From Empiricism to Expressivism by Robert B. Brandom

Author:Robert B. Brandom
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780674187283
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2014-08-12T00:00:00+00:00

2. The Modal Kant-Sellars Thesis

How urgent those questions are depends on whether we have grounds to accept criticisms of the empiricist program that undermine the basis for its relegation of modal vocabulary to a suspect, second-class status. I think that the best justification for our new comfort with modal idioms is indeed to be found in the principled rejection of some of the crucial presuppositions of the empiricist critique of the credentials of modal concepts. We can now see that the operative core of both Quine’s and Sellars’s arguments against empiricism consists in objections to its underlying semantic atomism.3 Arguing that meaning must at least determine inferential role and noticing that what follows from or is evidence for or against a claim depends on what other claims are available as auxiliary hypotheses or collateral premises, Quine concludes that the smallest unit of meaning is not a sentence, even in the case of observation sentences, but what he calls a ‘theory’: the whole constellation of all sentences held true, articulated by their inferential relations both to one another and to sentences not held true. Sellars argues that even observational beliefs acquired noninferentially through perception can be understood as conceptually contentful—and hence potentially cognitively significant—only in virtue of their inferential relations to other possible beliefs. He concludes that noninferential reports, no matter what their subject matter, cannot constitute an autonomous discursive practice: a language game one could play though one played no other.

It is clear, I take it, how these anti-atomist arguments bear against empiricist foundationalism: the layer-cake picture of a semantically autonomous base of perceptual experience or reports thereof, on which is erected a semantically optional superstructure, in effect, of theories inferentially based on those observations. And insofar as empiricist worries about the status of laws, necessary connections, dispositions, and counterfactual possibilities are predicated on the difficulty of justifying the inferences that would add them to the supposedly semantically autonomous base of nonmodal reports of actual experiences, Quine’s and Sellars’s assault on the layer-cake picture, if successful, undercuts those worries by removing the motivation for their ultimately unmeetable constraints on an account of what modal vocabulary expresses. Thought of this way, though, criticism of the semantic presuppositions of the empiricist project does not bear any more directly on its treatment of modal vocabulary than on its treatment of any other potentially puzzling candidate for empiricist explication: theoretical (that is, nonobservational, exclusively inferentially applicable) vocabulary, normative vocabulary, probabilistic vocabulary, and so on.

But there is another, much more intimate and immediate positive connection between arguments against semantic atomism and our understanding of what is expressed by the use of modal vocabulary. And it is here that I think we can find the best justification for our current relaxed attitude toward and even enthusiastic embrace of modal idioms as suitable tools for serious analytic semantic work. The underlying idea is what I will call the “Kant-Sellars thesis about modality.” Hume found that even his best understanding of actual observable empirical facts did not yield an understanding of rules relating or otherwise governing them.

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