The concept of “methodological individualism” carries particular connotations for me – and I both think that Brandom invites those connotations, by some of the ways in which he discusses his work, but that, ultimately, that’s not quite the most on-target critique. I also suspect that Habermas is placing some of Brandom’s terminology in not quite the right context, when he talks about Brandom’s “conceptual realism”- or accuses Brandom of the idealist position that reality is already conceptually structured: I suspect some of Brandom’s terms are being taken here, in a different sense than they are intended (but I don’t have the texts with me here to flesh out what I mean, and I also don’t think this is the most serious issue – particularly because I think, even if one could make a case that Brandom is being “misread”, that misreading is an honest one, in the sense that Brandom’s intentions are a bit murky).

On one level, Brandom makes a clear case (by “clear” here, I’m not suggesting that I agree, but simply that I think it’s easier to read what he’s trying to do in the text) for how a notion of objectivity, as a counterfactual ideal, might arise in the course of a certain kind of interaction – and, as you’ve said above, I see some similarities between this sort of argument, as a form of argument, and some of the forms of arguments Habermas uses for explaining the practical genesis of some of the counterfactual ideals to which he appeals. Of course, theorising “objectivity” as a counterfactual ideal – asking how we can decide to render some of our judgments subject to kickbacks from, say, a material world, based on reports from certain trusted observers, analysed against socially-negotiated standards – isn’t quite the same thing Habermas is trying to do, and it does dissolve far more back down into social interaction (although Habermas probably goes a bit too far in suggesting that Brandom asserts that the world “out there” is already somehow conceptually structured – Brandom is reasonably clear that he’s not a “constructivist” in such a strong sense).

Brandom, though, wants to leave much more ”open” and undetermined by his theory than Habermas does – so, on one level, it’s not difficult for him to unfold a distinction between communicative and instrumental rationality/modes of engaging with others and with the world. But the kind of distinction he unfolds here, isn’t the kind of distinction Habermas wants to unfold – and therefore the distinction can’t do the same kind of work that Habermas uses this distinction to do. For Brandom, I suspect the distinction would be a matter of different vocabularies and collective practices – far more contingent than what Habermas envisages, and not itself grounded in Brandom’s own theory of communicative practice, in the depth way in which Habermas seeks to ground it.

Then there’s Brandom’s problematic reach for “the theorist” at various points in his account. With these reaches, I suspect he breaches the immanent and reflexive frame of his analysis – and Habermas seems to suspect this, as well, which would be why he pings Brandom on the examples that he uses, which tacitly appeal to an audience not involved in the exchange whose structural properties Brandom claims to analyse. I think Habermas hits something very important here – but perhaps doesn’t select the best or clearest examples of where Brandom does this sort of thing, and therefore gives Brandom the “out” of, essentially, missing the point (I think) of the objection, and dismissing the specific examples Habermas highlights, without capturing the critical point: Brandom’s work makes constant reference to things that are explicit to a theorist exploring certain practices whose logics remain only implicit to the participants. From my point of view, this isn’t quite adequate for a reflexive, immanent theory (not that Brandom would necessarily care whether he meets some standard I want to impose on his argument, but I think I could make a case that there are costs – and that those costs are expressed in certain moments within his own argument, particularly in references to the historicity of his theorist, which suggest the need for a wider frame of analysis within which that theorist could be accounted for in a more immanent way).

At any rate: a bit disorganised on my part – I’ve had a distracting several days, and am probably too far away from the text to be very clear or very sure about my memory of what’s going on, so all of this is intended in a very provisional, getting-my-head-around-things, way.

In any case that’s a minor quibble. As you point out, the central question is how Brandom’s model of communication can account for “objectivity”. Habermas thinks that Brandom has to fall back on a notion of conceptual realism to do all the work here; whereas Brandom claims that the conceptual realism has no explanatory role in this regard. Only by clarifying Brandom’s account can we try to resolve the issue one way or the other.

It would interesting to see how one could reconstruct the communicative / instrumental distinction in Brandom’s theory – I’m a bit skeptical, I must admit.

As for your comments above: I think this is the question :-) In other words, we see (well, I shouldn’t speak for LM, who is still holidaying in Tassie, the bastard ;-P) a genuine basis for confusion here – an area in Brandom’s work where, because in some senses (I think) Brandom takes the answer to this question for granted, and spends his energies focussing on a very different sort of question, he is somewhat gestural around these issues.

Personally, I don’t take Brandom to be recommending a sort of methodological individualism – but I can understand how people come by this interpretation honestly, given the Tarde-style formulations he uses in his work. I think, instead, that a broader concept of the social is constantly referenced by Brandom, but as a sort of unspecified, black box sort of concept – the theorisation of which might then render Brandom subject to a critique that some of what he interprets to be intrinsic implicitly in communicative practice, and then rendered explicit by the emergence of a certain kind of normative and then logical vocabulary, might actually be constituted in a more direct sense in other realms of social practice that Brandom “black boxes”.

One element of Brandom’s project that interests me greatly, in a critical sense, but that we didn’t thematise in this paper at all, was Brandom’s critique of what he calls “I-we” approaches to the social, as contrasted with his preferred “I-thou” approach. It’s the advocacy of an “I-thou” approach that invites reading Brandom as a methodological individualist, but I suspect that Brandom is thinking in a different direction here – that what he’s trying to fend off is simply a form of thematising “the social” that would view communities, collectivities, or “Society” as sort of an empirical arbitrator of what is good or true.

Brandom doesn’t believe this offers sufficient critical potentials: he wants some possibility for criticising society as a whole for being potentially wrong. He moves to “I-thou” relations because they enable him to thematise how a structure of interaction (paradigmatically, in his account, between two individual interlocutors, but in principle extensible to other scales of interaction) can generate a counterfactual ideal capable of cashing out the possibility for criticising, not only individuals for being out off synch with some larger, norm-instituting, collectivity, but even societies as a whole.

Brandom doesn’t consider that there might be other ways of going about this – that not all approaches that thematise the social, understand the social as a sort of Durkheimian anchor for the normative. I suspect this is what causes him to be insufficiently attentive to the possibility of his being read a methodological individualist (because he’s thinking about fending off other sorts of critiques and misunderstandings of his work), and also what causes him to be as “black box” as he is about determinate aspects of a specific social, which might open up theorisable counterfactuals of different sorts.

This hits on another issue that we didn’t have time to thematise in this piece: Brandom’s constant gestural references to history. I think it’s possible to make a case that his approach is more abstract than it should be, given that he, in many places, explicitly specifies his argument with relation to themes that have preoccupied philosophy specifically since the 17th century. Although I’ve called his theory “reflexive” above, its form of reflexivity is insufficient, I suspect, to account for this level of historical specificity. Brandom could respond (and may think) that the development of more formal and explicit forms of logical expression in the modern era provide all the historicisation he requires – I would tend to counter that are some suspicious homologies between what he finds in linguistic practices, and what I might claim to find in other sorts of practices – suggestinng the need for a broader social theory for an adequately reflexive approach. But the argument here would be complicated enough that it didn’t seem appropriate for a conference discussion…

All this aside, though, LM and I also struggled with a certain murkiness in Brandom’s account, around the exact sorts of issues that you are raising above – we debated back and forth before presenting, trying to make better sense of what is going on. I think I’m perhaps a little bit closer to “getting it”, having spent some time post-presentation with Brandom’s Tales of the Mighty Dead – although, even here, I find that I sort of go back and forth from chapter to chapter on what I think he’s doing… Interestingly, trying to watch Brandom wrestle with Hegel in this work, he seems puzzled by somewhat similar things, in relation to Hegel, as we are raising here in relation to his own work…

But I suspect the issue will probably boil down to a matter of Brandom’s trying to thematise very specific things, which leave his work at an odd skew relative to some of the sorts of questions Habermas poses. On the one hand, I think it would be a real stretch to try to substantiate the notion that Brandom believes in “a kind of methodological individualism in which the subject has “direct access to a supposed conceptual structure of the universe.”.” As well, Brandom does draw distinctions that could map onto Habermas’ distinction between instrumental and communicative action – the difference is more in how the two authors understand these distinctions to be “grounded” in collective practice – with Brandom advocating a “norms all the way down” position (such that the instrumental-coommunicative distinction is itself a normative one) that makes Habermas nervous.

And Brandom genuinely does black box (I think) an analysis of the sorts of reasons that might be accepted, in any particular context, as valid – pointing this back to more socially-specified questions of who would be a trusted reporter, according to other social actors, what sorts of arguments would tend to be accepted in some specific context, etc. – Brandom’s analysis operates at too abstract a level to account for this, allowing only (I think) for an analysis of what particular claims presuppose, and what consequences follow from them, once some (unanalysed) context is given. Brandom does give an account of how the notion of objectivity can arise as a counterfactual ideal via intersubjective interaction – but this is the most abstract of critical ideals. Habermas wants a system that will do more work than this (and I’m sympathetic to that intention) – but, at the same time, Brandom’s work – if only by showing that it is possible to effect a very different reading of the tacit structures underlying communicative practice – may pose a certain challenge to how Habermas attempts to ground his more specific critical ideals. This is the issue we still need to work out in much greater detail (well, one of the issues – as is obvious from this post, there are many others).

“[Brandom] acknowledges a world of objects which most certainly do intrude upon discursive concept formation…”

But what does this entail exactly? And how does one make sense of it in the light of his conceptual realism? It seems to me that one of the central issues in the debate between Habermas and Brandom is precisely the origin of “world-disclosing” concepts. For Habermas, such concepts are the product of cooperative effort in the lifeworld; by contrast, he takes Brandom to be advocating a kind of methodological individualism in which the subject has “direct access to a supposed conceptual structure of the universe.”

The discussion about “feedback” is related because Brandom does not draw a distinction between instrumental and communicative action. Habermas acknowledges that Brandom has an account of experimental action (cf. the example of the litmus paper) but argues that the fact reality frustrates our expectations about how to act is not yet a reason for changing our doxastic commitments. For example, finding that I’m consistently late when driving to work because I’m often stuck in traffic doesn’t mean that I reassess my belief that driving to work is the best option; it may mean I simply try to find a better route to work. As Habermas says: “Perceptual judgments play a different role in engaged coping with reality than in the communicative horizon of attributing, justifying and acknowledging truth claims.” Because Brandom is oblivious to this distinction, it is not at all clear what would constitute “discursive concept formation” on his view.

Btw, I’m in Melbourne all this week if anyone wants to have a coffee with me. :-)