Kant understands judging and acting as applying rules, concepts, that determine what the subject becomes committed to and responsible for by applying them.

Seems more like Kant's misunderstanding. Abstract and bloodless. The distinction between humans and "merely natural creatures" looks like a denial of the fact that we are merely natural creatures. Creatures that are not free of or fully in control of natural desires and passions.

The process by which the whole evolves and develops systematically is a paradigmatically rational one, structured by the rhythm of inhalation or amplification by acknowledging new commitments and extracting new consequences, and exhalation or criticism by rejecting or adjusting old commitments in the light of their rational relations to the new ones.

We are not the rational beings Brandom imagines us to be.

Thank you!

And those rational relations among judgments are determined by the rules, that is the concepts, one binds oneself by in making the judgments

It is a systematic, rational unity, dynamically created and sustained by drawing inferential consequences from and finding reasons for one’s judgments, and rejecting commitments incompatible with those one has undertaken.

While I think this is a desirable state to be in - self consistent, self critical, accountable - my gut reaction to these quotes is that this is a formal determination of what counts as a person tending towards unified, self consistent conduct; rather than prescribing any content to that unity of conduct.

I think this raises two issues. The first is that the norms of inference followed, even if ironclad, are not guaranteed to be consistent within person. A formal example. If you believe P, and a norm of reason you believe in is modus ponens (P, P implies Q, therefore Q), then you remain able to believe P and not Q self consistently.

Why? Because believing P doesn't rationally commit one to Q through the belief that modus ponens is valid for arbitrary propositions. Belief that P only commits one to belief that Q if it is believed that P implies Q. In that regard, a self consistent system of beliefs can be rendered consistent with any other content so long as the person also believes that no contradiction is entailed all the rules of inference you follow and a statement which, in reality, contradicts your set of beliefs. Someone will only update their belief system when they believe there is a contradiction within it, and even then...

EG, if you believe the set of propositions {A,B,C}, and through the rules of propositional logic A & B & C derives a contradiction, you can simply claim the set of beliefs {A,B,C,not(A & B & C entails falsehood)}.

In that regard, the system commits no one to anything, nor commits a person to realising any contradiction to any of their currently held beliefs by any law of logic.

Seems more like Kant's misunderstanding. Abstract and bloodless. The distinction between humans and "merely natural creatures" looks like a denial of the fact that we are merely natural creatures. Creatures that are not free of or fully in control of natural desires and passions. — Fooloso4

I've been reading Kant's Anthropology lately. The old bachelor wasn't so clueless, I assure you. He saw that we are all too liable to act like machines or beasts.

He makes a point that our fake virtue (politeness, etc.) is not to be thrown away. This is because we end up becoming more like what we pretend to be.

We are not the rational beings Brandom imagines us to be. — Fooloso4

I don't think Brandom is so naive to think we tend to live up to our wonderful aspirations. But it'd also be absurd to pretend norms don't improve or affect us. That one at least envisions a noble project matters. The point here is to make the structure of the subject explicit.

It's hard to say whether the rest of Brandom's system will answer to those objections or not. His inferentialist semantics is central. Consistency isn't the only restraint on the self. What claims mean in the first place is not up to this subject, though some claims may revise this or that particular concept.

Inferentialism is something like structuralism (meaning is 'between' concepts) with a focus on which inferences are licensed through the application of a certain concept. This goes back to Sellars. To say that an apple is red is to imply also that the apple is colored, that it is not blue, etc. And I might explain someone pulling their hand away from the candle flame in terms of pain, because pain implies avoidance, all other things being equal.

One of the aphorisms here is that you can't know how to use just one concept but always at least a system of concepts. The parrot who squawks 'red' when shown an apple is not applying a concept, for the parrot does not understand (Heideggerian skill) the context of norms and what such a comment commits it to.

More generally, we can consider what it means to make the philosophical scene itself explicit. What do I commit myself to when I pretend to philosophy among others who also do so ? What are we in fact called out for as 'cheating' within 'serious' conversations ? What have we in fact taken for granted in such a project ? How must the situation be to give this project sense ?

The old bachelor wasn't so clueless, I assure you. — green flag

Perhaps. I am addressing what was posted.

I don't think Brandom is so naive to think we tend to live up to our wonderful aspirations. — green flag

Ditto.

How does the structure of the self echo or mirror the structure of Heidegger's 'One' (the default tribal ego) ? The tribal software as a whole is not held responsible, so we might expect it to be less whole (more dissonant, more plural.) But philosophers seem to build something like a tower as the generations come and go, editing and commenting upon a canon (I call it the Hegel program). Does this ideal philosopher, the one we work toward building as a sort of perfect bot, have the structure of a self? I think so. I imagine that we understand ourselves as single coherent 'ghosts' in meatsuits because we are candidate versions of the tribal softwhere, trial versions of a structure that might be cloned. Plato's point about philosophers becoming kinds comes to mind. Below, Brandom uses common law as an example. Is this is kind of personification/elaboration/incarnation of justice?

For context, here's Brandom on Hegel.
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Hegel denies the intelligibility of the idea of a set of determinate concepts (that is, the ground-level concepts we apply in empirical and practical judgment) that is ultimately adequate in the sense that by correctly applying those concepts one will never be led to commitments that are incompatible according to the contents of those concepts. This claim about the inprinciple instability of determinate concepts, the way in which they must collectively incorporate the forces that demand their alteration and further development, is the radically new form Hegel gives to the idea of the conceptual inexhaustibility of sensuous immediacy. Not only is there no fore-ordained “end of history” as far as ordinary concept-application in our cognitive and practical deliberations is concerned, the very idea that such a thing makes sense is for Hegel a relic of thinking according to metacategories of Verstand rather than of Vernunft.

All that he thinks the system of logical concepts he has uncovered and expounded does for us is let us continue to do out in the open, in the full light of self-conscious explicitness that lets us say what we are doing, what we have been doing all along without being able to say what was implicit in those doings.
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I have urged that a good model for the process Hegel is concerned to theorize about is the process by which the contents of the concepts of common law are developed and determined in Anglo-American jurisprudence. By contrast to statute-law, the only source of content for these legal concepts is the decisions of judges, who apply them in the particular cases that contingently arise. Common law is judge-made law. The form of a rationale for a particular decision is the extraction of a principle from prior precedent and practice. The current judge makes explicit a rule that he claims is implicit in the prior decisions he selects as authoritative. Genealogical explanations of those decisions are always in principle available. That is, one can find causal explanations that do not cite norms, rules, or principles, appealing instead to “what the judge ate for breakfast” in the jurisprudential shorthand for factors such as collateral political concerns, contingencies of class background or training in one school rather than another, and so on. But if the later judge can find a principle implicit in prior decisions that is brought out into the light of day in further refinement by the decision, that decision can nonetheless be seen as governed by that authoritative norm. ‘Necessary’ [notwendig] for Hegel, as for Kant, means “according to a rule or norm.”

Placing a prior decision as an episode in a rationally reconstructed tradition of precedents that is expressively progressive in having the form of the gradual unfolding into explicitness of a principle that can be seen to emerge over the course of development of that tradition is at once turning a past into a history and giving contingency the form of necessity.

There is no thought that any particular development is necessary in the alethic sense of being inevitable or unavoidable, or even predictable. It is rather that once it has occurred, we can retrospectively exhibit it as proper, as a development that ought to have occurred, because it is the correct application and determination of a conceptual norm that we can now see, from our present vantage-point, as having been all along part of what we were implicitly committed to by prior decisions. This normative sort of necessity is not only compatible with freedom, it is constitutive of it. That is what distinguishes the normative notion of ‘freedom’ Kant introduces from the elusive alethic notion Hume worried about. Commitment to the sort of retrospective rational reconstruction that finds norms governing contingent applications of concepts (the process of reason) turns out to be implicit in engaging in discursive practices at all because it is only in the context of discerning such expressively progressive traditions that concepts are intelligible as having determinate contents at all. Coming to realize this, and so explicitly to acknowledge the commitment to being an agent of reason’s march through history, is achieving the distinctive sort of selfconsciousness Hegel calls “Absolute knowing.”

Of course, no retrospective story one tells can succeed in rationalizing all of the actual contingent applications of determinate concepts that it inherits. (That is what in the final form of reciprocal recognition, we must confess, and trust that subsequent judges/concept-appliers can forgive us for, by finding the line we drew between what could and what could not be rationalized as itself the valid
expression of a prior norm.) And no such story is final, because the norms it discerns must inevitably, when correctly applied, lead to incompatible commitments, which can only be reconciled by attributing different contents to the concepts. Doing that is telling a different retrospective story, drawing a different line between past applications of the concept that were correct and precedential, and those that were incorrect and expressively not progressive. So the content of ground-level concepts develops and is determined not only according to each retrospective recollection [Erinnerung] of it, but also between successive stories.

It is expressively progressive recollective narratives of this sort that form the background necessary to diagnose systematic distortions in discursive practices. Such distortions are not found by comparison with some abstract, utopian ideal, but with respect to a principle discovered as immanent in a tradition. What I have been outlining is Hegel’s way of characterizing the process by which we distinguish reason-constitutive norms from adventitious, contingent, or merely strategic ones, and hence distinguish logos from mythos, genuine reason from ideological commitments masquerading in the guise of reasons.
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https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Texts/Towards_Reconciling_Two_Heroes_Habermas.pdf