary and, at least at present, nothing is conceivable for us without them.

https://monoskop.org/images/8/8e/Derrida_Jacques_Of_Grammatology_1998.pdf

What turn out to be prejudices in retrospect, were the very 'mechanisms' that made their transformation into prejudices possible in the first place. We can only judge now by the (unstable) standards we 'are.' We agree, I think, that each such judgment changes who we are.

When we say someone is stuck in the past they are not literally frozen in an archive, they are continuing to move forward every moment into fresh experience, but so ploddingly that it appears they are only regurgitating a ‘what was’. — Joshs

:up:

if you want a revolution
return to your childhood
and kick out the bottom

dont mistake changing
headlines for changes

if you want freedom
dont mistake circles
for revolutions

think in terms of living
and know
you are dying
& wonder why

if you want a revolution
learn to grow in spirals
always being able to return
to your childhood
and kick out the bottom

...


https://allpoetry.com/from-Tombstone-as-a-Lonely-Charm-(Part-3)

I don't see why the past wouldn't still be constraining. Indeed, I see both thinkers as acutely aware of such constraints. — Pie

The past is only constraining to the extent that new experience is always already familiar, recognizable, intelligible to us at some level. Pure novelty is non-existence But it is familiar not because a piece of the past has simply been carried over as a sedimented , recycled bit, glomming itself onto new events. There can be no pure duplication or repetition of a past as identical to itself.

The space of reasons is fundamentally historical, cumulative, and self-referential.

The far-out version is something like this:

The Real itself is what organises itself and makes itself concrete so as to become a determinate “species,” capable of being revealed by a general notion"; the Real itself reveals itself through articulate knowledge and thereby becomes a known object that has the knowing subject as its necessary complement, so that "empirical existence” is divided into beings that speak and beings that are spoken of. For real Being existing as Nature is what produces Man who reveals that Nature (and himself) by speaking of it. Real Being thus transforms itself into “truth” or into reality revealed by speech, and becomes a “higher” and “higher” truth as its discursive revelation becomes ever more adequate and complete.

It is by following this “dialectical movement” of the Real that Knowledge is present at its own birth and contemplates its own evolution. And thus it finally attains its end, which is the adequate and complete understanding of itself — i.e., of the progressive revelation of the Real and of Being by Speech — of the Real and Being which engender, in and by their “dialectical movement,” the Speech that reveals them.
...
The concrete Real (of which we speak) is both Real revealed by a discourse, and Discourse revealing a real. And the Hegelian experience is related neither to the Real nor to Discourse taken separately, but to their indissoluble unity. And since it is itself a revealing Discourse, it is itself an aspect of the concrete Real which it describes. It therefore brings in nothing from outside, and the thought or the discourse which is born from it is not a reflection on the Real: the Real itself is what reflects itself or is reflected in the discourse or as thought. — Kojeve

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/kojeve.htm

If we criticize the foundations of our conceptual system, we nevertheless employ this very system to do so.

Since these concepts are indispensable for unsettling the heritage to which they belong, we should be even less prone to renounce them. Within the closure, by an oblique and always perilous movement, constantly risking falling back within what is being deconstructed, it is necessary to surround the critical concepts with a careful and thorough discourse-to mark the conditions, the medium, and the limits of their effectiveness and to designate rigorously their intimate relationship to the machine whose
deconstruction they permit; and, in the same process, designate the crevice through which the yet unnameable glimmer beyond the closure can be glimpsed.

https://monoskop.org/images/8/8e/Derrida_Jacques_Of_Grammatology_1998.pdf

There can be no pure duplication or repetition of a past as identical to itself. — Joshs

Sure. But who ever claimed otherwise ?

The space of reasons includes individuals making claims. But what is a self ? Does it make sense without a world, without others, without a language shared with others in a world with that self ?

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/txt/kojeve-s.htm

Because "the Concept is Time" and "man is Time," the basis for humanity's comprehension of the historical unfolding of the empirically existing concepts, which describe the real, is to be located in our existential experience. The key to this experience is the struggle for recognition; and the key to recognition is death as the possibility of the "absolute refusal of recognition". But for Kojève, Hegel's concept of 'death' is insufficiently distinguished from natural death.

The main point of Hegel's dialectic of recognition - as opposed to Heidegger's existential analysis whereby a Being individualised by its anticipation of death is considered, by virtue of its throwness, to be 'with-others' - is that "self consciousness exists for a self-consciousness". If this is true, then as a self-interpreting, self-conscious being, Being's individuality cannot be derived from its anticipation of death independently of its relations to others. Rather, Being must first, or simultaneously, be constituted as a self-conscious being through its relation with others, in a dialectic of recognition, in order that it may become the kind of being which is capable of anticipating its death as the end towards which it is thrown, and hence of constituting itself existentially as a being-towards-death. This disrupts the whole ontological problematic of being and time, for it challenges the foundational status of Heidegger's description of Dasein - a being for whom being is 'there' in the fundamentally inquisitive form of the question of the meaning of being - revealing it as a dogmatic presupposition of Heidegger's inquiry; the result of a prior commitment to 'the question of the meaning of being' which falls outside the scope of the inquiry's own critical procedures.

On the Hegelian model, being can only be 'there' in Heidegger's sense of presenting itself as the object of inquiry for a fundamentally self-interpreting entity, if this entity has previously been constituted as an entity of this kind, through a process of mutual recognition. Furthermore, it is only through this process of mutual recognition constitutive of Dasein's consciousness of itself as a self-interpreting being that Dasein can acquire a sense of death in the first place. The point for Hegelians is not only that Being is first and foremost a being-with-others, but that its being with others is constitutive of a death which, while ultimately grounded ontologically in our inscription within cosmological time, nonetheless derives its existential reality from the form of our relationship to it. Heidegger's analysis may register that it is by the deaths of others that that 'mineness' of death is confirmed, but it provides no account of whence this thing called 'death' comes, or what its existential anticipation has to tell us, ontologically, about the character of Being as a social being. In Hegel's analysis on the other hand, the dual priority of recognition over the anticipation of death appears explicitly in the depiction of the 'struggle for recognition' in which each must risk their life in order to be recognised by the other as a self-conscious being - the process leading up to the notorious master-slave dialectic.

The master and slave are allegorical forms, typifications of power relations inherent in the structure of recognition. What they mark is, on the one hand, the necessarily social character of all self-consciousness, and, on the other hand, the contradiction between dependence and independence that self-consciousness beings must consequently experience outside of an association 'in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all'; or, as Hegel puts it, 'an absolute substance which is the unity of the different independent self-consciousness which, in their opposition, enjoy perfect freedom and independence'.

The presentation of this struggle as a trial by death is somewhat obscure. In order to know itself as a consciousness, consciousness must know itself as both subject and object of knowledge at the same time. But without another self-consciousness, this is impossible, since any relation of consciousness to itself which is modelled on its relations to objects can only oscillate between an assertion of its independence from itself as the object of knowledge, and a supersession of this independence which establishes the self-certainty of the knowing subject only at the cost of demonstrating its dependence on the negated object: therefore "self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction (the satisfaction of its desire to supersede itself as an object) only in another consciousness."

The duplication of self-consciousness, their mutual recognition, and hence their mutual dependence (replacing dependence on an object) are thus all shown to be conditions of the possibility of self-consciousness, and hence, conditions of the possibility of Dasein as a self-interpreting being for whom being is in question.

Brandom likes to talk about taking true and making true, belief and action. — igjugarjuk

Just some remarks. Largely unstructured. Allegedly Brandom seeks

"the transcendental conditions of the possibility of determinately contentful conceptual norms"

Which is a lot of qualifiers for a main goal of a piece.
( 1 ) Transcendental. There's statement in the essay which uses it:

In his view, if we are to assert, intelligibly, that we know something, we must take it that the conceptual form things have for thought represents the way they are in themselves. This is a transcendental, indeed semantic, claim about what it means to "know", or be conscious of, something; it is not a direct claim about being itself.

(though this is the author rather than Brandom)

A transcendental claim then seems to be claim about what must (logically? a-priori?) be true in order for the state of ourselves, our environs etc to be intelligible and capable of having the properties that they do. It's a structural claim, rather than a functional one.

( 2 ) conditions of possibility. That seems to be the way of fleshing out the relationship of (something... us?) the structural underpinnings of 'determinately contentful conceptual norms' to the determinately contentful conceptual norms themselves. Don't know how the conditions of possibility condition (as a verb) the determinately contentful conceptual norms either - is it (allegedly) an empirical fact that they do or an a-priori one?

( 3 ) determinately contentful. That has an exegesis in paper.

This is the claim that "to be conceptually contentful is to stand in relations of material incompatibility and consequence . . . to other such contentful items" (p. 666) -- relations of what Brandom elsewhere calls "material inference". In saying this, Brandom has in mind empirical concepts, rather than logical ones. The latter are also inferentially related, but empirical concepts stand in relations of material inference, because their empirical contents acquire determinacy through excluding and including other such contents.

Determinately contentful conceptual norms are those conceptual norms which concern empirical rather than logical concepts. Like if I eat a spoiled egg I'll feel crap. What seems to make the norm determinately rather than conceptually contentful is the relationship of events/states of affairs to each other ('material inference') rather than 'logical ones'. I imagine that relations of material inference can only be learned with reference to, or in derivation from, stuff which has been seen and done.

I believe there's an ambiguity in the way I've presented the relationships of material inference referenced in the paper, because it's unclear over whether they are natural successions of events/dynamical flows of environments ('mind independent') or whether they are bodily/mental constructions instantiated in people that represent natural successions of events ("mind dependent"). I also believe that the ambiguity comes from holding the distinction between mind dependent and mind independent on the crucible of mental states - construed as patterns of the psyche. On that there's a quote in the article about where Brandom begins his case for his goal.

Brandom's aim is (among other things) to set out "the transcendental conditions of the possibility of determinately contentful conceptual norms" (p. 532), and the place from which he starts is the "nonpsychological conception of the conceptual"

And in that regard reading those relationships of conceptual inference, whether material or nonmaterial, as psychological events will probably be a misreading.

Instead of mind(internal) and world(external), Brandom seems to use another coordinate system for the space of reasons, the subjective and the objective. Which he has a special sense for.

Brandom's next claim is that conceptual contents take two forms: subjective and objective. Their subjective form articulates what things are for consciousness, or how they appear to us. Their objective form, by contrast, articulates what things are in themselves -- the form of empirical reality or "objective facts". For Brandom, therefore, both reality and thought are "in conceptual shape" -- a view he calls "conceptual realism". Note, however, that Brandom claims no direct access to reality, but he bases his conceptual realism on what is required for knowledge to be intelligible. In his view, if we are to assert, intelligibly, that we know something, we must take it that the conceptual form things have for thought represents the way they are in themselves. This is a transcendental, indeed semantic, claim about what it means to "know", or be conscious of, something; it is not a direct claim about being itself. Note that conceptual realism does not explain how knowing subjects come to distinguish what is real from what is mere appearance (from their perspective). It is simply the thesis that subjective and objective conceptual contents must be understood as "the two poles of the intentional nexus"

Subjective is what things are 'for us' and objective is what things are 'in themselves' - with the clarifying comment that things as they are in themselves are 'the form of empirical reality'. Presumably this is the constellation of material inferences+events which plays a representational role in how we do stuff. I think this is evinced by:

we must take it that the conceptual form things have for thought represents the way they are in themselves.

Another interesting highlight is the Brandom quote that the content of subjective and objective concepts form 'two poles of the intentional nexus' . Will assume this means oppositional poles, like north and south, rather than points of attraction/guidance. I suppose it could also be a 'yes and', since both poles are guiding norms!

My brain has now stopped working. I am now crowdsourcing exegesis on how objective norms are binding.

I imagine that relations of material inference can only be learned with reference to, or in derivation from, stuff which has been seen and done. — fdrake

"Because he didn't want to get wet, he put up his umbrella." We can think of the very meaning of 'wet' and 'umbrella' as existing 'within' our allowing such inferences. We would not say (could not understand) "He wanted to keep his feet dry, so he took off his boots in the snow." To me this is like Saussure's system of differences without positive entities, except that the nexus is explicitly inferential.

And in that regard reading those relationships of conceptual inference, whether material or nonmaterial, as psychological events will probably be a misreading. — fdrake

As far as I can tell so far, we should look for concepts in the structure of both our verbal and non-verbal 'doings.' We 'perform' concepts, or rather concepts are like a second-nature structure in our doings, some of which can be made explicit and modified.

Subjective is what things are 'for us' and objective is what things are 'in themselves' - with the clarifying comment that things as they are in themselves are 'the form of empirical reality'. Presumably this is the constellation of material inferences+events which plays a representational role in how we do stuff. — fdrake

This quote from A Spirit of Trust might add something.

Doing the prospective work of coming up with a new revision [to a set of conceptual commitments] and doing the retrospective work of coming up with a new recollection that exhibits it as the culmination of an expressively progressive process in which what was implicit is made gradually but cumulatively more explicit are two ways of describing one task. Coming up with a "new, true, object," i.e., a candidate referent, involves exhibiting the other endorsed senses as more or less misleading or revelatory appearances of it, better of worse expressions of it. What distinguishes the various prospective alternative possible candidates revisions and repairs of the constellation of senses now revealed as anomalous is just what retrospective stories can be told about each. For it is by offering such an expressively progressive genealogy of it that one justifies the move to a revised scheme.

...
The disparity of the senses (appearances, phenomena, ways things are for consciousness) that is manifest prospectively in the need to revise yet again the contents-and-commitments one currently endorses, and the unity of referents (reality, noumena, ways things are in themselves) that is manifest retrospectively in their gradual emergence into explicitness as revealed by an expressive genealogy of the contents-and-commitments one currently endorses, are two sides of the same coin, each intelligible only in a context that contains the other. — Brandom

He thinks that we institute norms that govern our attitudes by engaging in a special kind of process: recollection [Erinnerung]. Recollection retrospectively rationally reconstructs the prior applications of a concept, picking out an expressively progressive trajectory through them. To say that the rationally reconstructed tradition is “expressively progressive” is to say that it takes the form of the gradual emergence into explicitness of a determinate conceptual content, which provides a norm governing applications of that concept. That content is exhibited as having been all along implicit. Each application reveals some contour of the concept.

The process of recollection adopts an essentially retrospective perspective: “The owl of Minerva flies only at dusk….” It is this process that turns a mere past into a history, something with the edifying narrative structure of a tradition: a past as comprehended. It is “Reason’s march through history.” The idea of recollective rationality is one of Hegel’s Big Ideas.
...
The key to understanding the way Hegel moves beyond the basic Hegelian normative statuses socially instituted by synchronic reciprocal relations of recognitive attitudes consists in appreciating the orthogonal diachronic historical dimension of recognitive processes. It is in particular the recollective phase of diachronic recognitive processes that explains the attitude-transcendence of normative statuses. That includes the special cognitive representational norms according to which representing attitudes are responsible for their correctness to standards set by what counts as represented by those representings just in virtue of exercising that distinctive kind of authority over them. Discursive norms, both practical and cognitive, are understood according to the categories of Vernunft as features of essentially social and historical recognitive processes, developing in tandem with the attitudes that articulate them. Understanding operating according to the categories of Verstand is blind to both the social and the historical dimensions of conceptual norms.
...
Forgiving recollection can be understood on the model of the institutional common or case-law jurisprudential practices mentioned earlier. There, the current judge rationally reconstructs the tradition by selecting a trajectory of prior precedential decisions that are expressively progressive, in that they reveal the gradual emergence into explicitness of a norm (the content of a law) that can be seen to have implicitly governed (in the dual sense of serving as a standard and having the precedential attitudes be revealed as subjunctively sensitive to it) all the decisions (attitudes) in the reconstructed tradition. It is that norm that then justifies the current judge’s decision. The norm that is seen as emerging from the rationally reconstructed tradition of decisions sets the standard for normative assessment by future judges of the current decision, which claims to be subjunctively sensitive to that very norm. So the recollecting judge subjects herself to (acknowledges the authority of) the norm she retrospectively discerns. The more of the prior decisions the recollection rationalizes and exhibits as expressive of the norm, the better the recollective warrant that norm provides for the current decision. Whatever residue there is of decisions that cannot be fit into the retrospectively rationally reconstructed tradition as precedentially rationalizing and expressive of the norm, increases the scope for criticism of the current decision by future judges, who may or may not acknowledge it as correct and itself precedential. For the only authority the decision has derives from its responsibility to the tradition of prior decisions.

Forgiving (recollectively recognizing), on this account, is hard work. It cannot be brought off with a single, sweeping, abstractly general gesture: “I forgive you for what you did.” One could always say that, but saying it would not make it so. Besides commitment to practically affect the consequences of the doing one is forgiving, one must produce a concrete recollective reconstruction of the deed, under all of its intentional and consequential specifications. Recollection is a making—the crafting of a distinctive kind of narrative—that is successful only insofar as it ends up being recognizable as having the form of a finding. Doing that seems perverse, but it is giving contingency the normative form of necessity. Recollection is the narrative genre in which the rationalization of decisions appealing to common or case law also belongs. One must recruit and assemble the raw materials one inherits so as to exhibit a norm one can endorse oneself as always having governed the tradition to which one oneself belongs, with which one oneself identifies—a tradition that shows up as progressively revealing a governing norm, making ever more explicit what was all along implicit. The expressively progressive tradition discerned culminates (for now) in the consequential specification of the doing that is the recollection itself.
...
The responsibility the individual tragic heroic agent takes on himself is accordingly spread out and shared. The doing of each (in one sense) is now in a real sense the doing of all (in another, recognitively complementary sense). For all share responsibility for and authority over each action. The distinctive role played by individual agents is not obliterated, for the responsibility and authority acknowledged by and attributed to the initiating agent is different from the reparative and recollective responsibility and authority acknowledged by those who take up the burden of forgiving the agent. Every deed now shows up both as a practical contribution to the content of all that came before it, and as acknowledging a recollective responsibility with respect to all those deeds. The temporally extended, historically structured recognitive community of those who are alike in all confessing the extent of their failure to be norm-governed, acknowledging their responsibility to forgive those failures in others, confessing the extent of their efforts at recollective and reparative forgiveness, and trusting that a way will be found to forgive their failures, is one in which each member identifies with all the others, taking co-responsibility for their practical attitudes. It is the “‘I’ that is ‘we’, the ‘we’ that is ‘I’.”

https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Texts/Heroism%20and%20Magnanimity%20PMFSCA%2018-9-21%20j.docx

But this only works in contexts, the empirical or the logical, where it is decidable just what being warranted or justified consists in, — Janus


How are such contexts to be decided if not rationally ? This is as simple as offering reasons for claim that a context is or is not subject to rational norms. Admittedly people sometimes just stop talking and wage war. — Pie

In logical contexts what is warranted is what is valid, In empirical contexts what is most directly warranted is what is observable. Then there is the less determinable criteria of what makes sense in terms of our causal understandings of how things work. What would be the criteria for warrantability in metaphysics or aesthetics?

We've discussed this some already, of course. To me philosophy is not simply constituted by (potentially) justifiable claims. It makes such claims about such claims. It discusses justification in the first place. This is human self-knowledge. We make explicit the nature of our behavior-coordinating 'chirps and squeaks.' This surely involves creativity. Where do shiny new hypotheses come from ? The strong philosopher is like a non-fiction poet, not only seeing human reality in a new way but making a case for this being better than a merely exciting madness and instead a deeper and truer rationality. I agree with you that the point is to put more life in to life, to live more vividly. It's not given that self-knowledge is the best path toward this goal, but I think it's a path. — Pie

Right, but as above, what can we say, and how do we justify what we say, about the justifiability of claims that lie outside the logical or empirical contexts?

So, you mention self-knowledge; how do I know that I am knowing myself, that is how do I tell that the ideas I have formed about myself are justifiable? Do I appeal to agreement from others? Do I assume that I know myself better than others do? How could I find out whether I know myself better than others do?

It's a well worn reversal, but I think it is salient: "the unlived life is not worth examining"; how do I go about justifying thinking that is true or not, or even merely salient, or not? Does it not convince (or not) on the basis that it somehow "feels right" (or not)?

In philosophy, say I weave my understandings and insights into a coherent, magisterial system of ideas; a magnificent intellectual feat involving both creative originality and a lot of hard work; could any of that justify thinking that my system is therefore true? Is justification in philosophy merely rhetorical? What could be the alternative? Consensus, perhaps? That wouldn't seem likely!

I don't understand the terms being employed and those quotes make no sense to me at all. That is, I don't know what Brandom is talking about.

A normative reason is a reason to do something.

We have faculties of reason. A faculty of reason gives its possessor the impression that there are reasons to do things. That's why it is called a faculty of reason.

If the faculty is a good one, then it will be reliably tracking the actual reasons that there are.

Being rational is a about how responsive one is to the rational impressions one's faculty of reason generates in oneself.

So a 'perfectly' rational person is someone who always does what they get the impression they have reason to do, and they do it because they get the impression they have reason to do it.

And an ideally perfectly rational person would be someone whose faculty of reason reliably tracks the reasons that there actually are, such that they always do what they in fact have reason to do.

In logical contexts what is warranted is what is valid, In empirical contexts what is most directly warranted is what is observable. — Janus

:up:
We do have to be careful, though, because observation is theory-laden.

In essence, basic statements are for Popper logical constructs which embrace and include ‘observation statements’, but for methodological reasons he seeks to avoid that terminology, as it suggests that they are derived directly from, and known by, experience (2002: 12, footnote 2), which would conflate them with the “protocol” statements of logical positivism and reintroduce the empiricist idea that certain kinds of experiential reports are incorrigible.
...
Popper therefore argues that there are no statements in science which cannot be interrogated: basic statements, which are used to test the universal theories of science, must themselves be inter-subjectively testable and are therefore open to the possibility of refutation. He acknowledges that this seems to present a practical difficulty, in that it appears to suggest that testability must occur ad infinitum, which he acknowledges is an operational absurdity: sooner or later all testing must come to an end. Where testing ends, he argues, is in a convention-based decision to accept a basic statement or statements; it is at that point that convention and intersubjective human agreement play an indispensable role in science:

Then there is the less determinable criteria of what makes sense in terms of our causal understandings of how things work. What would be the criteria for warrantability in metaphysics or aesthetics? — Janus

At some level of complexity, I think our historicity becomes central. Whatever we propose forces a reevaluation of the past (generalized retrodiction). We need to explain our proposed revised history as a story of progress and a making explicit of a reality that was already there. We put the hypothesized object or conceptual shift 'back in time' and relive our pasts with a new X-ray vision. I imagine a detective getting hunch and playing it out, looking for confirmation or contradiction. This is also like carefully fitting a candidate belief into a network of previous investments at minimum cost perhaps.

Doing the prospective work of coming up with a new revision [to a set of conceptual commitments] and doing the retrospective work of coming up with a new recollection that exhibits it as the culmination of an expressively progressive process in which what was implicit is made gradually but cumulatively more explicit are two ways of describing one task. Coming up with a "new, true, object," i.e., a candidate referent, involves exhibiting the other endorsed senses as more or less misleading or revelatory appearances of it, better of worse expressions of it. What distinguishes the various prospective alternative possible candidates revisions and repairs of the constellation of senses now revealed as anomalous is just what retrospective stories can be told about each. For it is by offering such an expressively progressive genealogy of it that one justifies the move to a revised scheme. — Brandom

Right, but as above, what can we say, and how do we justify what we say, about the justifiability of claims that lie outside the logical or empirical contexts? — Janus

I was thinking earlier about violence, silence, reasons. Violence and silence are intended to represented two states of communication breakdown. While people are still talking, I expect that they will sometimes talk exactly about what they do and do not have to justify. Until patience is exhausted or consensus is reached, they're will be disputed territory.

So, you mention self-knowledge; how do I know that I am knowing myself, that is how do I tell that the ideas I have formed about myself are justifiable? — Janus

It might be like figuring out if you are driving on the correct side of the road. Norms are enforced more or less gently. A young man might think he's a great violinist and continue to fail to impress those who recognize such talent professionally. A humble young woman might think she's only mediocre at math and continually amaze her teachers with her genius. Probably both will move toward correction. No man is an island. We've evolved to work together, respond to censure and praise.

I don't understand the terms being employed and those quotes make no sense to me at all. That is, I don't know what Brandom is talking about. — Bartricks

Let me jump in. Brandom is updating Hegel who himself was extending/fixing Kant.

Humans (largely) no longer experience the norms governing them to be either imposed by God or fixed like the laws of nature. We are self-consciously our own masters. We have grown up as a species, and we have to figure out all by ourselves what's a good bedtime and whether it's OK to eat 5 eggs every day.

Brandom is concerned with rational norms. He presents a scorekeeping notion of rationality. We all keep each other honest by tracking each other's claims. One of the big rules is that we don't contradict ourselves. Since our original beliefs make us responsible also for their implications (and so many other beliefs that have not even occurred to us yet), we are constantly finding our system of beliefs in need of repair. We have to drop this one or that one.

A big thing to note here is that I can believe something that contradicts your beliefs as long as it doesn't contradict my own. Individuals matter. We are not some big blob. I can call you out for a belief that I myself endorse...because for you it involves contradiction, while it doesn't for me.

Another big issue here is mutual recognition. Words don't mean whatever 'I' want them to mean. Their use by the tribe as a whole is authoritative. But I might be able to make a case for a new use so that my use even becomes standard. The tribal norms have no definite location or representative. We feel our way in to them and obey and enforce (and ever so slightly modify) them simultaneously.

Being rational is a about how responsive one is to the rational impressions one's faculty of reason generates in oneself. — Bartricks

I agree with you about responsiveness or sensitivity. I'm not sure 'impressions' isn't misleading.

So on Brandom's view, what is a normative reason? I do not mean what sort of consideration generates one. I mean what is one, in itself?
For instance, it seems to me - that is, I get the impression that - I have reason to reject a view that contains a contradiction. What is that an impression of?
I can give a very clear answer: it is to have the impression I am directed to reject a view that contains a contradiction.

I would just use the word 'norm.' One ought to avoid contradicting oneself. That's a norm governing reason itself. This norm is so basic that it's maybe even tied up with the very concept of a self. A self-contradicting person is like two or more people trying to share a single body.
Note that norms are often expressed with 'one,' as in 'one ought to tip at least 20%.' One is one around here. One is unified and coherent and not self-contradicting.

By an impression I just mean some kind of a mental state with representative contents. That is, a mental state that we tell ourselves is telling us something.

But what is a norm? Is it not a directive?

You have used the word ought. But there are normative oughts and bon normative oughts. (The rain ought to arrive soon, for example, is not a normative use of the word ought)

So what makes a normative ought a normative ought?

But what is a norm? Is it not a directive? — Bartricks

Directive is a synonym, yes.

Common normative sentences include commands, permissions, and prohibitions; common normative abstract concepts include sincerity, justification, and honesty. A popular account of norms describes them as reasons to take action, to believe, and to feel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norm_(philosophy)

Note that I can explain my actions by saying that I'm just following the rules. I explain paying taxes gladly perhaps in terms of my perceived responsibility to the less fortunate or simply to pay my fair share for public goods like roads.

So if I believe - as I do - that I ought to reject a theory that contains a contradiction, then i believe i am directed to reject it.
But who is the director? Not me, yes?

So, to believe that one has a reason to do something - anything - is to believe that one is directed to do it. And so for any such beliefs to be true, there would need to be an actual directive being issued to one to do so, else the belief is false.
But whose directives could be the truth conditions of such beliefs? Not my own, surely?