‘operation’ can be taken both to form contents and to be the adoption of an attitude towards those contents, the need to deal with compound judgements shows that predication is inadequate for both purposes. Endorsing hypothetical (conditional) judgeable contents is not happily thought of as predicating, and those contents are not happily thought of as formed by predication. III. Kant’s Most Basic Idea 4. For this reason, Kant could not take over the traditional classificatory theory of consciousness, which depends on understanding judging as predicating. But what can go in its place? Here is perhaps Kant’s deepest and most original idea, the axis around which I see all of his thought as revolving. What distinguishes judging and intentional doing from the activities of non-sapient creatures is not that they involve some special sort of mental processes, but that they are things knowers and agents are in a distinctive way responsible for. Judging and acting involve commitments. They are endorsements, exercises of authority. Responsibility, commitment, endorsement, authority—these are all normative notions. Judgments and actions make knowers and agents liable to characteristic kinds of normative assessment. Kant’s most basic idea is that minded creatures are to be distinguished from un-minded ones not by a ontological distinction (the presence of mind-stuff), but by a normative deontological one. This is his normative characterization of the mental. Drawing on a jurisprudential tradition that includes Grotius, Pufendorf, and Crusius, Kant talks about norms in the form of rules. Judging and acting—endorsing claims and maxims, committing ourselves as to what is or shall be true—is binding ourselves by norms. It is making
derivative, parasitic one in which one can believe of a sentence in Turkish, which one does not at all understand, that it is true. Sellars puts this Kantian point well in the title of one of his essays: “Concepts as Involving Laws, and Inconceivable without Them.” If that is right, then in being able to employ concepts such as cat and mat in ordinary empirical descriptive claims one already knows how to do everything one needs to know how to do in order to deploy concepts such as possible and necessary—albeit fallibly and imperfectly. Grasp of what is made explicit by judgments formed using those alethic modal concepts is implicit in and presupposed by grasp of any empirical descriptive concepts. This is part of what Kant means by calling them “pure” concepts, that is “categories,” and saying that our access to them is “a priori”—in the sense that the ability to deploy them is presupposed by the ability to deploy any concepts, including especially ordinary empirical descriptive concepts. This latter claim is not at base epistemological, but semantic. What about the concern, on the side of practical philosophy, with the question of how grasp of normative vocabulary is related to grasp of empirical descriptive vocabulary? A closely analogous argument applies. Any rational agent, anyone who can act intentionally, must practically understand the possibility of acting for reasons. That means making some distinction in practice between sample bits of practical reasoning that do, and those that do not, entitle or commit those who endorse their premises to their conclusions. For being an intentional agent means being intelligible as responding differentially to the goodness of practical reasons for action provided by one’s discursive attitudes. The sort of force such reasoning gives to its conclusion is normative force. Good bits of practical reasoning give the agent reason to act in
norms from the realm of empirical into the realm of noumenal activity. I think it is a nice question just how Kant’s account deals with this issue. 6. As I read him, Hegel criticizes Kant on just this point. He sees Kant as having been uncharacteristically and culpably uncritical about the origin and nature of the determinateness of the contents of empirical concepts. Hegel’s principal innovation is his idea that in order to follow through on Kant’s fundamental insight into the essentially normative character of mind, meaning, and rationality, we need to recognize that normative statuses such as authority and responsibility are at base social statuses. He broadens Kant’s account of synthesizing normative individual selves or subjects (unities of apperception) by the activity of rational integration, into an account of the simultaneous synthesizing of apperceiving individual selves (subjects of normative statuses) and their communities, by practices of reciprocal recognition. How does this response fit into the space of possibilities defined by the considerations I have been putting forward as motivating Kant? The problem is set by a tension between the autonomy model of normative bindingness, which is a way of working out and filling in the Enlightenment commitment to the of normative statuses, on the one hand, and the requirement that the contents by which autonomous subjects bind themselves be at least relatively attitude-independent, in the sense that while according to the autonomy thesis the subject has the authority over the judging, in the sense of which concepts are applied, which judgeable content is endorsed (responsibility is taken for), what one then becomes responsible for must be independent of one’s taking responsibility for it, on the other. This is to say that the content itself must have an authority that dependence
picture. For here we cannot appeal to some expressively stronger metalanguage in which to stipulate or otherwise fix the meanings of our expressions in advance of using them. All there is fix those meanings is our use of them. And what we use them to do, the kind of doing that is their use, is making claims and inferences—in effect, making discursive commitments and rationally integrating them. For natural languages, and the thought conducted in them, that activity of rational integration must accordingly be able to be understood not only as consisting in the process of applying concepts by using expressions to make judgments, but also as the process that determines what concepts are expressed by those locutions: what fixes the determinate content and boundaries of those concepts. Carnap had followed Kant in seeing the prior determination of conceptual contents as a condition of the possibility of applying those concepts in judging—which, we have seen, is intelligible only as part of the activity of synthesizing a unity of apperception integrating such commitments into a rational whole. Hegel proposes a transformation of Kant’s picture that corresponds structurally to Quine’s replacement of Carnap’s two-phase picture with one that sees only two functions of or perspectives on a unified, ongoing discursive practice. In this respect, Hegel stands to Kant as Quine stands to Carnap. (Those who do not understand history are destined to repeat it.) 3. How could one understand the process of applying concepts in judgment, and their rational integration with one another by extracting consequences and extruding incompatibilities, as also being the process of determining the contents of those concepts, including their relations of material inferential consequence and incompatibility? Here again I think it is useful to think
form contributed by the cognitive faculty of the understanding. It is not something we can know or assume to characterize what is represented by those conceptual representings, when the representeds are considered apart from their relation to such representings: as they are in themselves. On Hegel’s reading, Kant is committed to a gulf of intelligibility separating our representings from what they are representings of, in the form of the view that the representings are in conceptual shape, and what is represented is not. Just to remind ourselves how much is at stake in Hegel’s criticism of two-stage representational theories of the relations between appearance and reality that are committed to the differential intelligibility of the relata, it is worth thinking in this connection also about Frege. For Frege, discursive symbols express a sense [Sinn] and thereby designate a referent [Bedeutung]. Senses are what is grasped when one understands the expression, and referents are what is thereby represented: what expressing that sense is talking or thinking about. A sense is a representing in that it is a “mode of presentation” [Art des Gegebenseins] of a referent. No more than Kant does Frege construe grasp of a sense as immediate in a Cartesian sense—according to which the mere occurrence of something with that sense counts as the mind’s knowing or understanding something). Grasping a judgeable content requires mastering the inferential and substitutional relations it stands in to other such contents. But like Descartes and Kant, Frege thinks that grasping senses, understanding representations as representations, does not require representing them in turn, and that representings in the sense of senses are graspable in a sense in which what they represent is not (apart from the special case of indirect discourse, where what is represented is senses). So if, as I have claimed, Hegel’s argument is intended to be directed at two-stage representational models committed to treating representings as intelligible in a sense in
in practice as a representing is taking or treating it as subject to normative assessment as to its correctness, in a way in which what thereby counts as represented serves as a standard. A second semantic constraint on epistemological theories that I take to be implicitly in play in Hegel’s understanding of the epistemological GKC is that if the representational relation is to be understood semantically in a way that can support genuine knowledge, it must portray what is represented as exerting rational constraint on representings of it. That is, how it is with what is represented must, when the representation relation is not defective, provide a reason for the representing to be as it is. What we are talking (thinking) about must be able to provide reasons for what we say (think) about it. We can call this the Rational Constraint Condition (RCC). Though he does not argue for this constraint in the Introduction, I think in many ways it is the key premise for the argument he does offer. The thought is that the difference between merely responding differentially to the presence or absence of a fact or property and comprehending it, having thoughts that are about it in the sense that counts as knowledge if everything goes well, depends on the possibility of that fact or property being able to serve for the knower as a reason for having a belief or making a commitment. The central sort of semantic aboutness depends on being able rationally to take in how things are, in the sense of taking them in as providing reasons for our attitudes. Hegel learns from Kant to think about representation in normative terms. What is represented exercises a distinctive kind of authority over representings. Representings are responsible to what they represent. What is represented serves as a kind of normative standard for assessments of the correctness of what count as representings of it (correct or incorrect) just in virtue of being
and Q (something expressible explicitly by the use of alethic modal vocabulary). And similarly for consequential relations among commitments. The Genuine Knowledge Condition is satisfied on this model in the sense that it is not semantically precluded by the model that the epistemic commitment to isomorphism of the subjective norms of incompatibility-and-consequence and the objective modal facts which is implicit in the semantic relation between them (according to the model’s construal of representation) should hold objectively—at least locally and temporarily. The model also makes sense of the possibility of error (it satisfies the Intelligibility of Error Condition). For, following Kant, it construes the representation relation in normative terms. In manipulating (acquiring and rejecting) commitments according to a definite set of conceptual norms (deontic relations of incompatibility-and-consequence) one is committing oneself to the objective modal facts (alethic relations of incompatibility-and-consequence) being a certain way—as well as to the gound-level empirical determinate facts they articulate being as one takes them to be—the model also says what must be the case for that isomorphism (or homomorphism) relation to fail to hold in fact. Then one has gotten the facts wrong—perhaps including the facts about what concepts articulate the objective world. 12. In this chapter I have aimed to do six things: To demarcate explicitly the exact range of epistemological theories, epitomized by those of Descartes and Kant, that fall within the target-area of Hegel’s criticism;
A Functionalist Approach to the Distinction between Appearance and Reality Part One: Strategy Introduction 1. I began my previous chapter by formulating a central criterion of adequacy for theories of conceptual content that Hegel sees as put in place by the crucial role they play in theories of knowledge. He opens his Introduction to the Phenomenology by insisting that our semantic theory must not already doom us to epistemological skepticism. Our understanding of discursive contentfulness must at least leave open the possibility that by undertaking conceptually contentful commitments we can (in some cases, when all goes well) come to know how things really are. He then argues that that condition cannot be met by any account that opens up a gulf of intelligibility separating how things subjectively appear to us (how they are “for consciousness”) from how they objectively are (“in themselves”). Modern epistemological theories since Descartes’s have understood knowledge as the product of two factors: the knower’s grasp of subjective thoughts, and those thoughts’ representational relations to objective things. Knowers’ cognitive relations to those represented things are accordingly mediated by representings of them. On pain of an infinite regress, the relations between the knowers and their representings cannot then in general be understood as themselves mediated and representational. At least some of the representings must be grasped immediately, in the sense of nonrepresentationally.
called the “rational constraint condition” tells us that what serves as a standard of assessment of judgeable contents must be able to serve as a reason for the assessment. This is to say that it must, at least in principle, be available to consciousness as a reason. To be serviceable as a reason, what plays the role of a standard of assessment must be in conceptual shape; it must stand to representings and representables in relations of material incompatibility and consequence. That is what is required for it to be able to serve as a reason for or against judgments, a standard with respect to which they can be assessed as correct or incorrect. The Experience of Error 9. With that thought, we arrive at the crux of Hegel’s functionalist account of representational purport. Hegel’s term for the process by which new commitments are integrated into a constellation of old ones is ‘experience’ (Erfahrung). The aspect of that process on which his account of the representational purport of judgeable contents turns is the critical one, in which incompatibilities that result from adding a new judgment are acknowledged and resolved. The systematic normative obligation along this dimension is a task responsibility: the responsibility to do something. What one is obliged to do is to restore the synthetic unity characteristic of apperception by repairing the incoherence that results when a subject finds itself with incompatible commitments. This process is the experience of error. Consider an example. A naïve subject looks at a stick half-submerged in the water of a pond and perceptually acquires a belief that the stick is bent. Upon pulling it out, she acquires the belief that it is straight. Throughout she has believed that it is rigid, and that removing it
endorsement of the bent-stick and straight-stick perceptual judgments conjoined with the straight-stick belief constitute an argument against the bent-stick belief. In undergoing the experience of error, our subject in practice treats reality (the straight stick) as providing rational constraint on the assessment of various appearances as veridical. In proceeding this way, the subject in practice takes or treats the bent-stick belief as expressing just what things are for consciousness, and the straight-stick belief as expressing what things are in themselves. These statuses, in turn, are what the beliefs are to consciousness, or implicitly. For the subject of the experience of error need not explicitly deploy concepts of reality and appearance, represented and representing, what things are in themselves and what things are for consciousness, noumena and phenomena, in order for what it does in retaining one of the (contextually) materially incompatible dyad of commitments and rejecting the other to be intelligible as practically taking or treating one as presenting how things really are and the other as presenting a mere appearance. One is to consciousness what the stick is in itself (straight), and the other is to consciousness what the stick is (was) merely for consciousness. This is what Hegel means when he says that “consciousness provides itself with its own standard,” how “in what consciousness within its own self designates as the in-itself or the true, we have the standard by which consciousness itself proposes to measure its knowledge.” The Two Sides of Conceptual Content are Representationally Related
Consciousness knows something, and this object is the essence or the in-itself. But this object is also the in-itself for consciousness; and hence the ambiguity of this truth comes into play. We see that consciousness now has two objects; one is the first in-itself and the second is the being-for-consciousness of this in-itself. The latter seems at first to be merely the reflection of consciousness into its self, a representation, not of an object, but only of its knowledge of the first object. But, as already indicated, the first object comes to be altered for consciousness in this very process; it ceases to be the in-itself and becomes to consciousness an object which is the in-itself only for it. And therefore it follows that this, the of this in-itself, is the true, which is to say that this true is the essence or consciousness’ new object. This new object contains the annihilation of the first; it is the experience constituted through that first object. [86] The first thing to notice is that the first object is described as the “first in-itself”. That implies that there is (at least) another in-itself. But there is only one real stick (and it is straight). What is at issue here is the role something can play in experience. The role in question is being an to consciousness. To be an in-itself to consciousness is to be what consciousness practically takes or treats as real. At the beginning of the experience, the subject in question endorses the claim that the stick is bent. That is what the subject takes to be real. That bent-stick commitment expresses the first in-itself to consciousness: how it initially takes things really, objectively, to be. The second in-itself to consciousness is expressed by the later straight-stick endorsement.
What, then, is the second object being talked about in this passage? It is not the straight stick (which is the second in-itself to consciousness). Hegel says here the second object is the “being-for-consciousness” of the first in-itself. What does that mean? When he introduces the movement of experience in the previous paragraph, Hegel says Hence it comes to pass for consciousness that what had been to it the in-itself is not in itself, or, what was in itself was so only for consciousness. [85] What the subject discovers is that what it had taken to express the way things really are (the stick is bent), actually only expresses an appearance. The role the bent-stick representation plays for consciousness, what it is to consciousness, has changed. It “becomes to consciousness an object which is the in-itself only for it.” The “new, true object” is the bent-stick representation revealed as erroneous, as a misrepresentation of what is now to the subject the way things really are: a straight stick. This representing is “true” not in the sense of representing how things really are, but in the sense that what is now to consciousness is what it really is: a mere appearance, a misrepresenting. That is why “This new object contains the annihilation of the first; it is the experience constituted through that first object.” This is the sense in which “In the alteration of the knowledge…the object itself becomes to consciousness something which has in fact been altered as well.” What alters is the status of the bent-stick representing, what it is to consciousness. It had enjoyed the status of being to consciousness what the stick is in itself. But now its status has changed to being to consciousness only what the stick was for consciousness: an appearance. Understanding that the two “objects” are the bent-stick representation when it was endorsed and the bent-stick
From Skepticism to Truth through Determinate Negation 6. Hegel tells us that the key to understanding the significance of the change in perspective he is urging is to think through the significance for the threat of skepticism of the role of what is made explicit in experience by the concept of determinate negation. The penultimate paragraph of the Introduction continues: As a matter of fact, the circumstance which guides this way of observing is the same as the one previously discussed with regard to the relationship between the present inquiry and skepticism: In every case the result which emerges from an untrue mode of knowledge must not be allowed to dissolve into an empty nothingness but must of necessity be grasped as the nothingness of that whose result it is, a result which contains what is true in the previous knowledge. Within the present context, this circumstance manifests itself as follows: When that which at first appeared as the object sinks to the level of being to consciousness a knowledge of the object, and when the in-itself becomes a being- of the in-itself, then this is the new object. [87] We have put ourselves in a position to understand this final sentence, about how the change of normative status a judgeable content undergoes when the subject withdraws a previous endorsement (the “inversion of consciousness”) is intelligible as the emergence of a new object. What does this have to do with the attitude we should take toward skepticism?
nothingness [Nichtigkeit] of the first, it is what experience has made of it” [86]. The idea is that skepticism consists in taking the sense in which the second object is negation of the first to be formal or abstract negation, rather than determinate negation. Doing that is “allowing the result which emerges from an untrue mode of knowledge” to “dissolve into an empty nothingness.” The point is that the sense in which the second object “contains the nothingness of the first” is not that “The stick is bent,” is succeeded by “The stick is not bent.” It is that it is succeeded by the realization that “The stick is bent,” is not saying how things really are. It is an appearance, a mis-representation of a straight stick. That is the materially incompatible commitment for which the bent-stick representation was discarded, changing its normative status. The original commitment is not revealed by its incorrectness as an appearance—but as the appearance of a reality. It is genuinely an appearance of that reality: a way that reality shows up for consciousness. It is wrong, but it is not simply wrong. It is a path to the truth. When Hegel says that “the result which emerges from an untrue mode of knowledge” must “be grasped as the nothingness of that whose result it is, a result which contains what is true in the previous knowledge,” this is so in a double sense. First, the original take on things is not simply cancelled, leaving a void, as a bare contradiction of it would do. It is replaced by a contrary, substantive commitment—one that is materially, not merely formally incompatible with it. Something positive has been learned: the stick is straight. Second, the transition from the original object to the second, true object is a change of status from a propositional attitude ascribable to the subject de dicto to one ascribable (also) de re. Where before we, and the subject, could say “S believes that the stick is bent,” after the experience of error and the rejection of the original endorsement in favor of a materially contrary one, the very same attitude
reject—as the very first step in the critical enterprise—is just this claim about its semantically monolithic character. What if Hegel is wrong to think that if one can say at all what he is saying in the rest of the Logic, then one must say it in terms that are systematic in a sense that entails being semantically monolithic? Of course, a “what if?” proves nothing. Entitling oneself to a response of this general shape (that is, relinquishing the commitment to Hegel’s thought having to take the shape of a semantically monolithic system) requires performing a dissection that distinguishes within Hegel’s system an autonomous, viable conceptual core from a discardable husk of optional collateral commitments, and further locates the strong holist aspect of the systematicity of the semantics of its logical and philosophical concepts and claims in that shell. Doing that would require specifying what other master-commitments or insights of Hegel’s can be made sense of apart from the systematicity claim, so as to see that they do not in fact require or entail it. How one might go about doing this should be clearer at the end of my story than it can be made at this point. But the short version is: good reasons to endorse a strong holism concerning the senses (but not the referents) of ordinary determinate concepts do not oblige one to adopt a corresponding thesis concerning the contents expressed by the logical and philosophical metavocabulary we use to discuss and explicate those ground-level concepts. II. The First Move: A Distinction The critical perspective on Hegel’s thought that I want to explore and expound here begins by comparing and contrasting Hegel’s views about the nature of the contents of ordinary determinate concepts with his views about the nature of the contents of what he calls “form determinations of the Concept”: logical, philosophical, and speculative concepts. The first
along been doing in judging and acting—is achieving a distinctive sort of self-consciousness of ourselves as normative, rational, geistig beings. One important ancestor of this fundamental distinction between kinds of concepts is Kant’s division of labor between empirical concepts and the pure concepts of the understanding, that is, the categories. Of course, Kant understood the relations between these concepts and metaconcepts somewhat differently: the pure concepts or categories codify in explicit concepts (that is, ones that can themselves figure in judgments) the forms that are implicitly exhibited by all empirically contentful concepts as they figure in (explicit) empirical judgments. That is, in Kant’s hylomorphic philosophical metametalanguage, the content of the pure categorial concepts expresses the form of the determinate empirical ones. But for both figures I think it is good methodological advice to seek to understand the account offered of the metaconcepts to begin with in terms of what they tell us about the use and content of the ground-level concepts. This is not always easy, since both Kant and Hegel spend a lot more time talking about the nature and contents of the concepts they want to use to explicate concept use than they do about concept use itself. So there is a natural temptation to follow their example, and worry more about, say, the deduction of the categories in Kant, or the problem of how to make a beginning and then conduct a progressive exposition of the system of logical concepts in Hegel, than about the picture being presented of how ordinary cognition and action should be conceived. But I think it is important to resist that temptation—at least sometimes—and so to enter this particular
mean anything determinate, and it is only by engaging in processes of the second kind that we can say what we mean or think, making that content explicit to ourselves or others. This second sort of enterprise depends on the use of some sort of logical vocabulary. The adequacy of a system of logical concepts is to be evaluated by its expressive capacity to make explicit the essential, content-determining features of both kinds of process or practice. Under the headings of ‘Verstand’ and ‘Vernunft’, Hegel introduces two meta-metaconcepts for classifying the most important kinds of logical metaconcepts. His own understanding of his distinctive philosophical contribution is epitomized in the slogan that the point of his work is to teach us how to understand our conceptual activity, and therefore ourselves, according to the categories of Vernunft, rather than those of Verstand. The two claims about the contents of empirical conceptual contents that we turn to next articulate central elements of the contrast between the metalogical standpoint of Verstand and that of Vernunft. IV. The Conceptual Inexhaustibility of the Empirical: The Tradition The tradition Hegel inherited took it that actual, concrete, determinate particularity could not be fully captured by the finite concepts deployed by nondivine minds. Their theoretical versions of the point start with the thought that although much of what I see when I look closely at my hand, or hear when I listen to a complex piece of music, can be expressed in judgments, no set of such judgments, certainly no finite set of judgments, can express all of it, without remainder. There will always be a residue that is as yet unsaid or unthought (sayable or
required but because the enterprise itself is revealed as ill-conceived. On the quietist reading, the phenomena of empirical inexhaustibility and fallibility persist, although the terms in which they are described evolve in concert with Hegel’s other metatheoretical innovations. I don’t think either of these approaches is sustainable. The eliminative view cannot be right, because it is clear that even after we have learned the lessons of the Logic, language remains “the existence of Spirit”. We are still supposed to use declarative sentences to express ourselves, as Hegel does when applying the conceptual apparatus of the Logic to nonlogical material in the lectures on aesthetics, religion, and the philosophy of nature. And Hegel remained actively interested in introducing new words for distinctive empirical phenomena—for instance the term ‘entoptic’, which he coined in 1817, to describe colors newly discovered to appear in transparent media when they are heated (an innovation for which Goethe praised him extravagantly). The process of forming, applying, and criticizing determinate empirical concepts and claims in natural science, for instance, is clearly supposed to continue even after we have achieved the sort of self-consciousness about that process that Hegel’s logic affords—as evidenced by his dedication to support and promulgate such research in the Hegelian Yearbook of Scientific Criticism he edited from 1826 to 1831 (for instance, in its treatment of the researches of the Humboldts). But the quietist view, according to which no ground-level change at all is supposed to be occasioned by that new philosophical self-understanding cannot be right either. For one aspect of Verstand that we must give up in order to achieve the perspective of Vernunft is the semantic atomism that sees the determinate identity of empirical concepts as wholly unaffected by the judgments applying them that we endorse. According to Hegel’s holistic successor conception,
[ausschliessend] contrast with, the ruling out of, other possibilities. These fundamental relations of material incompatibility, what he calls “determinate negation”, in turn give rise to material inferential relations among the contents they articulate: what he calls “mediation”. So for instance being a dog entails being a mammal in that everything incompatible with being a mammal is incompatible with being a dog. To be determinate or determinately contentful just is to stand in relations of material incompatibility and material inference to other such determinately contentful items—whether on the side of thoughts or of facts. These relations are intrinsically modally robust: incompatibilities are impossibilities of coinstantiation, and the inferences they generate are counterfactual-supporting. It is as a consequence of this way of thinking about determinate contentfulness that Hegel secures the result that was so important to Kant, namely that we can never be in the supposed position from which Hume’s question is asked: one in which determinate empirical thoughts or states of affairs are fully in place, but the question of how lawful or necessary relations among them are to be underwritten is still open. It is also an approach that rules out the semantic atomism on which Enlightenment epistemology was predicated. For that traditional picture took it that a stock of determinate concepts could be available to the inquirer, out of which judgments could be constructed that then could be sorted—fallibly to be sure—into true ones and false ones. The gradual accumulation of truths and winnowing of falsehoods then permitted the building of the edifice of scientific knowledge, brick by brick. But according to a conception of, in Sellars’ phrase, “concepts as involving laws and inconceivable without them,” the identity and individuation of concepts does not swing free of the judgments we endorse concerning lawful connections among them—paradigmatically, for Hegel, their modally robust material incompatibilities with and
I have gone on at some length about how I see Hegel thinking about ground-level empirical concepts both because this is the semantic issue about which I think he has the most to teach us today and because these views are much less familiar and less discussed, and the attribution of them is accordingly bound to be more controversial, than is the case for his treatments of logical concepts. But the larger point was to motivate a particular program for a critical reading of Hegel by comparing and constrasting his views about ordinary empirical concepts with his views about his own philosophical and logical ones. As I indicated above, I take it that Hegel’s distinctively philosophical, logical, or speculative (a translation common in English versions of Hegel for his “begreifende”) concepts—including the “form determinations of the Concept” with which the Science of Logic is principally concerned—have a characteristic expressive role that is quite different from that of ordinary, nonphilosophical concepts. Their job is not to make explicit how the world is (to subserve a function of consciousness) but rather to make explicit the process of making explicit how the world is (to enable and embody a kind of self-consciousness). If I am right in attributing to Hegel the constellation of views about the metaphysics and epistemology of the semantics of determinate concepts I sketched in the body of this paper—strong semantic pessimism as the expression of a construal of empirical inexhaustibility as necessary conceptual instability, and recollection as the only adequate form of specification of the contents of determinate concepts, respectively—then perhaps one reason these views have not been much remarked on by Hegel’s readers is that what he actually talks about in his official systematic works, the Science of Logic and the Phenomenology of Mind, is exclusively his distinctive philosophical concepts. Furthermore, Hegel’s views about the contents of concepts at one level cannot straightforwardly be carried over to the concepts proper to the other level.
Chapter Eight Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel’s Idealism: Negotiation and Administration in Hegel’s Account of the Structure and Content of Conceptual Norms This chapter could equally well have been titled ‘Some Idealist Themes in Hegel’s Pragmatism’. Both idealism and pragmatism are capacious concepts, encompassing many distinguishable theses. I will focus on one pragmatist thesis and one idealist thesis (though we will come within sight of some others). The pragmatist thesis (what I will call ‘the semantic pragmatist thesis’) is that the use of concepts determines their content, that is, that concepts can have no content apart from that conferred on them by their use. The idealist thesis is that the structure and unity of the concept is the same as the structure and unity of the self. The semantic pragmatist thesis is a commonplace of our Wittgensteinean philosophical world. The idealist thesis is, to say the least, not. I don’t believe there is any serious contemporary semantic thinker who is pursuing the thought that concepts might best be understood by modeling them on selves. Indeed, from the point of view of contemporary semantics it is hard to know even what one could mean by such a thought what relatively unproblematic features of selves are supposed to illuminate what relatively problematic features of concepts? Why should we think that understanding something about, say, personal identity would help us understand issues
concerning the identity and individuation of concepts? From a contemporary point of view, the idealist semantic thesis is bound to appear initially as something between unpromising and crazy. My interpretive claim here will be that the idealist thesis is Hegel’s way of making the pragmatist thesis workable, in the context of several other commitments and insights. My philosophical claim here will be that we actually have a lot to learn from this strategy about contemporary semantic issues that we by no means see our way to the bottom of otherwise. In the space of this chapter, I cannot properly justify the first claim textually, nor the second argumentatively. I will confine myself of necessity to sketching the outlines and motivations for the complex, sophisticated, and interesting view on the topic I find Hegel putting forward. I The topic to which that view is addressed is the nature and origins of the determinate contents of empirical conceptual norms. Of course Hegel talks about lots of other things. This is merely the strand in his thought I’m going to pursue here. But it may seem perverse to identify this as so much as one of Hegel’s concerns. After all, what he spends most of his pages talking about (in both of the books he published during his lifetime, the Phenomenology and the Science of Logic) is the pure, logical, or formal concepts (the pure form-determinations of the Concept), that are the successors in his scheme to Kant’s categories: concepts such as particularity, universality, and individuality and the distinction between what things are in themselves and what they are for consciousness or for another. But one of the overarching methodological commitments that guides my reading of Hegel is that the point of developing an adequate understanding of these categorical concepts is so that they can then be used to make explicit how ordinary empirical concepts work. I would say the same thing about Kant. And I think that one of the things that makes these philosophers hard to understand is that they devote relatively too
complete or maximal determinateness of concepts. Only if this condition obtains -only if the empirical concepts made available by judgements of reflection are fully and finally determinate—does the Kantian account make intelligible the application of concepts as being constrained by the deliverances of sense, the correctness of judgements as constrained by the particulars to which we try to apply the universals that are our determinate empirical concepts. Hegel wants us to investigate critically the transcendental conditions of the possibility of such determinateness of concepts. He does not find in Kant a satisfactory account of this crucial condition of the possibility of experience. The question is how we can understand the possibility of applying, endorsing, committing ourselves to, or binding ourselves by one completely determinate rule rather than a slightly different one. This problem is related to the one Kripke attributes to Wittgenstein. It is the issue of understanding the conditions of the possibility of the determinateness of our conceptual commitments, responsibilities, and obligations. I don’t want to dwell on what I take Hegel to see as the shortcomings of Kant’s answer. For my purposes it suffices to say that Hegel takes a different approach to understanding the relation between the institution and the application of conceptual norms. In fact I think Hegel’s idealism is the core of his response to just this issue, and it is here that I think we have the most to learn from him. A good way of understanding the general outlines of Hegel’s account of the relation between the activity of instituting conceptual norms and the activity of applying them is to compare it with a later movement of thought that is structurally similar in important ways. Carnap and the other logical positivists affirmed their neo-Kantian roots by taking over Kant’s two-phase structure: first one stipulates meanings, then experience dictates which deployments of them yield true theories. The first activity is prior to and independent of experience; the
III Hegel thinks of Spirit—the realm of the normative—as produced and sustained by the processes of mutual recognition, which simultaneously institute self-conscious selves and their communities. I have presented this picture as motivated by the problem of how to construe autonomy in a way compatible with the determinateness of conceptual contents, while seeing those conceptual contents as instituted in the same process of experience in which they are applied (the pragmatist’s fundamental commitment). I have suggested that Hegel thinks that the boundaries around what one has and has not committed oneself to by using a particular concept (and what is and is not a correct application of it) are determined by a process of negotiation among actual attitudes of application and assessments of applications. This motivation for understanding selves—the subjects of determinately contentful commitments and responsibilities, concept users, and hence subjects of experience, knowers and agents—in terms of mutual recognition explains why the process of reciprocal specific recognition should be taken to provide the context within which concepts are both applied and their contents instituted and determined. But it does not yet evidently explain why the structure and unity imparted to selves and communities by their institution by reciprocal recognition should be taken to provide a model for concepts—to explain their structure and unity. The reason that the process of reciprocal recognition, and so the structure and unity of selves, provides not only the context of but the model for the institution and application of conceptual norms is that it is not just one example of how norms are constituted by reciprocal authority (mutually dependent moments). Wherever a norm can properly be discerned, there must be
exclusion). Together, these two sorts of relation define what Hegel means by "conceptual" [begrifflich]: To be conceptually articulated is just to stand in material relations of incompatibility and (so) consequence (inference). In this sense, conceptual articulation is a perfectly objective affair. It has nothing obviously or explicitly to do with any subjective or psychological process. Showing that it nonetheless does have an implicit connection to such processes, and what that connection is, is the task of motivating objective idealism (that is, idealism about the objective conceptual structure of the world). Given this definition, Hegel's conceptual realism can be seen as just the form taken by a modal realism. There really are modally qualified states of affairs: possibilities and necessities (necessitations being the inferential version of this categorical notion, and conditional possibility being the corresponding weaker conditional modality). Further, without acknowledging them, we cannot make intelligible ordinary descriptive predicates and properties. Again, Hegel will claim that modal realism requires objective idealism. Second, I started this story with the idea of how things are—the idea that there is some way the world is. Understanding how things are is grasping a certain sort of content. In talking about objectivity and subjectivity in terms of 'truth' and 'certainty', Hegel wants us to start by focusing on this notion of content rather than on the objects of (claims to) knowledge. One reason to do this, of which Hegel's Introduction reminds us, is so our philosophical idiom will not rule out from the beginning as incoherent the possibility that how things are in themselves might also be how they are for some consciousness—that there is a sense of
9) In thinking about determinateness in terms of material incompatibility, and so in terms of inference, we should also distinguish between relations and processes. I think it is helpful to construe the distinction between the objective incompatibility of situations, properties, states of affairs, or the determinate elements of an "infinite" holistic conceptual relational structure, on the one hand, and the subjective incompatibility of commitments, on the other hand, on the Harmanian model of relations and processes (or practices). The process on the subjective side of certainty that corresponds to the relation of incompatibility of facts or properties on the objective side of truth is resolving incompatible commitments, by revising or relinquishing one of them. As a version of the point was put above, objectively incompatible properties cannot characterize the same object (objectively incompatible facts cannot characterize the same world), while subjectively incompatible commitments merely ought not to characterize the same subject. Any case where they do is a case of error, the acknowledgment of which (as Hegel has argued in the Introduction) is what taking one's commitments to be answerable to an objective world (in the sense constitutive of treating them as representations of such a world) consists in. But to acknowledge an error, that is, to acknowledge the incompatibility of two of one's commitments, is to acknowledge an obligation to do something, to alter one's commitments so as to remove or repair the incompatibility. I think that the idealism that emerges from the expository transition from Consciousness to Self-Consciousness claims, broadly, that one cannot understand the relations of objective incompatibility that articulate the conceptual relational structure in virtue of which the objective