Pragmatism, Idealism, and the Modal Menace: Rorty, Brandom, and Truths about Photons

Abstract

In a short exchange published in 2000, Richard Rorty and Robert Brandom differed over the status of “facts” in a world containing no speakers and, hence, no speech acts. While Brandom wanted to retain the meaningfulness of talk of “facts” or “truths” about things—in this case truths about photons—in a world in which there could be no claimings about such things, Rorty denied the existence of any such “worldly items” as “facts.” In this essay the difference between Rorty and Brandom on this issue is used to explore their differing attitudes to modality. Brandom appeals to a Kantian approach of modal realism to support counterfactual claims. However, I argue that when his approach to modality is examined in the context of current debates over possible world semantics, his own “incompatibilist” semantics itself seems incompatible with a Kantian approach to modality. In turn, I suggest that this difference between Brandom and Rorty in their attitudes to modality reveals a difference in their respective attitudes to pragmatism’s relation to philosophy in general.

Notes

1. In Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), vol. 3, 35. Rorty gives no reference to Peter Strawson there, but presumably has in mind his critique of Austin’s attempt to “purify” the correspondence theory of truth in his 1950 essay “Truth,” which Rorty invokes in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. “My own attitude is Strawson’s (and Heidegger’s): ‘The correspondence theory requires, not purification, but elimination’.” Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 179.

2. Robert B. Brandom, “Vocabularies of Pragmatism: Synthesizing Naturalism and Historicism,” in Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert B. Brandom (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 160.

3. Brandom, “Vocabularies of Pragmatism,” 160. But if Rorty’s strategy here is Kantian, the motivation for this strategy as Brandom portrays it seems quite un-Kantian. Rorty’s rejection of “the idea of facts as worldly items that make our claims true or false” is described as “a consequence of his anti-idealist commitments to a world of causally interacting things that causally constrains our application of vocabulary not having a conceptual structure” (161).

4. Brandom, “Vocabularies of Pragmatism,” 161. The quote is from Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 21.

5. Brandom, “Vocabularies of Pragmatism,” 162.

6. I am leaving out other aspects of Brandom’s critique here.

7. Richard Rorty, “Response to Robert Brandom,” in Brandom, Reading Rorty, 184.

8. Brandom, “Vocabularies of Pragmatism,” 163. Brandom makes a similar point elsewhere about the role of observation in science. “The theory is that electrical currents cause magnetic fields regardless of the presence of suitable measuring devices. And that can only be made out in terms of what is observable, that is, could be observed, not just what is observed.” Robert B. Brandom, “A Kantian Rationalist Pragmatism: Pragmatism, Inferentialism, and Modality in Sellars’s Arguments against Empiricism,” in Perspectives on Pragmatism: Classical, Recent, and Contemporary (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 93.

9. Brandom, “Vocabularies of Pragmatism,” 184.

10. Robert B. Brandom, Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 93.

11. Crucial breakthroughs here included Saul Kripke’s “A Completeness Theorem in Modal Logic,” Journal of Symbolic Logic 24.1 (1959): 1–14, and “Semantical Considerations on Modal Logic,” Acta Philosophica Fennica 16 (1963): 83–94. For a helpful account of this complex history, see B. Jack Copeland, “The Genesis of Possible World Semantics,” Journal of Philosophical Logic 31 (2002): 99–137.

12. The basic features of this “modal realism” were present in David K. Lewis, Counterfactuals (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973), but it was his Locke Lectures of 1984, published two years later as On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), that introduced this idea to a wider audience.

13. Lewis, On The Plurality of Worlds, 133.

14. Brandom, Between Saying and Doing, 97, 95, 96–97 (I have omitted the boldface of Brandom’s text.)

15. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A74–76/B99–101.

16. Wilfrid Sellars, “Counterfactuals, Dispositions and Causal Modalities,” in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, ed. H Feigl, M. Scriven and G. Maxwell,vol. 2 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1957), §108, quoted in Brandom, “A Kantian Rationalist Pragmatism,” 98. We might here remember Sellars’s argument in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind about the reporting of the colour of ties under different lighting conditions. In learning to use the concept “blue,” say, one has to learn that a particular blue thing may not always look the same way. Under odd sorts of lighting a blue tie might look green. Thus the very capacity to correctly apply the concept “blue” must include the capacity to make inferences of the type, “were I observing this under such and such conditions this blue thing would indeed look green,” or “if I am actually observing this under such and such conditions this thing that looks green might actually be blue.”

17. Brandom, “A Kantian Rationalist Pragmatism,” 99; final emphases added.

18. Sellars, “Counterfactuals, Dispositions and Causal Modalities,” §101, quoted in Brandom, “A Kantian Rationalist Pragmatism,” 99 n. 17.

19. Peter Strawson, “Truth,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supl. vol. 24 (1950), reprinted in The Nature of Truth: Classic and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. in Michael P. Lynch (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2001), 452.

20. Strawson, “Truth,” 452–53. Austin in his assimilation of facts to worldly things had offered a “purified version of the correspondence theory,” but “the correspondence theory requires, not purification, but elimination” (447).

21. Nicholas Rescher, “The Ontology of the Possible,” in Michael J. Loux, The Possible and the Actual: Readings in the Metaphysics of Modality (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 167.

22. Robert B. Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 181.

23. Kripke, “Semantical Considerations on Modal Logic,” 84.

24. See, for example, Jaakko Hintikka’s discussion of these issues in his “Intellectual Autobiography,” in The Philosophy of Jaakko Hintikka: The Library of Living Philosophers Volume 30, ed. Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2006), 21–24.

25. While Stalnaker does not use the phrase “metaphysical realism” to characterize the position he criticizes, he has associated his position with Hilary Putnam’s “internal realism,” which Putnam opposes to “metaphysical realism.” For a recent self-characterization of his position in relation to the modal realism–nonrealism dichotomy, see Robert Stalnaker, Mere Possibilities: Metaphysical Foundations of Modal Semantics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 39–42.

26. Robert C. Stalnaker, “Possible Worlds,” originally published in Nous 10.1 (1976): 65–75, reprinted in Robert C. Stalnaker, Ways a World Might Be (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 32; pagination here is to the latter publication.

27. Brandom’s major work here is Making It Explicit (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).

28. Brandom, Between Saying and Doing, 129.

29. Brandom, Between Saying and Doing, 128.

30. Brandom, Between Saying and Doing, 129.

31. Majkie and Prasad make this point neatly: “Fundamental to Kripke semantics is the relativization of semantic evaluation to possible worlds in W. That is, in order to evaluate a modal formula, we need to specify some world m ∈ W (the current world) and begin the evaluation there. The function of the modalities is to scan the worlds accessible from m, the worlds accessible from those worlds, and so on. In brief, m is the starting point in the step-wise local exploration of the model.” Zoran Majkie and Bhanu Prasad, “Soft Query-Answering Computing in P2P Systems,” in Soft Computing Applications in Industry, ed. Bhanu Prasad (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2008), 347.

32. Benedikt Göcke, Martin Pleitz, and Hanno von Wulfen, “How to Kripke Brandom’s Notion of Necessity,” in Robert Brandom: Analytic Pragmatist, ed. Bernd Prien and David P. Schweikard (Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 2008), 137.

33. For a short characterization of what he calls his “pragmatic picture,” see Robert C. Stalnaker, Inquiry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), chap.1. See also his description of his proximity to Quine’s pragmatism in the introduction to Stalnaker, Ways a World Might Be.

34. Stalnaker, “Possible Worlds,” 27.

35. Stalnaker essentially understands possible worlds as uninstantiated properties of the actual world.

36. Stalnaker, “Possible Worlds,” 26. This criticism has, of course, been made by others central to the history of “possible-worlds semantics.”

37. Lewis, Counterfactuals, 85–86.

38. This was one of the examples from the first of Rudolf Carnap’s possible “answers” to the nature of protocol sentences in his “Die physikalische Sprache als Universalsprache der Wissenschaft,” Erkenntnis, Band 2, Heft 5/6 (1932), 438. It is not clear he was endorsing this conception.

39. Stalnaker, Possible Worlds, 28–29.

40. Stalnaker, Mere Possibilities, 129.

41. Without the idea of a standpoint transcending the actual world, “any contingent proposition might be a proposition that exists only contingently” (ibid., 130). It is significant here that in C. I. Lewis’s system S5, possibilities are themselves necessary, a condition that Brandom acknowledges as part of his incompatibility approach. Brandom, Between Saying and Doing, 129.

42. Clearly there are other respects in which Brandom’s “directly modal” approach differs from Lewis’s.

43. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics. With Selections from the Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Gary Hatfield, rev. ed. (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2004), §18, §19.

44. Because Lewis treats non-actual possible worlds as parallel universes, the commonplace idea that one thing cannot be in two places at once means that one cannot find identical entities in different worlds—non-actual worlds must contain only “counterparts” of the inhabitances of the actual.

45. Brandom, “Vocabularies of Pragmatism,” 163.

46. Rorty, “Response to Robert Brandom,” 184.

47. Perhaps something like what Brandom wants to say could be said about something more specific, like the distribution of photons in the universe were we not around. Artificial illumination, after all, is going to make some difference. But there is no reason to think of there being a difference between what “would have been” and what “is the case” with respect to the nature of photons themselves.

48. In relation to idealism in particular, his position in “Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism” is typical; in Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays: 1972–1980) (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), 139–60. While Brandom refers to this “canonical text,” the stress he puts on Rorty’s “anti-idealist commitments” fails, I believe, to reflect the spirit of that work. Brandom, “Vocabularies of Pragmatism,” 160–61.