Brandom and Gadamer on the Hermeneutical (Il)legitimacy of Rational Reconstruction

Abstract

This paper critiques Brandom’s defense of the hermeneutical method of rational reconstruction, or what he calls the interpretation of historical philosophical texts de re. Brandom attempts to root this method in five so-called ‘gadamerian platitudes’ and his own inferentialist enterprise. I contend that Brandom’s attempt fails on both counts. As to the former, I argue that Brandom misunderstands Gadamer in a way that leaves him vulnerable to Gadamerian critique. As to the latter, I argue that Brandom’s account of textual interpretation privileges the point of view of the interpreter in a way incompatible with his discussion of the ascription of propositional attitudes in chapter 8 of Making It Explicit. I conclude with some thoughts about the legitimacy of rational reconstruction in general.

Keywords:

• Brandom
• Gadamer
• hermeneutics
• historiography
• rational reconstruction

Notes

1 That Brandom so licenses this kind of disentangling is, I think, evident from his response to Pippin’s (2005) essay, ‘Brandom’s Hegel.’ There, Pippin argues that one cannot provide a Brandomian, pragmatist reading of Hegel without so-called ‘“theory of everything” questions’ inevitably arising (p. 382). In response, Brandom (2005) merely asserts that his study ‘is narrowly focused on [Hegel’s] account of the nature of the conceptual’ (p. 429).

2 See Gadamer on ‘Transformation Into Structure’: TM, pp. 110–19.

3 ‘My concern here … is with specifically philosophical texts, traditions, and readings’: TMD, p. 94.

4 The objectivity I speak of here is the sort Brandom speaks of in the first Hegel chapter of TMD: ‘it has nothing obviously or explicitly to do with any subjective or psychological process’ (p. 181). That the norms governing discursive practice are objective in this sense is a central thesis of Brandom’s inferentialism.

5 Brandom remarks, parenthetically, that this fact ‘is not germane in the present context’. As I hope to show, I think that this fact about our finitude and fallibility has everything to do with properly understanding Gadamer’s motivations for the kind of dialogical relation he endorses.

6 I specifically have in mind the attitude that Gadamer calls ‘aesthetic differentiation’ (cf. TM, p. 74). For aesthetic differentiation and history, or the sort of temporal distance of which I am here speaking, see TM, pp. 124, 329.

7 ‘The fact that works stretch out of a past into the present as enduring monuments still does not mean that their being is an object of aesthetic or historical consciousness. As long as they still fulfill their function, they are contemporaneous with every age’: TM, p. 119.

8 Brandom actually agrees with this claim, and I will feature that point more centrally below (§ VII).

9 This is a very rough way of speaking of Brandom’s talk of ‘entrance moves’ and ‘exit moves’ from the game of giving and asking for reasons in Chapter 4 of MIE (Brandom, 1994).

10 Here, Brandom speaks of the ‘reflective equilibrium’ of his hermeneutical account.

11 That is, Brandom’s response will commit him to a pluralism about pluralism.