Ginsborg on a Kantian-Brandomian View of Concepts

ABSTRACT

According to a Kantian-Brandomian view of concepts, we can understand concepts in terms of norms or rules that bind those who apply them, and the use of a concept requires that the concept-user be sensitive to the relevant conceptual norms. Recently, Ginsborg raises two important objections against this view. According to her, the normativity Brandom ascribes to concepts lacks the internalist or first-person character of normativity that Kant’s view demands, and the relevant normativity belongs properly not to concepts as such, but rather to belief or assertion. The purpose of this paper is to defend a Kantian-Brandomian view of concepts against these objections.

KEYWORDS:

• A Kantian-Brandomian view of concepts
• The internalist character of normativity
• The normativity of concepts
• A Sellarsian coherence theory
• Brandom
• Ginsborg

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See, for example, Kant (1998), A106. In addition, for a detailed defense of this interpretation regarding Kant’s view of concepts, see Ginsborg (1997), esp. 48–52, and Brandom (2010b), 297.

2. In this paper, I will refer to concepts by using small capitals; for example, ‘dog’ expresses the concept of dog.

3. See, for example, Brandom (1994), 8; Brandom (2009), 115; and Brandom (2010a), 172–173.

4. See, for example, Sellars (1967), 76, 157, and 175. Sellars also calls these ‘rules of criticism’ and ‘rules of action or performance’ respectively.

5. Admittedly, when we take the child as possessing such a concept as dog, it is not in the full-fledged sense of possessing a concept. For the child does not yet fully understand many of the relevant norms governing its use. Nonetheless, we might say that the child knows that there is a dog in front of her. On Sellars’s view, in such a case, we can treat the child’s mental activities as like ours, and so we can interpret the content of her belief as analogous to the content of our belief in a similar situation (see Sellars 1975, Lecture I, §33). In addition, on the Kantian-Brandomian view of concepts, an understanding of a concept is a matter of degree, as opposed to an all-or-nothing affair.

6. According to Ginsborg, the use of a concept requires that the concept user herself recognize the normative constraints for its use. She wants to meet this condition in the following way. On her view (2011a, 2011b), S grasps the concept dog by virtue of grasping a rule for discriminating dogs; and S grasps a rule for discriminating dogs under the following two conditions: S responds discriminatively to dogs, and she also takes herself to be responding appropriately to her circumstances. Here ‘responding appropriately to one’s circumstances’ should be understood in terms of primitive appropriateness, which is a non-semantic and irreducibly normative notion. Thus, on this view, it is possible for S to be aware that she responds appropriately to her circumstances in a way that does not depend on any antecedently grasped norm which dictates what she ought to do. But observe that primitive appropriateness is a normative notion, and so it does not seem to be exempt from rational challenge. On what grounds then can S be sure that she is really responding appropriately to her circumstances? It is beyond the scope of this paper to refute Ginsborg’s account of primitive normativity, and so I will not discuss its problems. But what is important to note here is that if my arguments so far are correct then we don’t have to accept such a very problematic notion of primitive appropriateness in order to meet the sensitivity constraint. For critical discussion of primitive normativity, see Haddock (2012) and Verheggen (2015).

7. For this distinction between content-engendered normativism and content-determining normativism, see Glüer and Wikforss (2009).