Metaphysical Themes in Recent Pragmatism

Abstract

This paper discusses the status of metaphysical themes in recent pragmatism, primarily in the work of Robert Brandom and Huw Price. It examines the main points of difference between these two philosophers and recommends pathways for further development. The metaphysical statuses of naturalism and normativity are central concerns of the paper, and doubts are raised about accounting for phenomena associated with these dimensions in a straightforward way. It is suggested, however, that if the notion of a pragmatic metavocabulary is properly explicated it may provide the key for understanding the intermingling of naturalistic and normative aspects of intentionality, and claims regarding ontological commitment.

I There is at present a rich and bold strand of theory in the philosophy of language that is concerned with working out in detail a revised conception of the notion of “representation”; following Richard Rorty’s lead1—and John Dewey’s before him—many of those who think of themselves as neo-pragmatists have denied this notion a pivotal role in theories of intentional behaviour. Rather than being treated as a notion to be explicated, “representation”, and the correlate notions of “semantic content” and “meaning”,2 have by many such theorists been assigned roles derivative from inference,3 where inferential practices are themselves seen as constrained by the normative pragmatics that determines what one is doing when one is saying something.4 The fundamentality of the concept of “representation” is thereby considered by such theorists who reason this way to consist at least in part in its opacity to direct investigation, rather than the rewards direct philosophical analysis of it might offer.

It is obvious that there are legitimate empirical investigations in the offing for those who want to understand how language users “represent” the world, in some technical sense to be defined, as well as how they could be said to “undertake” forms

1 Most notoriously in Rorty (1979/2009) It is important to note that Rorty recommends denial of any

theoretical role for this concept (not merely as explanandum: see Rorty (1995, 286) for a typical statement of this), whilst the work discussed here seeks to preserve a less problematic role congenial to pragmatist sentiments. See Price (2009/2011) for a discussion of this spectrum of views with respect to “representation”.

2 This additional way of putting the point comes from Brandom (2011); the approach is constitutive

of what Brandom calls “methodological pragmatism”. 3 See McDowell (2009b) for a critique of the idea that claiming inference to be explanatorily primary

constitutes a meaningful rejection of a position call “representationalism”. Prioritising pragmatics over semantics purportedly rids us of a great deal of philosophical problems and this is perhaps sufficient to prefer such a direction of explanation. Cf. Rorty (1993, 447-448). Of course, this last point does not imply that the “scientific” approach is problem free; this would be naïve and an unrealistically optimistic view of the prospects for inquiry generally, which is in principle not problem free, since it is motivated by problems and thus perpetually beset by them.

4 Sellars (1953) played a central role in motivating this line of thought.

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of inferential commitment. Yet this empirical question, especially in the former case of representing the world—itself a possible case for behavioural and cognitive neuropsychology—is orthogonal to the theoretical, a priori insistence on a functionally determined framework for explanation of language use.

Robert Brandom’s inferentialist semantics is a paradigm-setting theoretical frame within which a large portion of discussion of these issues is located, his monumental Making It Explicit1 having worked out in a detail a theory of rationality along the lines just intimated. Brandom’s more recent work is complementary to yet distinct from this broader task of elaborating a theory of rationality. His 2006 Locke Lectures, published as Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism,2 focussed broadly on the structure and function of what Brandom calls, following Wilfrid Sellars and Rudolf Carnap before him, “metavocabularies”. According to Brandom, a metavocabulary can be either semantic or pragmatic: the former variety involves saying in different (perhaps revisionary) terms3 what was originally said in the target vocabulary, whilst the latter says what needs to be done to count as using the target vocabulary.

Another important strand of recent pragmatism can be found in the work of Huw Price. Like Brandom, Price is concerned to dismiss the notions of “truth”, “meaning”, “reference” and “representation” from the philosophy of language’s explanatory centre stage (which, importantly, doesn’t equate to their removal from the engine room), yet his strategy is different. The Humean roots of Price’s global expressivist position ground his anti-representationalism in something akin to the non-cognitivist thesis that the function of certain kinds of vocabulary (all kinds for Price) is not to state belief about “facts” such that truths in that vocabulary could be determined by “matching” beliefs with states of affairs in the world taken to be “represented” by them.4 And yet Price’s view about the distinction between factual/non-factual and descriptive/non-descriptive discourse entails that the ordinary contrast presumed by non-cognitivists cannot be drawn; therefore, that neither side of the original distinction is assumed to be sound. That is to say that, when combined with other sympathies, Price’s commitment to a global anti-representationalism dictates that “non-cognitivism” is no longer a helpful label because the broader distinction upon which it rests is thought of by Price as unhelpful.

Meanwhile, Brandom’s inferentialist semantics focuses on the centrality of attributing and undertaking of commitments to normative discourse and his anti-representationalism is confined to the de re ascriptions of propositional attitudes in which implicit logical, modal, and normative commitments are made explicit: Brandom is a local expressivist (and thereby anti-representationalist) about

1 Brandom (1994).

2 Brandom (2008).

3 See Price (1997) and Jackson (1997) for engagement. Brandom (2011, 193-4) does mention that

subject naturalism and object naturalism are “not necessarily incompatible enterprises.” Of course, to say they aren’t incompatible is not to say that they are interdependent or that each of their methods is even suggestive of the other’s; Price’s subject naturalism was formulated in opposition to object naturalism and was intended to invalidate it. On this see Price (2004b).

4 See Price (1988). Prima facie this complication marks a departure from Hume.

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representational vocabulary itself 1 and his project has strong rationalist roots: Brandom’s philosophical hero is, first and foremost, Hegel. However, Brandom does evidence a strand of Leibnizianism also, and his version of Hegel is arguably more traditionally rationalistic than Hegel’s Hegel, due in part to Brandom’s distinct interpretation of “the conceptual”.

It pays to see that the usual inference from a position’s being expressivist to its being anti-representationalist, and its reversal, is a common one, and yet is it compulsory? A well-formed answer would take us too far afield at present, although much is to be gained by scrutinising the issue. What we must at least recognise is that Price only employs the label “global expressivism” on the basis of the validity of this inference. His position is not best thought of as having anything in common with typical expressivist positions in metaethics.

Clearly the historical legacies mentioned above betray more than superficial divergences in Price’s and Brandom’s orientations. Nevertheless, I think the resultant differences are tied to attitudes regarding the foundations of ontology that can be read as closer than might seem, even if a glance at their philosophical work evinces distinct theoretical foci. Not to say that, at a glance, Price’s and Brandom’s orientations stand in deep opposition; this would be infelicitous. Rather to say that the relevant points of contact can, under the appropriate lens, be magnified with profit to both parties. This irenic strategy has been undertaken by Price himself although I will not complicate matters further by engaging directly with the details since they do not add anything that would change my general approach to the issues.2

At this point we must recognise a lurking spectre. It is bad philosophical practice to attempt rapprochements on a whim if in doing so one is simply suggesting an interpretation of the work of the individuals implicated that coheres with one’s own philosophical viewpoint. My aim here is to bring out some further texture I think is discernible in the issues with which Price and Brandom are already engaged and, in so doing, to attempt illumination and applause of their methods and philosophical hopes. The core focus will remain restricted to what I think is essentially correct in their views about the ontological commitments of thought and talk, so I shall be applauding some aspects of Price’s naturalism and some of the elements in the inferentialist semantics tied to Brandom’s account of normative pragmatics, yet in both cases I will also raise possible caveats regarding what I see to be parts of their positions that require careful development.

I noted above that Brandom is a local expressivist about representational vocabulary itself, a position made possible by the structure of his methodological pragmatism. For Brandom, the notion of semantic content is taken to be introduced in order to “explain or at least codify central proprieties of their pragmatic use”3 in normatively constrained inferential practices. So whilst the magnitude and detail of Brandom’s reconstruction of the notion of “representation” is substantial, the

1 See Brandom (2011, 206ff.). The introduction of representational vocabulary occurs via de re

ascription of propositional attitudes; the issue is the topic of Brandom (1994, Chapter 8). 2 See Price (2011) and (2013, Chapter 8).

3 Brandom (2011, 194).

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character of the reconstruction ought not to be seen as necessarily in tension with the principles upon which Price’s global expressivism is based, Brandom’s objections notwithstanding.

As far as I can see, nothing rules out the possibility that Brandom’s theoretical retention of the concept of “representation” can be interpreted as reflecting no more than the focus of his philosophical project on “normativity”, rather than “naturalism” (as in Price). For though both Brandom and Price advocate a revised view of the role of traditional semantic notions, Brandom’s derivative semantic account of these notions requires him to continue talking about them in terms that invite objection from quarters harbouring suspicion of the metaphysics connected with inflationary conceptions.

By contrast, Price offers a naturalistic genealogical story of core semantic notions (and particular concepts, as will be remarked upon below). For Price, there simply isn’t a semantic account to be given, in the traditional sense. So we might say that Price deflates core semantic notions. We will see what he means by this. His view is that there simply isn’t anything theoretically illuminating to be said about core semantic notions except in a highly general sense that coheres with a broadly naturalistic anthropological view of ourselves as rational animals. As further commentary will show, it is Brandom’s opting for the former strategy that motivates his pragmatist reconstruction of metaphysics, while travel down the alternate path is part-and-parcel of Price’s conception of a properly “sideways on”1 naturalist stance, albeit one that is liberal, that is to say, non-reductive.

Here we are faced by a basic, troubling question: Is there a clear, unproblematic, and ineradicable division between this conception of semantic derivation, and a naturalistic genealogy? The question for the theorist who goes derivative about semantic notions is to what extent such purportedly innocent derivation involves postulating entities not obligated by a satisfactory theoretical account of the vocabulary in question. Given that Brandom’s account is, put in another idiom, about the “pure pragmatics” of language, not a study of cases of empirical use—even if the point is to clarify and provide a theoretical framework for understanding normative behaviour—decisions as to which semantic entities one ought to postulate to explain pragmatics seem to be open to some indeterminacy. And saying there is a problem about which entities one ought to postulate to explain something commits one to admitting there is a problem about which entities may be requisite features of one’s ontology.

Recognition of this point leads one to ask: Exactly what is it to introduce entities beyond necessity in developing an account of the pragmatics of language use? In empirical investigation Ockam’s Razor does seem to provide a principled way of distinguishing metaphysics from science where the former variety of investigation falls

1 This phrase comes from John McDowell. He employs it to condemn accounts of subjectivity that

forego the first-personal dimension in favour of focus on the third-personal. The issue is itself a deep one and will receive only indirect attention through our concerns in II, where we express scepticism about the potential for pragmatic metavocabularies to account for language-use from outside the language-games in which it occurs.

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on the side of the line marked “excess”, the latter on the side of “economy”. Yet Ockham’s Razor does not and cannot provide an adequate, more fundamental, principled distinction upon which to base this further presupposition between “excess” and “economy”: it seems this requires stipulation since one needs to decide at some point when theory becomes useless or misleading. One is thereby tempted to ask whether this makes the line between metaphysics and science blurry. Of course, even if it did, this would not warrant unchained metaphysical speculation by non-practitioners of science. Rather, it would simply draw attention to the space already carved out in which fruitful speculation occurs: the logical sphere in which scientific practitioners are seen as moving in their conjuring of hypotheses—the backbone of progress in the acquisition of knowledge. For there is nothing mysterious in the thought that speculation is profitable only if it leads to determinate or at least determinable results, whether these be predictable evidential support garnered directly in experiment, or in theoretical structures connected with observation.1

Despite the fact that investigation into the fine structure of normativity requires Brandom’s revised conception of representation to receive detailed elaboration in a way that at times appears to re-invoke the old view against which neo-pragmatism is taken to be reacting, there doesn’t seem to be any reason why this project could not be construed as embodying pluralistic and deflationary ontological commitment, as Price claims it should. For if semantic notions are only introduced to articulate proprieties involved in the employment of certain vocabularies, why would such introduction have to be viewed in any more than deflationary terms?2 Articulation of such deflationary terms would shift the theoretical focus to what ontological commitments were introduced by the employment of a certain vocabulary, where the pragmatics of usage rather than the semantics provides a pivot-point. One sense in which this kind

1 On the introduction of hypothetical entities in philosophical discourse, see Sellars (1967/1992,

Chapter 1, II, §29). 2 Price recognises that Brandom is, in his terms, “on the side of virtue”, yet as Price rightly notes,

there is an ambiguity in some of Brandom’s descriptions of his own project which seem to reveal a return to the kinds of metaphysical approaches he has, for a long time, sought to avoid. See Price (2008, 2009/2011) . In defence of Brandom, I think his keen focus on the existential (Brandom has “existential commitment” rather than “ontological commitment” in the Index of Making It Explicit) commitments of thought and talk lead him to, at times, state his position in a vivid way. One example which Price exploits is the following: “[T]he investigation of the nature and limits of the explicit expression in principles of what is implicit in discursive practices yields a powerful transcendental argument – a...transcendental expressive argument for the existence of objects” Brandom (1994, xxii-xxiii).

Another tricky instance, worth mentioning, is in Brandom (2009b, 34-35), where Brandom writes: “The objective form of judgment, Kant says, is “the object=X,” to which judgments always, by their very form as judgments, make implicit reference. Thought of in terms of the normative pragmatics of judgment it is the mark of what one has made oneself responsible to by making a judgment. It expresses the objectivity of judgments, in the sense of their having intentional objects: what they purport to represent. The understanding of the intentional directedness of judgments – the fact that they represent or are about something – is through-and-through a normative one. What the judgment is about is the object that determines the correctness of the commitment one has undertaken in endorsing it. (On the practical side, it is normative assessments of the success of an action for which the object to which one has made oneself responsible by endorsing a maxim must be addressed.” (The emphases are mine.)

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of theoretical focus harmonises with Brandom is in the set of questions surrounding the notion of an Autonomous Discursive Practice (ADP).

Under the suggested view, at least one task of the theorist inclined to investigate ontological commitment in pragmatic terms would be to translate talk of material incompatibilities and supposed category or framework dependence into pragmatic terms. As a preliminary suggestion, the notion of category dependence would need to be cashed out in terms of the dependence of certain discursive practices on others, whilst the notion of material incompatibilities would need to be cashed out in terms of conflicting discursive practices, pragmatically (not semantically) conceived—that is, as behavioural incompatibilities. We must caution against an overly crude understanding of a behavioural incompatibility that simply defines meaningfulness in terms of actions of speakers; with “behavioural incompatibilities” we need to extend the range of predicables to include also potential actions and thoughts that would follow from those normatively mediated ones already in existence.

We can offer brief characterisation of an example of commonplace behaviour that demonstrates the dependence of certain so-called “categories of thought” on others in order to illustrate the point. Consider a non-fundamental behavioural constellation, which we might characterise in common speech as the action of “searching-for-valuable-items-on-a-beach-with-a-metal-detector”. This practice depends on many factors, but relevantly it depends on (1), the value humans place on certain metal goods, (2), the fact that humans occupy beaches1 and (3), the fact that there is a potentially favourable relationship of proportion between the value of the items in question and the fact that humans are likely to lose the items in question with sufficient regularity to make searching for them a not totally unreasonable but instead a proportionately rewarding exercise. Continuing this line, we could say that the existence of behaviour appropriately classified as “valuable-item-hunting-with-metal-detector-on-beach” would depend, most crucially, on “significant-human-valuations-of-small-metal-goods-easily-lost”.2

There might look to be nothing philosophically interesting whatsoever about such a suggestion. However, the crucial point is that a non-reductive, pragmatic account of behavioural dependencies requires one to introduce categories by which to explain these dependencies: explaining the search for something requires introducing the notion of value that motivates the search, and we needn’t assume conceptual essences to make sense of this idea, nor do we need to commit to any particular account of teleological explanation. Rather, we need only grasp the significance of the behaviour from the standpoint inside the language-game or practice in question. The metal detector case is interesting because it is (a), trivial and common, (b), involves the agent involved in the behaviour in question having engineered an item to aid the

1 It also obviously depends on the fact that metal detectors can differentiate a reasonable majority of

the beach landscape (sand) from the items in question, but this may be assumed since if the detector has been successfully engineered, i.e., if it is a metal detector at all, it would achieve this.

2 In Brandom’s (2008) terminology, originally from the Locke Lectures, this would be a kind of PP-

necessity.

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behaviour, and (c), clearly manifests a so-called state of mind that depends on another state of mind, so-called.

Now, before going any further, it is worth pointing out that the question here is whether Brandom’s recent detailing of a pragmatist reconstruction of metaphysics1 excludes the option I have just been discussing. The idea is not to insist that he ought to take this route in his own work, as if impudent delegation were the way. To add weight to our example, we can acknowledge that Brandom’s methodological pragmatism is structurally similar to philosophical2 (not logical) behaviourism, where such a view, at least in Sellars, involves the introduction of not only intentional states broadly construed, but also those hypothetical entities that, otherwise conceived, traditionally gave grief to empiricist epistemologies: “sense impressions”. Whilst Brandom has provided a rich and detailed reconstruction of the notion of “representation” out of pragmatist materials, such a reconstruction, I think, can usefully be viewed in the deflationary terms Price advocates. Again, this is not a commitment Brandom would make, nor one he needs to make. Yet, if it can be demonstrated as a possibility, it would constitute an interesting development of his view. For once we recognise both the structural similarity and the interpretive possibility just mentioned they pave the way for a renewal of insights expressed by philosophical behaviourism that have largely fallen by the wayside.3

In addition to the interpretive qualification of Brandom from Price’s end as just noted, I would like to also question Price from Brandom’s standpoint. The issue on which I will focus in the next section relates to the relative sympathies Price and Brandom accord to a certain kind of metavocabulary. This focus will involve exploring the efficacy certain kinds of metavocabulary have for, in Brandom’s terms, “elaborating and explicating” the commitments involved in employment of the target vocabulary.4 Phrasing the matter this way places tension on Price’s view; let us see why.

II A programmatic suggestion peppered through Price’s recent work is that philosophical naturalism ought to take the form of what he calls “subject naturalism”.5 According to this view, aspiring philosophical naturalists prone to The Metaphysical Urge should resist the temptation, guided by a representationalist thesis, to perform naturalistic

1 I am thinking primarily of Brandom (2009b, Chapters 1-3) and (2012, forthcoming).

2 What Sellars (1956/1963/1997) also calls “methodological behaviourism”. See Brandom’s remarks

about §§53-55 on 175-176. 3 Cf. the expression of interest of reviving aspects of Ryle in Price (1994).

4 Brandom’s characteristic phrasing is expressed in two acronyms: “expressivism about logical,

modal, and normative vocabulary that consists in understanding them as LX for every ADP is essentially, and not just accidently, a local expressivism.” Brandom (2011, 209). LX = elaborated-explicating; ADP = autonomous discursive practice.

5 The phrase itself betrays Humean sympathies insofar as Hume thought that psychology—a natural

account of human thought and talk (a “science of behaviour”)—ought to be the ground upon which philosophical and scientific inquiry be built.

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reductions of purportedly problematic metaphysical terms1 which involve “placement” of them in the world-view provided by our best current science: they should deny this urge and look rather to (1), the function these terms play in practice, and then offer (2), an anthropologically-based genealogical account of these functions under the rubric of “how and why we came to speak as we do”.2 It is important to distinguish these two aspects of the subject naturalist project since they are separable and require comparison with Brandom on different fronts, even if the elaboration of each is not entirely independent of the other.

The relevant connection is this: in Brandom’s terms, Price’s subject naturalist project involves the formulation and application of pragmatic metavocabularies to specify in naturalistic terms what one must do in order to count as using a particular vocabulary.3 The additional question, close to Price’s heart, regarding the genealogy that would explain why those using the target vocabulary came to speak the way they do is not attended to by Brandom. There is an obvious dependency of such an explanatory project, (2), on (1), the prior descriptive aim of accounting for the use of such a vocabulary itself, although additional complications arise in attempts to provide an explanatory story.

One way of viewing Brandom’s project in Making It Explicit is as a descriptive account of the fine structure of normativity. Brandom describes this as a “naturalism of second nature”4 and John McDowell has referred to it as a “transcendental sociologism”.5 Put this way, and given his scepticism about Price’s subject naturalist aspirations to provide a naturalistic pragmatic metavocabulary for normative vocabulary—that is nevertheless not reductive, given Price’s semantically deflationary, ontologically pluralistic, expressivist stance—Brandom’s stance appears to involve resistance to the idea that normativity is even visible from a naturalistic perspective, or within a naturalistic ontology.

The crucial issues raised by (2) can be little more than mentioned here, given the disproportionate relation between their magnitude and the limited compass of this paper, but I would like to record my scepticism about the possibility of conducting

1 See Price (1997). The problematic terms mentioned there are “Morality, Modality, Meaning and the

Mental” (247). It should be noted that although Price’s subject naturalism is directed primarily at clarifying such problematic terms, his wish for genealogical explanation extends across all domains. Regarding Frege’s two-level theory of the meaningfulness of assertion, Price says that “what it leaves out is an account of how there comes to be a thought to the effect that snow is white. One component of this thought is the concept white, for example. My proposal looks for a pragmatic account of the origins and ‘possession conditions’ of this concept, for creatures like us – natural creatures, in a natural environment. It asks, in effect, how does such a creature have to be, and what does it have to do, to count as possessing and employing the concept?” He adds in a footnote to this: “As we’ll see, this project has two importantly distinct parts to it. We want a general pragmatic account of the origins of judgement or assertion in general, and specific accounts of the origins of particular concepts.” Price (2004a, 184). The emphasis in the footnote (only) is mine.

2 This case was originally made out in Price (2004b). It is elaborated most thoroughly in Price (2013,

Part 1). 3 Brandom (2011, 191).

4 Brandom (2011, 195, n.5).

5 McDowell (2009a, 218).

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such an investigation in the terms Price appears to hope for, in absence of further qualification.1 Doing so judiciously requires pointing out some particular problems which would have to be faced if this aspect of the project is to be distinctively and adequately philosophical, rather than simply scientific; an eye on Price’s Quinean view of the philosophy-science nexus notwithstanding.2 The misgivings I express relate to what seem to be complications the ironing out of which is essential for further progress: I do not see any need to be sceptical about the position Price advocates if one casts it in the broad terms in which I am casting it here. The suggestion is that some modifications can be made to clarify and adjust certain aspects of the proposed view.

Before we arrive at that task we must acknowledge the potential for alternate interpretations of what a “genealogical story” about the emergence of a central semantic notion like “representation” might be. At the very least, we ought to be aware that Brandom’s Hegel would in all probability have substantial things to say about the “genealogy” of the kinds of normative practices under concern in Making It Explicit, for instance. Even if Brandom’s reading of Hegel were not to venture down this path it is quite clearly an option that the sympathetic might take. And whilst direct discussion of the issue would take us beyond the topic of this paper, we must acknowledge that a “genealogical” (even if not strictly “naturalistic”) reading of the emergence of intentional concepts is somehow on offer within the covers of the Phenomenology of Spirit,3 and that a Brandomian equivalent of Price’s hoped for naturalistic story may well take such a Hegelian form. (Note that Brandom’s book-in-progress on Hegel’s Phenomenology does offer a clue about how his story may go.)

Returning now to my scepticism about Price’s position, to which I referred above, it may described as consisting of three closely related parts:

1. Determinacy of Function: How can a genealogical story confidently be depicted as

having adequately identified the functions of certain kinds of language-behaviour under scrutiny? How can such functions avoid both undue indeterminacy and arbitrariness? By “indeterminacy” I mean the possibility that certain features of language being studied could be difficult to fix (the rules of a language are arguably

1 It is worth noting that this aspect of Price’s work is under construction and, given his broad

position regarding these matters, should most probably be seen by him as requiring empirical work; at least this seems to be the response called for. Conducted otherwise, the subject naturalist would be getting by with objectionable a priori reflection on properly empirical questions regarding linguistic behaviour that would be at odds with their own naturalistic stance.

2 The philosophy-science question is important, and for those who wish to qualify their Quinean

sympathies the gradation might to some extent be determined by relative degree of relevant empirical work. Nevertheless, it is possible to avoid a trivially terminological dispute (“I say philosophy ≠ science and you contradict me!”) by setting out the commitments of particular kinds of explanatory stances. Prima facie, different domains of discourse place different weighting on the so-called “normative” perspective (that which apparently pertains to Price’s i-representationalism, as discussed in Price (2013, Chapters 2 & 3) and this could be one important consideration in sorting gradations on the philosophy-science scale. These issues are explored in Macarthur (2007) and Price (2007, 2009).

3 Hegel (1977).

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not perspicuous).1 By “arbitrariness” I mean the possibility that fixing those features could problematically obscure or generalise them.

Raising these general questions puts pressure on the fact that it is one thing to talk of ontological commitment as being pluralistic and deflationary, but quite another to operate with this attitude in the conduct of a supposedly scientifically authoritative2 account of certain functions themselves by mentioning cases of usage of language if such a scientifically authoritative explanation involves the fixing of functions to a theoretically restrictive degree at odds with the possible indeterminacy apparent in the phenomena. The conditional is important: it leaves open the question of whether such “fixing”, apparently required for rigorous study, would have to be unduly restrictive and generalising (although I suspect that it could very easily be). If one accepts this, the “fixing” of a locus as may be required in an investigation of this kind seems problematic.

Counterpart to the fixing of functions is the issue of determinacy: a failure of determinacy would arise as a result of (i), difficulty in determining whether certain instances ought to be thought of as falling under a certain kind—or, as playing a certain role (the kind or role being offered a genealogical explanation) and (ii), difficulty in determining whether the kind or role in question was of a unified, and thereby relevantly circumscribable “natural kind”3 across relevant descriptions.

A quick response would invoke the fact that the ontological commitments involved in the genealogical explanation were deflationary,4 the entities being studied would be theorised about and committed to only within the relevant context of talk; no ontological commitment to the possibly “restrictive” versions of the functions in question would need to be undertaken outside the explanations entered into within the subject naturalist project itself. We might suppose that this fact obtains for all ontological commitments and not merely ones entered into by users of naturalistic vocabularies. The concern is with how this purportedly naturalistic approach to verbal behaviour can be squared with the apparently normative dimensions of discourse.

1 The issue is whether one can coherently find a core use or function for, in this case, linguistic

phenomena; of course, any kind of generally empirical work always requires definitions and such an approach is unavoidable if one wants to study something.

2 Note that “authoritative” is not simply equivalent to “exclusive” or “reductive”, as Price is well

aware (cf. his comments about “natural plurality” in Price (2004b, 87-88). Clearly, one can have pragmatic reasons for preferring a certain kind of explanation, but it is not clear how this is to be justified if one thinks, with Rorty, that the choice simply is to be decided in favour of the theory which leaves us with “fewer philosophical problems on our hands” (Rorty (1993, 440ff.)). It is not clear when this is true, and, even when it does clearly seem to be true, why it is true, if not for standard “metaphysical” reasons.

3 I place the epithet in inverted commas due to the concern relevant to “natural” as a qualifier for

“kind”. In accord with liberal naturalist sympathies, such an appellation is broader than is usual, perhaps.

4 Price (2009/2011, 313) characterises this as “ontologically conservative”, to which he contrasts

positions that are “ontologically profligate”. The second approach “picks up the internal ontological commitments of the frameworks theorised about.” The significance of this is that such a theorist is tempted by the question of what the X’s are that that vocabulary speaks about; the ontology becomes pneumatised. Such is to be drawn into the old object naturalist project that Price was originally reacting against in formulating subject naturalism.

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Unfortunately we can only scratch the surface of that rich issue here; we must be content with merely signalling the problem.

To return to the distinction just made, (ii) can be elaborated in the following way: Consider the investigation into some aspect, or kind, of here generally intentional, but specifically verbal, behaviour which is meant to be in some relevant way uniform across a cultural and chronological, therefore historical, segment. The question is whether it would be possible to identify this phenomenon in terms satisfactory to the subject naturalist, given that the subject naturalist aims to provide liberally natural explanations and such a liberally natural investigation implicates not only (ii*) study of behaviour qua physical movement that is unproblematically visible, but also (ii**) study of such behaviour qua intentional, where imputation of intentionality involves de re ascriptions of propositional attitudes.

Close examination of (ii**) reveals it to involve rationalising explanations, and the depth of understanding involved with such explanations involves a rich account of the fine structure of normativity operant in those norms of rationality thereby implicated. Where does this leave the genealogical project? What this at least shows is that adopting an adequately liberal stance toward the natural phenomena under investigation requires a rich account of normativity; precisely the kind of account provided by Brandom in his inferentialist semantics and one which, furthermore, is based upon a local expressivism about representational vocabulary qua introduced via de re ascriptions of propositional attitudes.

If such considerations are accepted as relevant, the subject naturalist project, qua liberal, functionally pluralistic, and non-reductive, faces the difficult task of explaining exactly how its naturalistic and normative aspects interrelate.

2. The Visibility Point: Another strand of scepticism stems from the conviction that mere mention of language uses occurring in a target vocabulary will in some important way be blind to central features of them, unless the cases of mentioning are somehow wise to the norms governing the uses. This raises the question of what it means to be inside as opposed to outside a practice. My imagery will be that of having “one foot in” as opposed to “two feet in” the practice where both, supposedly, would be ways of being inside, as opposed to radically outside in the way that Quine’s field linguist featured in Word and Object is.1

The former stance is the minimal requirement for identifying normative vocabulary as being of a relevant kind and of appropriately attributing particular propositional attitudes to speakers,2 whilst the latter is the stance of a language user playing their home language-game. It is not clear whether there is a principled way of distinguishing the “one foot” and “two feet” stances. Satisfactorily meeting this concern would call for further elucidation of the notion of ontological commitment which Price is concerned to defend. This issue requires its own focussed study. A

1 Quine (1964, Chapter 2).

2 Important in this connection is Brandom’s local expressivism about de re ascriptions of

propositional attitudes (mentioned above). This issue is central to elaboration of the Kant-Sellars Thesis, to be discussed in III.

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major concern is whether his deflationary views of ontology are insufficient to distinguish “perspectival primacy” from “ontological primacy”1—and whether this is a problem, or a mere terminological outcome given the variety of ontological commitment Price goes in for.

3. The Descriptive-Explanatory Nexus: This third aspect of concern relates to an

apparently presupposed distinction between descriptive and explanatory enterprises.2 It is noteworthy that Brandom’s project in Making It Explicit can be viewed as a richly descriptive account of the fine structure of normativity, whilst Price’s subject naturalism is accurately construed as aiming for an explanatory account of the genealogy of linguistic practice.

Brandom’s Between Saying and Doing offers descriptions of the structure of metavocabularies and thus provides a platform for comparison. For although Brandom does not strictly offer a genealogical account of the genesis of particular vocabularies, he does provide an explanation of the “elaborating-explicitating” role that certain vocabularies play: an important case is the role fulfilled by modal vocabulary, which

1 Price (2013, Chapters 2 & 3) insists that the subject naturalist project will reserve a perspectival but

not ontological primacy for what he calls “e-representation”, by which he means environment tracking, external kinds of representation. Price also speaks of “i-representation” which he characterises as inferentially articulated and internal (presumably to a certain vocabulary). For present purposes I shall be ignoring the careful distinctions required here to distinguish this kind of “representation” from other kinds in the literature; however, Brandom (1994, 518-520) and Brandom (2011, IV, esp. 213) offer alternatives to this binary.

As a side note, I am tempted to say that there is definitely a pragmatic reason (which we might spell out in terms of “framework preference”, in the Carnapian tone Price is interested in) to prefer certain kinds of “scientific” explanation that involve more emphasis on what Price calls “e-representation”, yet I am not sure how one can thereby dodge the suggestion that this truly is a kind of ontological preference – it is ontological preference; one can simply be a deflationist about ontological commitment. Deflationism seems to do away with the “perspectival”/“ontological” distinction, or at least trivialise it. Perhaps this is no real problem.

For more detail, see Brandom (2012). Brandom’s concern coincides with mine: “naturalism” privileges some one kind (or some set of kinds) of vocabulary: naturalistically articulated vocabulary. Given the admission that Price’s deflationary, pluralistic stance takes the wind out of the sails of category preference (of certain sortals over others), where does this leave vindicators of subject naturalism? This requires some explication and the liberal dimension of such naturalism would be a good starting point for making a case.

2 Brandom (2012, 14-15) guards against the “methodologically monistic scientism” that thinks the

“only legitimate method of acquiring philosophical understanding” is the explanation of language use via postulation of meanings, where usage is “expressed in a non-semantic vocabulary, whether or not our access to claims about correct usage are made observationally or themselves inferentially.” Brandom has no principled basis for rejecting this kind of project, although it is clear that if conducted in exclusion of other theorising of the kind sufficient to distinguish relevant observational and inferential components of intentional practice such an approach will be reductive and unsatisfactorily incomplete (15). The important connection with description and explanation is borne out in this context; regarding the scientistic methodology, Brandom says: “Rejecting that at least leaves open the question of whether, and which, features of natural scientific investigation, explanation, knowledge, and understanding ought also to be counted among those useful and appropriate in philosophy. After all, description is also a central and essential element of scientific methodology, and even the most rigorous versions of Wittgensteinean quietism allow philosophers to describe features of our linguistic practice.”

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Brandom takes to perform the function of making explicit the implicit commitments we undertake in speaking in ways that introduce the notions of “possible” and “necessary”. The meaning-use relations that Brandom discusses in this context invite certain kinds of genealogical explanation. As noted above, logical, modal and normative vocabularies are, for Brandom, elaborated-explicitating for every autonomous discursive practice: their employment is thereby dependent, in a quasi-genealogical fashion, upon the normatively-constrained inferential practices in which they occur. Their genealogical explanation would consist of (i), an account of the practices out of which they emerge and (ii), an account of the dependence relations they bear to those practices.

I think (i) can usefully be seen as calling for both normatively pragmatic and liberally natural considerations. I am here exploiting the fact that, as Brandom says, modal vocabulary is not an ADP (autonomous discursive practice): a language-game one could play though one played no other. The point is that making normatively mediated modal commitments explicit through the employment of modal metavocabulary is an optional use of language. One question is: why make modal commitments explicit? A genealogical project is guided by such questions; this is one area where Price’s approach is required. Price would ask: “Why does normative vocabulary generally embed modal commitments? How do we come to speak this way?”.

My suggestion is this: Given that Brandom’s inferentialist semantics, in conjunction with his account of the structure and function of metavocabularies, explains1 (ii), we have only to understand (i): the existent practices themselves. From what has emerged thus far, Price’s subject naturalist project is a prime candidate for naturalistic explanation at least at the level of (i).

In Immodesty Without Mirrors—Making Sense of Wittgenstein’s Linguistic Pluralism Price writes:

My proposal looks for a pragmatic account of the origins and ‘possession conditions’ of this concept, for creatures like us – natural creatures, in a natural environment. It asks, in effect, how does such a creature have to be, and what does it have to do, to count as possessing and employing the concept?2

Examining this remark, I think the question of how a creature “has to be” is precisely the kind of complex set that merits liberally natural explanation. The liberal naturalist is adept at doing justice to the complex of ontological commitments involved in speaking about concept-employing creatures, for there are clearly a multitude of dimensions which ought to be considered when attempting to characterise the set of enigmatic objects to which human-as-rational-organism belongs. With respect to the second question of what such a creature “has to do” to count as possessing and employing concepts, I think there is room for insights from both sides of the fence.

1 This has received preliminary detailing in Brandom (2008) and is, as far as I can tell, under

continued construction. 2 Price (2004a, 184). The context is colour concepts; Price speaks of “white”.

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III

My focus in this section will be on the ways in which explanatory and descriptive dimensions relate in cases of intentional practice. The theoretical concern here is with linguistic behaviour, and it is clear that any explanation of such behaviour necessarily involves an interpretation of it—it involves understanding it under some description. This theme has been with us, at least implicitly, for as long as ascriptions of intentions and meaningfulness to the behaviour of other beings has been with us, yet in the twentieth century work by, primarily, Quine and Davidson, moved this issue to the forefront of philosophical discussion and we would be ill-advised to ignore the difficulties that press an interpreter (not even necessarily a radical one).

Clearly this point about the intermingling of explanation and description could be made in the general case—the issue is intimately related to that of ontological commitment—yet the matter becomes acute in cases where the notion of “intention” gets a grip. The idea that descriptions, or even simply descriptive concepts, introduce a “space of implications” is what Brandom calls the “Kant-Sellars Thesis”.1 This idea finds expression in §108 of Sellars’s essay Counterfactuals, Dispositions, and the Causal Modalities where he writes that,

although describing and explaining (predicting, retrodicting, understanding) are distinguishable, they are also, in an important sense, inseparable. It is only because the expressions in terms of which we describe objects, even such basic expressions as words for the perceptible characteristics of molar objects locate these objects in a space of implications, that they describe at all, rather than merely label. The descriptive and explanatory resources of language advance hand in hand; and to abandon the search for explanation is to abandon the attempt to improve language, period.

Obviously the relevant concern is that any explanatory task relying on the primacy of its coordinate description is thereby in danger of excluding the relevance of alternate explanations from its scope, that is, explanations that invoke distinct ontological commitments. And even having noted Price’s Carnapian tolerance2 of alternate explanatory frameworks, there seems to be a problem with the preference for specifying the appropriate form of explanation as naturalistic unless the sense of this term is qualified to explicitly encompass the normative-naturalness of rational animals. This is because not merely is the relevant explanation naturalistic but the description also, and although Price is a functional pluralist and is happy to be liberal with the scope of “natural”, the precise character of the genealogical theme in his pragmatism requires further explication.

Why would “naturalistic” explanations, in genealogical terms, of (1) core semantic notions like “representation” as well as (2), particular empirical concepts, on their own not be alarming? The problem is not that such a form of inquiry is illegitimate or fundamentally misguided, but rather that such an enterprise might not to some, or even many, be recognisable as philosophy. Therefore Price’s subject naturalism might

1 Brandom (2008, Chapter 4), (2009a) .

2 Price (2009).

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be simply placed to the pedagogical side for a philosopher who advanced this objection.1 This is a pertinent criticism, although it is not the current point. The issue at the moment is whether the subject naturalist’s genealogical explanations would coarse-grain to the extreme in their explanations of purportedly normative, intentional or otherwise meaningful behaviour by adopting a “sideways on” perspective to the practices in question. This suspicion was articulated above in II under the three titles of “The Determinacy of Function”, “The Visibility Point”, and “The Descriptive-Explanatory Nexus”.

A response that wished to preserve some explanatory role for a “sideways on” perspective within subject naturalism could say that for each class of phenomena there is, potentially, a preferred form of explanation. That is to say, for the behaviour of a given set of entities to be rendered coherent and explicit, there is some explanatory structure that does it best—simply on pain of articulating the structure of certain “patterns” found in the phenomena under concern.2 Of course, one need not have a neat, cut and dried conception of some particular explanatory structure in mind at the outset; such an aim is incoherent insofar as it presumes empirical reality is knowable a priori such that one may decide how particulars are best described prior to experiencing them.

Here the entities under consideration are human beings, as appearing in their performances of verbal and otherwise intentional behaviour. The subject naturalist explanation would involve something like a natural history of the emergence of certain forms of coordination behaviour of which the verbal and intentional are examples. If one wants to know why we began to employ a concept like “representation”, we would do well to look at the history of our behaviour and various cultural constellations to see where this concept entered and what it allowed us to do that we could not do without it. This approach coheres with Price’s rubric of “Why we came to speak as we do”. Now, on its own, this is not troubling. The difficulty comes in thinking that such a question can be answered without recourse to the kind of specific normative postulates that are presumably visible only from within some specific given practice (ignoring this restriction entails insisting that there is a highly general form common to all intentional behaviour that, moreover, is unproblematically manifest in mere behaviour; recall objections under the heading “The Determinacy of Function” in II).

We just noted that “one need not have a neat, cut-and-dried conception of some particular explanatory structure in mind at the outset”. If the subject naturalist wishes to offer genealogical explanations of core semantic notions by merely mentioning the uses of language of a given speech community then it is clear that certain dimensions of the supposed “normative constraint” governing these uses are in principle inaccessible from such a standpoint (The Visibility Point in II). If the exclusion of these supposed aspects of normativity is not deemed troublesome, and if they are not simply rejected out of hand as poor theory, then it seems they are to be regarded as part of another perspective from which things are viewed; therefore, that they are not part of

1 The issue is that of the “disciplinary identity” of philosophy. An important objection on this

ground is advanced by Redding (2010). 2 Cf. Dennett (1991).

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the subject naturalist’s framework, or conceptual toolkit, but some other theorist’s toolkit. But to whose toolkit do they belong? And why does the subject naturalist lack similar aids?

Price has said1 that only behaviour associated with normativity, and nothing more, is the explanandum; indeed, what else could one have in mind since, after all, the issue is about how behaviour is itself best understood; the question is what the explanans of such behaviour is—what exactly does it mean to speak of the “normativity” of thought and talk? Price’s view entails the unsurprising thesis that some ways of thinking about normativity are simply instances of poor theory. This is untroubling if left unqualified, for is there not such a thing as poor theory? And are there not more metaphysically robust and therefore dogmatic accounts of the non-reducibility of normative behaviour than Brandom’s which Price would swiftly reject? And is Brandom’s account not a story of the conditions of the possibility of a phenomenon we have good reason to take at face value: our responsiveness to reasons2 and the normative commitments and entitlements of our thought and talk? Indeed; but where does this leave us? What does Price exclude that Brandom includes? At the very least: a lot of detail about normative structure. Importantly, offering a philosophical theory involving such additional detail evinces a conviction that one can say a lot more in a theoretical voice about the phenomena we have good reason to take at face value. Perhaps this is a matter of taste.

Or, more negatively, perhaps Price regards the desire to add this kind of detail as a hangover of Platonism.3 One needs to be careful here though, since Price does not deny the existence of something like normativity, although he does seem suspicious about the intelligibility of explaining normativity itself in “normative” terms. And in fact, this is precisely the core of Brandom’s concern about subject naturalism.4 So here is the problem: the subject naturalist would seem to have some particular form of explanation in mind, presupposed at the outset. And whilst Price characterises this form of explanation as “anthropological” it is not clear that this is appropriate, since anthropology typically takes on board considerations about humans that go beyond the naturalistic framework of physical, chemical, and biological science; non-prejudicial anthropology involves the study of human practices in a way that requires their normative character remain intelligible on its own terms.

Of course, characterising the naturalistic framework this way is misleading for two broad reasons: (1) It suggests that such a set of forms of inquiry constitute a unique kind, marked off from non-naturalistic forms of explanation, whilst nothing has been said about the principles grounding this division (it is simply a definitional matter that

1 Private communication.

2 This is clearly more McDowellian than Brandomian, although the appropriateness of employing

the phrase here suggests the closeness of their work, as evinced in the incredible detail required to show their differences.

3 McDowell’s “naturalised Platonism”, which is co-ordinated with the idea of “second nature”, will

be recalled as an attempt to formulate an exception. See McDowell (1996, Chapter 5). 4 Brandom (2011) does in fact regard Ruth Milliken’s teleosemantics as “the best candidate” for a

naturalistic pragmatic metavocabulary; his concern about Price’s project has to do with similar considerations entered into in II in The Visibility Point mentioned above.

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natural phenomena is what these enterprises study); (2) It suggests that an explanatory framework is itself a clearly delimited thing that can, at the outset of inquiry, be understood as delimiting the field of investigation. But this second assumption commits the egregious error of deciding what something is before studying it, claiming to know in absence of the possibly of knowing. This difficulty about arbitration is particularly acute with questions about intentional behaviour because there is a tension between our first-personal sense of subjective certainty and grip on who and what we are, and why we are the way we are, what our nature is, and the reflection grappled with at a third-personal level that reveals us as radically alien to ourselves, and powerless over and ignorant of the forces which dictate who we are and what we do.

The problem we have been so far discussing could properly be said to belong to philosophical psychology. And by qualifying “psychology” with “philosophical” the signal is given that psychology is an immature science, if one at all. This suggestion prompts the thought that the subject matter or sets of questions comprising philosophical stages or elements of a discipline are, by their nature, immature, or, to avoid pejorative force, in need of clarification. We need not deny clarification can always be performed with respect to mature theories to make sense of this conjecture. If we take the claim in the minimal sense that philosophical questions typically arise as a result of some form of unclarity about where the path of inquiry leads or ought to lead, then we have the consequence that the pressure to engage in, and inability to avoid on a large scale, philosophical psychology demonstrates the as yet unclear nature of explanations of the behaviour of living organisms that takes into account the existence of their own subjective take on the world, itself guided and shaped by other factors that are already easily explained in other terms (the physical constitution of their own bodies as well as their environment, their nutritional requirements, etc.). So the claim is that we are not yet in a position to be so confident in having understood the nature of psychological explanations as to declare at the outset that purportedly normative notions ought not to get a stranglehold on our conception of intentionality.1

An appropriate way to focus the conditions of assessment of the normative character of action is by outlining an approach that would dispense with many of the difficulties thus far raised, and also synthesise some of the insights of the views under examination. Earlier I provided a brief example of how one ought to understand forms of purportedly intentional behaviour, namely, action, as standing one another. My example was that of a person seeking items on a beach with a metal detector; my point was that to understand the normative structure of such action involved understanding how certain kinds of intentions stand to one another. And understanding how kinds of intentions stand to one another involves understanding the value placed upon them, as well as the rational relationships of inclusion and exclusion of certain motives—that is, the compatibility and incompatibility of certain kinds of intentional behaviour.

My suggestion here will be very simple, for the matter is complex, and no more than a recommendation can be offered at this point. If the points just raised be

1 Cf. Price (1994) and Dennett (1991) to which he refers.

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granted, that is, that rationality is such that certain actions stand in relations of inclusion, exclusion, dependence, and entailment, then we may say that, like language and thought, action has a kind of categorial structure. This may mean nothing more than that certain categories of motives and actions may stand in rational relations to one another of the kind just adumbrated. It may mean much else besides. The question for the theorist of the nature and structure of intentional action is how to understand the nature of their theorising about such phenomena. I have thus far given an outline of two approaches, in Brandom and in Price, where certain concerns override others. In Brandom one finds resistance to the idea that normativity could be properly in view from a natural-scientific perspective if such a perspective involved abstracting from the ways practitioners hold one another accountable, kept their commitments and entitlements in check; Price, meanwhile, we found suggesting that perhaps there was a more complex relation between the uses of normative and non-normative vocabularies than this, that perhaps certain vocabularies may have a kind of primacy, depending on the nature of the explanatory project in question, and that perhaps non-normative discourse may reveal normative discourse as being able to have its own primacy legitimated from outside in scientific discourse.

Given the fact that these two approaches are continually under construction I have not attempted to adopt the role of adjudicator; rather to highlight the virtues and difficulties encountered in the territory. Yet my brief remarks just now about the categorial structure of action recommend a response to two problems. First, in response to Price, it is questionable that the nature of normatively constrained discourse can be properly accounted for from a perspective within from the normative constraint is unintelligible; thus certain kinds of non-normative discourse may simply be speaking a different rather than more correct vocabulary vis-à-vis action and speech (and therefore, the thoughts implied by them). Second, it is surely correct for one to allow for insights garnered in natural-scientific investigation to affect one’s theory of normativity; that is to say, it is problematic to insist that linguistic exchanges are different in kind from other kinds of normatively constrained behaviour in the way Brandom says. Moreover, the account of the semantic content of sentences in terms of commitments and entitlements, builds a level of detail into speech and thought the magnitude of which is arguably implausible; a thesis that encounters particular difficulties when the relation between assertion and other speech acts and human actions is under the spotlight. The point is that not only may all kinds of action, verbal and otherwise, have distinct forms of normative structure, but also that there may not be a reason to metaphysically prioritise the propositional structure of thought and talk. And, as Price says, this fact may indeed be demonstrated within a non-normative vocabulary which we should have no a priori metaphysical reason to ignore.

Exactly how this tension is to be resolved I shall not attempt to say, beyond the following comment: in many cases we find ourselves startled by the status an action or thought of ours may be said to possess, often in spite of ourselves; language is a maze, for we may enter it from one side, occupy a certain spot, and find we are at quite at home, and yet we may cut through it from another, end up in the same place, and feel

19

ourselves to be entirely lost.1 I do not believe there to be any reason to give up entirely the idea of rational connections, relationships of inclusion, exclusion, dependence, and entailment, for this seems innocuous and a quite commonplace understanding of how rational, intelligent behaviour actually functions. What we must not think is that there is some immediately perspicuous and ultimately authoritative rendering of all intentional action. The idea is that one expects, with some justification, a web of thought to emerge, for this is what being rational involves: forming a connected system of thoughts based on principles which stand to one another in conditional (consequential) and hierarchical (sometimes trumping, sometimes neutrally sub- and super-ordinate) fashion.

The nature of such structure may not readily be available to us, at least not all the time, or even most of the time. The reason for this may be personal, or it may be communal. Our ways of going on may be partially illuminated by non-normative discourses which tell us something about the history of our practice which might reasonably lead us to form expectations about the future and the core meaning of what we do in naturalistic terminology; yet we may also find resistance, resistance from an appropriate place, to the idea that the nebulousness and privacy of our communing with people through the shared mediums of which we are in many ways constituted is an affair much of which will forever be left out of account.

IV

My intention has been to draw attention to some issues that would need to be addressed in further development of Brandom’s and Price’s positions with respect to their treatments of the notion of “representation”, and especially in regard to so-called “metaphysical” aspects of that notion. I have suggested that it would need to be shown how Brandom avoids undue metaphysical commitments regarding the intentional content of thought and talk. And Price’s subject naturalism, I have claimed, needs to address the relationship between the theory and the empirical work relevant to the genealogical story that is proposed, and would need to address the question of ontological commitment regarding the purportedly naturalistic vocabulary which would explain normative vocabulary.

However, despite all this talk of deflated ontology and supposedly innocent eschewals of metaphysics, have we so far seen that there is a clear view of which commitments, if introduced, would slur the speech of the ordinary? It was remarked that there is a quite urgent and by no means easily answerable question here: How does one determine, in a principled way, where the boundary is drawn between mere metaphysical speculation and truly productive and explanatory scientific hypotheses in the dirty groundwork of theory generation? We saw earlier that a supposedly basic principle of scientific theorising (Ockham’s Razor) was, unless qualified, insufficient to distinguish the former from so-called metaphysical speculation, for the explanatory economy of that principle was itself undeduced. What decides which explanatory apparati are excessive and which economical?

1 To paraphrase Wittgenstein (1953, §203).

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We might think that greater simplicity is an ideal which, when governing suitably, whittles away the dead wood whilst leaving sturdy branches untouched, and that such a process is an organic one driven by ordinary empirical experimentation, a process which, in the long run, will help us prune our theory into elegant shape. But this suggestion ignores the fact that “greater simplicity” is itself an ideal of inquiry in need of account.

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