Azadpur Phil 770 Nick Eggert 1

Rational Constraint by ​what?

0. ​
Introduction. In the following paper, I argue that Brandom’s criticism of McDowell rests

upon a certain ambivalence concerning the notion of “rational constraint”. Specifically, Brandom

identifies two levels at which one might make demands for “rational constraint” that correspond

​ to ​what is doing the constraining: experience or t​ ​ he facts? I claim that Brandom--in a manner

parallel to that of Rorty’s dismissal of the need for a robust concept of “empirical

content”--betrays an uneasiness surrounding the issue of “answerability to the world”, where

“world” is construed in McDowell’s sense as “conscious experience”, that can be explained by

​ ​ ind and World.

his contention that McDowell hasn’t sufficiently argued for his positive thesis in M

Finally, I make the claim that Brandom’s position fails to answer the worry that motivates

McDowell’s entire project, but not necessarily for the reasons that McDowell believes it to fail.

​
Brandom’s proposal ​can meet the “rational constraint constraint” criterion on epistemological

theories, but not in a manner that confers justificatory status on “empirical content”. And it is

crucially this seemingly impossible question--How is empirical content possible? --that McDowell

​ believes ​must be answered if one is find peace from epistemological anxiety. To answer this

​ question ​just is to demonstrate that empirical content’s possibility is derivative of its necessity as

rational constraint in the form of conceptually articulated experience. Brandom doesn’t attempt

an answer to this crucial question precisely because he only sees a much weaker constraint

called for in ​Mind and World.

1. ​
Brandom’s Critique and the RCC. Brandom’s critique is best read as making two

separate, but intimately connected, points about the possible alternatives available to one who

is awake to McDowell’s worries surrounding empirical content. First, he questions the implied

necessity of McDowell’s preferred alternative, and second--the more truly c​ ritical

​ inimal empiricism.
point--Brandom accuses McDowell of helping himself to much more than a m
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​ the Brandomian idiom--McDowell e

Or, to put the point in ​ ndorses a view which, while possibly a

​
legitimate ​
alternative to the oscillating s​ eesaw of dead-ends in M
​ ind and World, he is in no way

entitled to. Another way to state these two objections is to say that they arise due to a blindspot

​ random’s
in McDowell’s own thinking. This blindspot--which will ultimately be revealed as B

prefered view--consists in the ability for alternative theories to meet McDowell’s criterion of

rational constraint ​without putting the ultimate burden of this constraint on conscious

experiences. I will return to this point later.

​ As to the first critique--that of the ​necessity Brandom reads into McDowell’s positive

exposition--we needn’t spend too much time here, since McDowell is quite clear that his own

view, while in no deep sense ​necessary, arises organically within the context of the dialectical

contest between the Myth and coherentism. Brandom is, I would argue, subconsciously aware

of this purely ​contextual motivation when--in his brief characterization of the Myth and

coherentism--he describes the latter as the coming apart of receptivity and spontaneity.He

writes: “...[re: coherentism] the role of spontaneity is acknowledged, but receptivity is shorted by

being disconnected from spontaneity” (243).1 The Myth, then, would be--like coherentism--a

​ lus a naive conflation in receptivity of non-conceptual

cleaving of receptivity from spontaneity p

activity (what Sellars called a primitive ‘sensing’) with conceptualizing.

​ ​ By characterizing the possible alternatives in t​ his way--i.e. how one handles the

separation of receptivity and spontaneity--Brandom himself implicitly demonstrates how a

McDowellian alternative ​logically arises. McDowell’s position is, after all, the soldering back

together of receptivity and spontaneity given the utter epistemological bankruptcy of their

separation. As McDowell remind us, the separation of spontaneity from receptivity (what

characterizes the Myth and coherentism) is the misguided product of an admirable insight--that

1
​All page numbers quoting Brandom refer to Brandom’s ​Perception and Rational Constraint: McDowell’s Mind and
World.
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​ the space of reasons is ​sui generis. However, one cannot achieve this s​ ui generis status simply

by brutally separating off the rational activity of spontaneity--not without courting a

transcendental anxiety that worries over the very possibility of how a disconnected spontaneity

can be ​about anything at all. By presenting his alternative to be the resultant moment of the

dialectic between the Myth and coherentism, McDowell avoids Brandom’s critique regarding the

supposed ​necessity of his own view.

This leads us right into Brandom’s second critique--that the positive theorizing to be

found in ​Mind and World can only motivate a view much weaker than the one McDowell ends up

endorsing. As Brandom writes: “...there’s a lot more to it [McDowell’s alternative] than a minimal

empiricism…” (242).

What McDowell’s book ​does successfully motivate, according to Brandom, is the need

for this ​minimal empiricism. In its original usage, “minimal empiricism” refers to epistemological

theories that ​at the very least require experience to act as a tribunal for empirical judgements,

so that one might coherently be said to ​get facts about the world correct. Whatever we decide

plays the role of tribunal, it is this element that constrains our thinking and judging about the

world; and further, since thinking and judging are rational activities, the constraint must itself be

rational so long as it is not arbitrary. On all of these points Brandom and McDowell are in

agreement--but it past a minimal empiricism that Brandom will follow McDowell no further. He

takes it, rather, that we can elaborate the notion of “rational constraint” without thereby

necessitating that it is a conceptually structured c​ onscious experience that plays this

constraining role.

Brandom calls his and McDowell’s point of mutual agreement the “rational constraint

constraint” (RCC); both take it that an adequate theory must have some such constraint for

thinking to be ​about anything. Before I move on to talking about Brandom’s positive account; I
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would like to put down both philosopher’s conceptions of “rational constraint” for side-by-side

comparison:

(McDowell): “Judgement is free action, but for it to be recognizably judgement the freedom in question
needs to be responsible to a subject matter, and we can make sense of that only by managing to see experience
itself as directly disclosing bits of the world.” (405)

(Brandom): 1.) Representational relations are normative

2.) a.) Concepts have rational (inferential) articulation.
b.) It is essential to the content of concepts that their rational credentials may be critically
assessed.
3.) For thought to be about some objective feature of the world, it must be open to the critical
assessments of (2b.), where these assessments take into consideration ‘ related states’ for or against the original
thought.

In the next section, I will draw out the differences between these conceptions in order to

critically assess Brandom’s prefered alternative.

2. Constrained by what? As mentioned at the beginning of Section 1, Brandom

claims that McDowell’s analysis has a blindspot that prevents him from considering alternatives

that would place the burden of rational constraint elsewhere than on experience. Further, he

​ pistemological reliabilism--a view that he will

claims that theories such as Davidson’s or even e

endorse--fall squarely within this blindspot, with the result that McDowell rejects them out of

hand as forms of coherentism and bald naturalism.I will be focusing on reliabilism, since this

view is built into Brandom’s response.

​ Brandom, in describing “the most promising competitor” to McDowell’s theory, defines

experience: “Experience...has the two dimensions of sense impressions and perceptual

judgements, whose relation is rationally controlled by the facts perceived and reported.” (254).

When one is “properly wired up and trained...the perceptible facts wring from us perceptible

judgements.” (253). To be properly wired up is to be a reliable reporter of ​how things in fact are,

and this is accomplished through socialization and induction into a language. Following Sellars,

​ xplanatory
the sense-impressions upon which perceptual judgements are based serve as an e

device, ​not as entities that stand in a justificatory relation to these judgements. So receptivity
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and spontaneity are not connected in t​ his way--this would be to place the RCC at the first level

(“dimension”) of experience (McDowell’s alternative). Receptivity and spontaneity are together,

for Brandom, at the second level--when non-inferential perceptual judgements are found to be

already caught up in inferential relations. A perceptual judgement thus caught up can be

rationally criticized by examining these relations (its “credentials”), and the fact that such a

criticism can decide for or against a judgement shows that our activity of judging is concerned

with ​truth.

So, for Brandom, agents are rationally constrained by t​ he facts. The facts are just what

we non-inferentially judge to be the case, given that this ability to make non-inferential

perceptual judgements is a ​reliable mechanism. The reliability of the mechanism is further

cashed out in the willingness of ​others to endorse your judgements. Therefore, it takes a

community that is at home in its practice of making perceptual judgements to determine what is

to be taken as the objective ​shape of the space of reasons and thus the “world”.

Now, at one point Brandom concedes that he isn’t trying to object to the account

McDowell gives of perceptual experiences (253). It may be correct (and, we can imagine, may

be why our judgements are typically reliable), but he maintains that McDowell hasn’t shown why

we should feel obliged to accept it.

​ y the facts, I do not think

While Brandom’s account does provide for rational constraint b

such an answer meets McDowell’s motivating anxiety regarding empirical content. As Brandom

says, the reliabilist “...takes for granted the ​contents of...judgements that are candidates for

empirical knowledge” (249). The anxiety McDowell describes is the inability to take empirical

content for granted; it is to be baffled, in light of modern alternatives within epistemology, at the

very possibility of empirical content.

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