What Brandom won’t make explicit

Normative pragmatics—core assumptions

About MIE, Brandom writes:

The book is an attempt to explain the meanings of linguistic expressions in terms of their use. The explanatory strategy is to begin with an account of social practices, to identify the particular structure they must exhibit in order to qualify as specifically linguistic practices, and then to consider what different sorts of semantic contents those practices can confer on states, performances, and expressions caught up in them in suitable ways (Brandom 1997).

All in all, that the content is inferential means it is also social, historical, dialogical, and perspectival, a point elaborated by Brandom in his paper on Hegel’s idealist pragmatism (Brandom 1999). Here, Brandom shows how the concept transcends both the positions of individual contributors and the frameworks advanced by historically contingent communities to form a dynamic network of inferential relations (spirit) of which development hinges on the power and authority of socially instituted linguistic practices.

The norms of material inference implicit in every linguistic practice are identified by Brandom as the primitive capacities in terms of which acts of saying and believing can be understood (Brandom 1994, 100); they are the knowing-how making it possible to explain any knowing-that. Since what human beings do is ultimately accounted for in terms of how they conduct material inferences, “[A] theoretical route is…made available from what people do to what people mean, from their practice to the contents of their states and expressions” (Brandom 1994, 134).

According to Brandom, participants to a linguistic practice have normative statuses secondary to the attitudes they express and are taken to assume as social agents. Statuses are secondary to attitudes precisely because they must first become instituted in a social practice. As a participant, one commits oneself to certain claims, and thereby, on the strength of material logic, becomes entitled to some linguistic acts and normatively prevented from undertaking others. Linguistic practice is hence conditional upon mutual recognition of normative statuses among participants: commitments and entitlements need to be both acknowledged by an agent and attributed by the same agent to other agents, and vice versa. Social interaction is a medium through which the inevitable tensions between one’s implicit commitments and acknowledged entitlements, and between what one is claiming and what other take him to be claiming, are revealed and relieved.

Human rationality expresses itself mainly through a deontic scorekeeping, for example, an incessant evaluative stance toward our own and others’ discursive moves, subordinated to the force of better reason (Brandom 1994, 21). But, essentially, for Brandom humans are not only rational—capable of “concept mongering”—but also logical: able to reflect on this rational capacity and thus to uncover the ultimate norms implicit in social practices. Owing to the logical capacity, norms of linguistic practice can be made explicit, and linguistic practice can be expressed (modeled) as a content-generative practice of conducting material inferences in assertoric mode of speech.

Rational behavior is defined by concept application so that it can be distinguished from, for example, behavior that is merely effective, and as such shared by sapient humans with sentient creatures (Brandom 1994, 87). We differ from parrots, says Brandom, in our ability to distinguish what follows from the applicability of the concept (Brandom 1994, 88). Rationality is a practical matter, whereas the skill at issue is of a specific kind—it is a “practical mastery over the inferences” (Brandom 1994). The question of right and wrong hence boils down to the question of whether concepts are correctly or properly applied (Brandom 1994, 54). It is the assumption that the “mastery over inferences” is essential to rationality that leads Brandom to conceive of norms as correct patterns of concept application.

Habermas on normative pragmatics

In Habermas’s view, Brandom’s pragmatics is only half-way there in securing the normative dimension of discursive practice. His main charge is that Brandom is pursuing anti-objectivist theoretical strategy, thus promoting a form of social conformism, with the danger that I–Thou perspective might be confused with de facto I–We attitude (Habermas 2003a, 162ff). According to Habermas, normative pragmatics focuses on what participants to a social practice take to be the case, thereby failing to account for what makes the practice objective and norm-governed. In the end, participants are portrayed as passively following certain conceptual schemas, as opposed to being given their due as autonomous agents responding to real-world challenges. At the same time, Brandom in Habermas’s construal pays lip service to the second-person attitudes of participants, and misunderstands the fundamental imperative them. In simple terms, on normative pragmatics, what is meant to be social appears objective, and what is supposed to be objective, seems arbitrary.

Habermas writes:

Brandom…wants to take account both of truth’s claim to universality and of the supposition of one and the same world. On the other hand, he does not conceive of our contact with the world as one that surprises us in the sense of constraining our attempts to cope with reality. In other words, Brandom wants to avoid Rorty’s contextualism without including in his pragmatics a Putnamian analysis of how we learn from confrontations with the world (Habermas 2003a, 135).

Habermas is of the opinion that Brandom’s pragmatics fails to propose a mechanism by which divergent perspectives can converge to create an objective content (Habermas 2003a, 137). The contention that participants respond to each other’s claims by exchanging their respective views on what is the case, does not do justice to the objective dimension of linguistic content simply because both parties can be wrong (Habermas 2003a, 148).

Habermas objects to assimilating all norms to the norms of concept application; in his opinion this amounts to treating norms as mere objects:

Constative speech takes things that are ready-to-hand out of contexts of interests guiding practical projects and brings them into the discursive context of inferential thought as objects about which we can state facts (Habermas 2003a, 142).

For Habermas, to reduce what is practical about linguistic practice to concept application in an assertoric mode of speech dissociated from the veto power of the objective world is to ultimately succumb to social conformism. Brandom, he claims, fails to explain how learning process shapes conceptual structures (Habermas 2003a, 153), and where the veto power is absent, norms become schemas to be followed passively (regardless of what participants make of it). In Brandom’s idealist picture, there is not much room for the individual attitude of each participant, whereas these individual perspectives need to be taken seriously if the distinction between the correct and incorrect is to apply in the first place (Habermas 2003a, 161).

In the end, Habermas finds Brandom’s account of discursive behavior “surprisingly objectivist.” In his view, contrary to the declarations made, Brandom’s model does not make good on the distinction between I–Thou and I–We relations:

…it turns out that the act of attributing, which is of fundamental importance for discursive practice, is not really carried out by a second person. There can be no second person at all without the attitude of a first person to a second person. This condition is not satisfied in Brandom’s model. It is no accident that Brandom prefers to identify the interpreter with a spectator who assesses the utterance of a speaker and not with an addressee who is expected to reply to the speaker (Habermas 2003a, 162).

Overall, what Brandom gets essentially wrong is the point of linguistic practice, or the defining function thereof, which for Habermas is social integration:

Communication is not some self-sufficient game in which the interlocutors reciprocally inform each other about their beliefs and intentions. It is only the imperative of social integration—the need to coordinate the action-plans of independently deciding participants in action—that explains the point of linguistic communication (Habermas 2003a, 164).

Brandom’s reply to Habermas

Brandom takes Habermas to wage against him the charges of epistemological and semantic passivity. In response to the first, Brandom retorts that his conception does not by any means imply passivist epistemology. Precisely because the linguistic contents are not pre-established, concept application requires that participants be actively engaged with the world and one another.

We must extract inferential consequences from our candidate doxastic commitments, including practical consequences for what would and should happen if we act in certain ways, and then seek to assess the truth of these consequential claims, and of various claims incompatible with them (Brandom 2000, 358).

With reference to the semantic passivity charge, corresponding with Habermas’s complaint about participants being portrayed as passively following the intrinsic logic of the concept, Brandom stresses that we produce the concepts, as opposed to being ruled by them. The conceptual development is what interests him in the first place (Brandom 2000, 359), which obviously has to do with his idealist, historical, and dialogical conception of linguistic content. Brandom reminds the reader that the conceptual development as presented MIE is based on the notion of dialectic tension between what the participant takes himself to be expressing and what he actually expresses. The tension is said to oblige us to continually improve on our grasp of concepts. For the same reason, Brandom is surprised at Habermas’s contention to the effect that normative pragmatics does not recognize the difference between participant’s and spectator’s points of view. He points out that “…we cannot understand our capacity to understand things unless we take full account of the fact that we are not just spectators trying to conform to things, but agents, trying to transform them” (Brandom 2000, 357, emphasis added).

As far as the problem of treating all norms as ultimately norms of material inference—with the alleged result of blurring the distinction between facts and norms—is concerned, Brandom points out that all justification, be it theoretical or practical, is aimed at orienting actions. That is, his pragmatics, in virtue of the conception of meaning in which it is grounded, implies that cognitions and explications are themselves actions (and, if instituted, practices). Brandom also underlines the fact that normative pragmatics does in fact honor the distinction between a practical and theoretical reasoning, and stresses that MIE clearly distinguishes between normative and non-normative facts (2000, 356ff) The essential difference is presented as a difference in vocabulary: normative facts are simply those whose statement requires normative vocabulary (Brandom 2000). What is also relevant is that “non-normative facts can intelligibly be stated to obtain before the normative facts, apart from which we cannot understand these non-normative facts” (Brandom 2000, 368).

In response to the alleged lack of appreciation of the second-person perspective, Brandom finds Habermas’s observation to the effect that normative pragmatics identifies the interpreter with a public evaluating claims essentially correct (Brandom 2000, 362). He emphasizes, however, that information elicitation is not sufficient for understanding; participants must also be able to see the world from each other’s perspective in order to be able to specify the content of each other’s commitments (Brandom 2000). Still, in his model, as Brandom admits, the second-person reference hinges on an entirely logical-observational—that is, the third-person—attitude. Brandom does not discern any tension between these two contentions.

Brandom (2000, 363) overtly denies that discursive practice has a distinguishable goal or point. The game of giving and asking for reasons is not meant to result in mutual understanding—which he defines as doing or sharing the same thing—for the latter is simply not a necessary condition of joint enterprise (Brandom 2000). Brandom (2000) states firmly: “linguistic practice is not for something.” Linguistic practice is, so to speak, always a work in progress, which continually sets itself new ends to realize.

Embodied perception and linguistic content

In order to better understand the source of a disagreement between Habermas and Brandom, it is advisable to have a glimpse into the pragmatist, “embodied” conception of language in which formal pragmatics is grounded, and which Brandom refuses, or fails, to fully embrace. ⁴

As shown by Robert Innis (2002), it has been consistent across the pragmatist tradition—from C.S. Peirce and John Dewey, through Alan L. Gardiner, Karl Bühler, and the Gestalt theorists, to Michael Polanyi—to conceive of the linguistic content in terms of perceptual capacities. We can go so far as to say that the main purpose of language is to manage perceptual—in a very wide sense of the word—content. Straightforwardly put, on the pragmatist account, perception is the ultimate source and determinant—the last hermeneutical instance, one might say—of both linguistic and extralinguistic meaning.

Pragmatics is, accordingly, understood as an inquiry into the non-linguistic conditions of the possibility of meaningful linguistic interactions. The aim, however, is not so much to pass beyond the Humboldtian “magic circle of our language” (cf. Habermas 2003a, 143) so as to arrive at a “pure,” entirely pretheoretical level of interaction and understanding—in uncovering of which such authors as Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi (Gallagher 2006; Gallagher and Zahavi 2008), or Hubert Dreyfus (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1986; Dreyfus 2002) seem to be interested—as to identify a specific cultural capacity, that is, a capacity for the kind of involvements and dynamic interactions with material and non-material world, contingent upon a specific sets of perceptual and cognitive faculties and behavioral repertoire (Donald 1991), that make symbolic communication possible. The ultimate linguistic implicit, from which meaning emerges and of which it is constituted, thus points to an “enabled and enabling” culture (Margolis 2010, xv), and more specifically, to the language-mediated “theoretical culture,” as Donald deems it (Donald 1991). Theoretical culture, its unique contribution notwithstanding, encompasses, in a transformatory way, the achievements of previous stages of the cognitive evolution (i.e., the mimetic and mythical cultures), and “inherits” their basic frame of reference. What this means, on the one hand, is that there are certain cognitive and perceptual capacities needed in order for linguistic interactions to become possible, and, on the other, that linguistic systems (langue) and linguistic interactions (parole) help—or fail to—sustain and develop the cognitive-perceptual capacities accrued in the course of evolution of the human kind (Donald 1991; see also Habermas 1984, 91–101). From this perspective, language appears to be but another, though very powerful, tool for forming and maintaining lifeworld relationships.

As thoroughly argued by Polanyi (1966), perception has an orientational—“from-to”—structure: to perceive is to relate, to supply the perceiver with a sense of purpose and connectedness. Thus, the from-to structure is something more than intentionality in Brentano’s sense (cf. Polanyi 1966, x) in that it implies that embedded in every perceptual act are different kinds of vectors irreducible to the simple thought-object relation. Perception already involves the will to act, to strive toward something. Thereby, it determines the choice of the mode of action. Further, as demonstrated convincingly by Rudolf Arnheim (Arnheim 1972, 1974), perception is inherently cognitive—it is an active exploration of the environment with the use of schemas to later become abstracted in the form of intellectual tools proper, the process ultimately leading to an expansion in the scope of perception and cultural participation (see Damasio 1999, 2010).

The latter point is critical with respect to the pragmatist theory of perception: it entails that perception is essentially inferential. Perception is not confined to the qualitative element, (“firstness”: Peirce 1868); most of all, it provides a dynamical order to which we can attend, and thus grounds abductive reasoning. Importantly, perceptual capacities pertinent to theoretical culture are quite different than those we come across in episodic culture, of which animal world partakes (Donald 1991, 159). Animals, Donald argues, have impressively developed sensitivity to perceptual details, thanks to which they are able to categorize different configurations of elements as different situations and respond to these automatically by turning on certain hard-wired, stereotypical behavioral programs. In contrast to this, in theoretical culture possible trajectories of action present themselves as a subsidiary component of situational awareness, which means that both practical and cognitive engagements, though distinct with regard to their aims, are situated on the same level of complexity. I shall return to that when discussing Brandom’s account of perception.

Last but not least, the pragmatist conception of language is essentially performative: it is unrestricted to uncovering the how of linguistic practices—or to effectively reduce the what to the how, as Brandom seems to do—and instead, aims to account for the meaning in terms of the point or purpose of linguistic practices. The upshot, then, is that all social, linguistic practices are permeated with perceptual processes that endow them with purposiveness, and hence, meaningfulness; the perceptual gestalts determine the “what is at issue and what is at stake” (Rouse 1999) in a given practice, or, to use Austinian–Habermasian terminology, the illocutionary aim thereof (Habermas 1984, 289ff).

The formal frame of reference and meaningfulness

How precisely does formal pragmatics fit into this pragmatist framework? Theoretical culture is both enabling and enabled with respect to the social linguistic practice in the sense that it delimits the basic evolutionary preconditions of communicative action and at the same time underlies the effort to preserve these enabling structures in the process of cultural participation. Formal pragmatics might be seen as laying down—with no claim to originality ⁵ but with a consistent critical intent—the basic formal structure of this cultural capacity. That is, what Habermas adds to the picture is a coordinate system (henceforth: the formal frame of reference) that divides the lifeworld into the objective, subjective, and social “worlds.” ⁶ What we get as a result is a three-dimensional space with reference to which every vector (individual action) must be described. ⁷ Since the space is a component of perceptual awareness, it can be made explicit and used critically. Critical analysis of a practice can reveal whether our actions de facto are well placed along all the relevant dimensions, and identify possible distortions.

These two frameworks combined, we are entitled to say that how people interact hinges on how they perceive a given situation, and, more generally, on what they are capable of perceiving (in an embodied, multisensory way). Cast in these terms, formal pragmatics implies that the formation of complex (i.e., three-dimensional) perceptual structures is a condition behind our ability to relate to ourselves, each other, and the world, and thus, a proper condition of (mutual) understanding. That is to say, participation in the lifeworld is conditional upon a capacity for creating wholesome—that is, properly “stretched” along the three dimensions—perceptual gestalts.

Further, Habermasian conception of validity claims easily lends itself to an analysis in terms of an interplay between the focal and subsidiary awareness as advanced by Polanyi (1958/1962). As well-known, each of the three validity claims (i.e., the claim to objective truth, to moral rightness, to subjective sincerity) corresponds with one of the three worlds. If social interaction involves complex perceptual acts, then every illocutionary aim of a linguistic practice is conceptually equivalent to (and involves) the “focal” awareness of participants, the three basic option-types being establishing facts, sustaining and regulating relationships, and self-expression and self-regulation. Whereas the focus of participants’ attention is determined by one type of validity claim, the remaining two contribute to the meaning by forming a background ⁸ and participants are aware of them “subsidiarily.” Since each of the subsidiary constituents of situational awareness has a certain content in its own right (a “weight,” cf. Arnheim 1988), the subsidiaries can challenge the main theme by calling attention to the tacit dimensions of a practice and make these subject a “focal” exploration. Thus, on this construal, understanding hinges, among other things, on an ability to shift from one perspective to another according as the demands of a situation change under pressure of internal dynamics or external factors, and the illocutionary force of a linguistic practice—i.e., its capacity for coordinating actions in accord with presumed illocutionary aims—is the ultimate measure of (mutual) understanding (see Habermas 1998, 201ff). Logicality understood as a capability of making conceptual norms explicit—for Brandom, the upshot of rationality—proves to have a deeper layer to it: it is actually conditioned upon a mastery over making effective abductive transitions within the three-dimensional space, leading to the formation of adequate gestalts, upon which undertaking proper actions depends.

Before we move on, it is in order to attempt to briefly contrast this view of perception with Brandom’s own account thereof as presented in Chapter 4 of MIE. In opening passages Brandom provides a criticism of two naturalistic conceptions—regularity-based account of action and reliability-based approach to the problem of the authority of testimony (Brandom 1994, 206ff). He alleges that both fail to provide standards for their own application (the criterion of regularity and reference-class, respectively), and insists that only a consequently social account is able to confer normativity on actions. That is to say, the right kind of question is not that of what is “objectively” the case in interactions; what we should be concerned with is, rather, what the participants make of it, what they “take” or “treat” it to be about (Brandom 1994, 212ff). Brandom thus seems to be on his way toward a pragmatist view of perception. He does not manage to get there, however, and ends up distinguishing between two species of discursive commitment: cognitive, concerned with beliefs and governed by reasons, and practical, concerned with intentions and desires and connected with causes (Brandom 1994, 234). What he offers is a standard, empiricist account, based on input-output scheme: perception is a discursive entry transition, and action—a related exit transition.

The contrast between Brandom’s account and the pragmatist, embodied view presented above seems clear. According to the latter, perception has no proper boundaries; rather, it can be regarded as setting limits to what can be achieved (practically and cognitively) at any given moment. That is to say, the actor always operates within a certain frame of reference—a situation—that he perceives as a heterogeneous whole. Accordingly, we are prompted to conceive of both our own and other people’s intentions as part of the situation we perceive. Seen in this light, intentions are not mere mental states but rather motivational complexes, at times eccentric with respect to one another, at times clashing, that might need to be brought into line in the course of interaction. That means that intentions do not just delimit causal chains instrumental with respect to pursued ends. Fundamentally, they have to do with the kind of social bond that a given situation (or situation-type) implies or requires. Simply put, motivations as ascribed to an agent are part of our concept of what he feels entitled to do. As such, intentions/motivations are tied to reasons and subject to normative considerations: they either preserve or fail to preserve the I–Thou type of bond. Hence, participants’ motivations as we perceive or infer them play an important role in our trying to determine illocutionary aims of interactions, as well as in the more general attempts to figure out if the interactions in which we partake have any illocutionary aim and force whatsoever (i.e., whether they are communicative or strategic). ⁹ Overall, we may say that intentions—properly understood—are among the factors that help us pragmatically disambiguate propositional contents.

The three worlds—a phenomenological analysis

To each of the worlds as distinguished by Habermas distinct phenomenological features can be ascribed. Importantly, it is critical not to take these features as simply present in any given instance of a social practice; rather, they ought to be conceived of in normative-critical terms as necessary conditions for something to be what it claims to be (cf. Innis 2002, 151). These features are, in other words, potentials that require actualization.

The objective world—Habermasian understanding of this dimension has much developed since 1984—has to do with the experience of resistance, or “the veto power” of the world (Habermas 2003a). Importantly, it would be incorrect to equate the objective world with the natural world – the experience of forces beyond our direct control applies to all kinds of interactions. And, thus, in interactions with animate and inanimate nature, the objective points to all interruptions coming from the environment, as contrasted with ecological affordances, and the extended and lived bodies. Simply, this form of resistance comes into play every time our bodies or tools refuse to comply with our expectations. In social interactions, objective is the veto power of other people’s interests and agendas, in contrast with natural sociality and social embeddedness. From the subjective viewpoint, the objective refers to all cognitive and emotional obstacles and tensions we have to work with. In general, the objective world is a class of all disharmonious elements in our lives, of things that pose challenges, and that, if handled correctly, may lead to transformation. Disturbances along this dimension manifest as a fear-propelled withdrawal, or, conversely, arrogance and exaggerated forcefulness, inability to let things be.

As inhabitants of the social realm, we recognize ourselves and others as equal, but distinct. Healthy balance is required between the sense of distance between I and Thou, and the sense of sharing a lifeworld. The most common disorder is objectification of partners, inability to distinguish between persons and problems connected with them or caused by them. Once the balance in the social realm is skewed, I–Thou perspective turns into I–We attitude: a (sometimes tacit) overidentification with a specific group and sets of convictions and patterns of reasoning related to it.

Along the subjective dimension, we attend to what we experience in the course of interactions with partners and tools in a personalized, embodied way, and manage to resist the temptation to overly objectify our own bodies. As a result, we should be able to distinguish between our own and other people’s goals and intentions. Psychological projection, conformism, and pathological disembodiment (e.g., Fuchs 2005) are symptomatic of disorders in this area.

All three dimensions are intricately bound, and it is impossible to give an account of one world without reference to another ¹⁰ : objectification, for instance, a disorder along the social dimension, usually goes hand in hand with a dominating attitude, symptomatic of a compromised capability of objective reference.

One of the consequences of this entanglement is that neither understanding nor rationality in general can be accounted for in terms of observational attitude as proposed by Brandom. Not that there is something essentially wrong with an observational attitude: a disengaged, third-person outlook makes perfect sense in many social and non-social contexts. The problem is that it supplies the participant with only partial understanding of what is going on, and certainly does not provide a necessary motivational and practical-instrumental link to action; simply, by itself it does not constitute a paradigmatic case of perception, from the perspective of which an interaction can be assessed and, if need be, challenged. As far as understanding is concerned, a contemplation on “what it is all about” must be somehow related to a sense of what this means for me (being where I am) and others around me.

Whereas Habermas insists on treating objects seriously (and dynamically), Brandom—echoing a famous caveat that norms cannot be deduced from facts—argues that philosophical considerations cannot assume the existence of objects as their point of departure because normativity cannot be inferred from it (Brandom 2000, 368). ¹¹ In the light of the above, however, Brandom’s contention appears to be based on misreading of Habermasian stance. For one, in formal pragmatics objects are primarily understood phenomenologically, and only secondarily, existentially—they are present through the experience of resistance. The latter has thus also a normative dimension as it yields a ban on adoption of a defensive attitude, that is, I–We, usually accompanied by either Us versus Them (enmity) or I–It (objectification) attitudes. For the second, Habermasian model admits of a distinction between the object and the purpose of linguistic practice: every linguistic exchange refers to certain sets of objects, and treats of certain non-normative or normative facts, but its “aboutness” lies first and foremost in a lifeworld situation from the perspective of which the objects and facts are considered, and which co-determines the meaning and, hence, a normative context of the practice. Let us look at two exemplars of social interaction from this perspective.

First, let us consider medical and legal linguistic practices, where the fallacy of objectification is most likely to occur, and the second-person perspective easily yields to formalism. Ideally, a physician or a judge should keep in mind that the objects they are treating of are persons, whose personhood is not fully represented by the commitments or entitlements stemming from their being subjected to medical/legal procedures. The illocutionary aim here is to come up with an effective treatment or arrive at a just verdict, so that in the end the patient or the litigant can be “returned” to the lifeworld, capable of re-assimilating within its structures, which comes down to a requirement that the subject not be stripped of his individuality (i.e., his claim to identity be redeemed: Habermas 1992). Hence, under the veil of medical or legal formalism, there is always the second-person reference tacitly and normatively involved, with the possibility that the perception of the situation can be skewed. If the purpose of the practice is not well understood, or becomes somewhat effaced or suppressed by other demands, the linguistic interaction succumbs to biases. The patients and litigants become, often inadvertently, reduced to grammatical subjects with certain commitments and entitlements assigned to them, so that the physician and the judge can follow, with no resistance beside the obvious intellectual effort needed in those kind of situations, inferential pathways already paved. Importantly, it is the very logic of the situation that causes the bias—the patient lacks expertise, and the litigant, political power—not the idiosyncrasies of the agents involved, though the latter may obviously aggravate or alleviate the problem.

To this Brandom could retort that ultimately, biases always manifest linguistically, as violations of certain norms of inference, and hence, his model makes it possible to spot them and correct them (cf. Brandom 1999). But while the premise might be true, the consequence does not necessarily follow. To illustrate, the point let us consider a discursive exchange in which the addresser propounds an argument that is found wanting by another party. Let us say that the addressee finds a formal-logical error, for example, the slippery slope argument, and asks the addresser to correct it. The addresser complies, at the cost of committing a different kind of fallacy this time (e.g., an equivocation), however. He is once again asked to make things right, and in response, he corrects the fallacy, while introducing yet another one. No formal or material logic can dictate when such an unproductive, and possibly harmful, practice should come to an end. In cases such as this, we have good reasons to suspect that the addresser abuses language and the concepts of fallibility and corrigibility pertinent to it with the view to either saving from refutation the opinions he wants to push through, or to avoid certain conclusions he is not willing to accept.

Formal pragmatics, in turn, suggests that in order to be able to correct systematic errors, we must look deeper, into perceptual gestalts operative in a given practice, based on which the inferences unfold. As well known, simplified gestalts—all kinds heuristics experts use—cause a tunnel vision (e.g., Tversky and Kahnemann 1974; Gilovich, Griffin, and Kahnemann 2002). For instance, a doctor who treats a patient in analogy with a laboratory animal, and is surprised to learn that his otherwise excellent therapeutic recommendations do not appear to be working in a real-life setting, de facto assumes I–We attitude. If a problem such as this persists, we would need to actually interrupt—suspend—the exchange and have a look into an implied frame of reference that possibly causes the erring. A new linguistic interaction that inevitably unfolds is not continuous with the one that was interrupted as it takes place in a new, rebuilt frame of reference, and formulates new desiderata for the parties concerned to fulfill (an initiation of a learning process, a therapy, an introduction of a new organizational structures or rules of communication, ¹² affirmative action, etc.) As a result, a new space of reasons is expected to be formed, with the roles of participants involved redefined. The pragmatic-critical attitude that drives these analyses is predicated on the assumption that linguistic practice, upon proper interrogation, is revelatory of perceptual distortions, though on their own, conceptual norms do not cause or heal biases (cf. Habermas 1971; 2001a).

The second case worthy of a brief consideration is that of negotiations. Because of their interest-centeredness, Habermas (1984) was reluctant to use the language of negotiations when explaining the concept of communicative action, but, as should become clear in a moment, negotiations may well be communicative in Habermasian sense. On the most fundamental level, formal pragmatics requires that when judging a linguistic practice, we must first establish the “aboutness” (illocutionary aim) thereof—in the case of negotiations, the purpose is to strike a deal. The parties talk about certain objects (properties, rights, other parties), they adduce certain facts and norms, but the whole point of it is to arrive at a certain agreement, and to institute it (possibly, with recourse to the rules of engagement as well) thus making it possible for the parties to interact in a smooth and efficient manner. The linguistic acts have to be subordinated to this purpose—this is the perspective to which we have to refer in evaluating the correctness of linguistic actions undertaken (i.e., inferences). Parties do not have to compete for better reasons; it is presumed that the reasons behind them undertaking the negotiations are just good enough as they stand, which of course does not prevent parties from learning something new about themselves, others, or the world in the process. In other words, from the fact that the participant’s take on the other participant’s position is inherently fallible it does not follow that the actions they undertake while negotiating boil down to their “negotiating” their semantic positions; these hermeneutical activities are but a part of what they actually do.

The main condition of success and, possibly, also of normative rightness, of negotiations is satisfied if and only if parties perceive each other as two poles necessary to sustain balance in a given domain, and, by a normative extension, in the lifeworld in general. Not only do parties attempt to understand each other’s positions in an intellectual way, but they must, first and foremost, effectively embrace the equality between each other, and strive to sustain it by instituting an agreement reached in an objectively sound (i.e., doable) and socially appropriate way, that is, without violating third parties’ rights and interests. When the latter requirements are met, negotiations may be deemed communicative, as opposed to instrumental or “strategic,” which is to say that forming and instituting agreements must be, in the last instance, motivated by a need to preserve and develop the lifeworld.

The most interesting thing about negotiations is that they reveal the very core of the second-person attitude. A personal involvement between parties is neither a prerequisite nor a desired outcome (actually, oftentimes we are better off if it is not there, or becomes suspended) of negotiations (or of any formalized interactions, for that matter). Parties, instead, enter and try to develop and institute an indirect relationship, mediated by a shared concern for the lifeworld. All the participant needs to assume is that—unless proven otherwise—other people function in the same frame of reference, that is, what they are capable of and entitled to, alike actions and experiences. Similar to say, what must first and foremost be respected and taken into account in formalized types of communication is other people’s right and capacity to form healthy social—or inner-worldly—bonds, not the specifics thereof. So long as all parties’ right and capacity for bonding is not undermined, the sole fact that negotiations do not engage people in close, personal relationships, does not speak against their status as communicative action.

The latter observation sheds some light on Habermasian concept of telos of mutual understanding. Brandom stresses that doing or sharing the same thing is not a precondition of joint enterprise. And indeed, it isn’t. Formal pragmatics postulates, rather, that every social transaction determines, based on its illocutionary aims, the scope of “focal” entities that need to be shared to make it communicatively successful. What is mandatory, however, is that all participants, “subsidiarily” and unreservedly, also share the commitment to the multidimensionality of the lifeworld as the reference frame that enables them to form social bonds and to nurture and express individuality (Habermas 1992).

Michael Barber (2011, 113ff) have tried to ward Habermasian criticism off by arguing that Brandom’s model actually presupposes the centrality of the second-person perspective (of Levinasian kind) and inalienability of mutual recognition. For the Spirit to be able to freely express itself, so to speak, through practices and institutions, participants must share the ethics of mutual recognition both in regard with each other and the norms they institute. On the face of it, this seems correct, the problem is, however, that mutual recognition is taken for granted by Brandom: participants must, but do they? What is really going on during a practice cannot be captured by means of this model because the normative as well as actually operative gestalts, and related distortions, are not attempted to be made explicit.

In the course of his argument, Barber further contends that Habermas prioritizes face-to-face interactions, and that in this connection he has allegedly failed to account for the sophisticated forms of social transactions from which Brandom abstracts his model (Barber 2011, 115). This, however, as pointed out above, is neither entirely true of formal pragmatics, nor correct as regards both models’ explanatory power. Formal pragmatics is first and foremost oriented performatively toward the attitudes participants tacitly assume toward one another. The primary critical—and constructive—focus is thus on the kind of structure of possible interactions (social bond) a given linguistic practice implies or attempts to impose, and, further, on the institutions that uphold, or are capable of upholding, that very structure—regardless of whether an interaction is personal or not. Essentially, communication is not so much about physical contact, as about answerability to the lifeworld which translates into the impact participants in fact have on the trajectory of discussion, and into the intensity and authenticity of their engagement in a given case.

Where a party is only formally present in a linguistic practice, the illocutionary force thereof drops substantially, even though the game of giving and asking for reasons might continue uninterrupted. In other words, where assertions, in which participants are represented by their linguistic proxies, are taken to be the currency of social exchange, those directly concerned might turn out to have only a very limited influence on what is done about them. The conversation might in fact be carried on “above their heads.” In connection with the inability to effectively distinguish between the other as a grammatical subject and the other as an agent endowed with communicative power, one might inadvertently underwrite a corporate logic, where the judge does not answer to litigants, but to superiors and future generations evaluating her arguments (cf. Brandom 1999); the politician to a party; corporations to boards, as opposed to clients, etc.

Although formal pragmatics does not deny that every practice establishes its unique ends and standards of success, it also implies that whatever the end-state of a practice may be, if a gain in one of the lifeworld dimensions causes a considerable loss in any of the other two—their collapse—the progress attained must be regarded as a devolution, not an evolution of the lifeworld.

As Robert Innis argues throughout his 2002 book, it is the normative crux of the whole pragmatist orientation to make all linguistically—or more broadly, technologically—mediated interactions answerable to certain universal anthropological principles upon which the possibility of communication is conditional. Formal pragmatics fits into this program in that it insists that all the indirect and formalized interactions should continually be assessed not only from the perspective of their internal aims and rules, but also in terms of the extent to which they are supportive of communicative processes or, on the contrary, subversive of these. In this light, the level of linguistic interactions on which Brandom focuses his analyses is a proper object of critical assessment, not a standard for it.