'Yo!' and 'Lo!': The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons

The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons

MARK LAN

Yo!' and 'Lo!' The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons

ebecca Kukla ark Lance

RVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS bridge, Massachusetts

don, England

Copyright © 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kukla, Rebecca, 1969— Yo! and Lo! : the pragmatic topography of the space of reasons / Rebecca Kukla, Mark Lance. p. cm. includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-674-03147-0 (alk. paper) I, Pragmatics. 2. Speech acts (Linguistics) 3. Language and languages— Philosophy. L Lance, Mark Norris. 11. Title. P99.4.P72K85 2008 2008011161 410---dc22

To Wilfrid Sellars

lo, a rabbit!' — W V O. Quine Yo) Word up! — Dead Prez

You tal kin' to me? — Travis Bickle

viii

Contents

5.2 Four Ways of Telling Someone What to Do 105 113 5.3 Two Alternative Accounts 122 5.4 Reasons, Claims, and Addresses 128 5.5 Coda: Categorical Imperatives 6 Vocatives, Acknowledgments, and the Pragmatics of Recognition 137 6.1 Two Kinds of Recognitives 138 6.2 Vocatives 145 6.3 Acknowledgments 7 The Essential Second Person

Acknowledgments

134

153

155 7.1 Concrete Habitation of the Space of Reasons 160 7.2 Second-Person Speech 163 7.3 Tellings, Holdings, and Transcendental Vocatives 171 7.4 Speech as Communication and as Calling 8 Sharing a World

179

180 8.1 1nterpellation and Induction into Normative Space 190 8.2 Membership in the Discursive Community 195 8.3 How Many Discursive Communities Are There? 8.4 Sharing a World and Learning to See 205 8.5 On the Equiprimordiality and Entanglement of Ye and TO 210 21 2 8.6 Fugue Appendix: Toward a Formal Pragmatics of Normative Statuses (with Greg Restall)

217

Index

235

This book is the direct result of almost exactly five years of intensive joint philosophical work. Prior to that, each of us had thought hard about certain themes in this book for many years. Our shared discovery of the possibilities for synthesizing the ideas that we had been pursuing separately—occasioned by a graduate seminar at Georgetown University—dramatically transformed each of our thinking and created something wholly new It would be hard to overstate the intellectual excitement of those early conversations during which this book was born. Finding someone who not only understands what you are up to, but whose work immediately opens up new possibilities for the formulation and development of your own, and with whom you can explore, challenge, deepen, and make that work more precise, all in a context that is intellectually smooth, is a rare and treasured moment in a life. Since those initial meetings, the work on this book has been utterly collaborative. We talked through each major idea and argumentative move in advance of any writing. Though initial drafts of chapters were often undertaken by one of us, subsequent drafts always went to the other, and later drafts were written and rewritten line by line as we sat together in front of the monitor. There is no chance that any part of this book could have existed in anything like its current form without that collaboration. Not only could neither of us have found our way down this road alone, but we are certain that neither of us could have done so with any other companion. But of course if we had talked only to each other along the way we would have descended into madness. We have been supported and joined by a magnificent intellectual community. Two people deserve special mention for their essential, engaged, and generous help: Richard Manning organized and participated in a day-long "jam session" on the book at Georgetown University when it was very much a work in progix

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Acknowledgments

ress, and the conversations we had that day altered and enriched the book. At least as important, he gave us detailed, line-by-line comments on an early draft, and as always proved himself both a penetrating reader and a maddeningly reliable bullshit detector. We overhauled much of Chapters 1 and 2, in particular, in response to his comments. Margaret Little has been a constant sounding-hoard for ideas, testing our intuitions, challenging underlying assumptions, directing us to relevant literature in moral philosophy, pushing us to formulate points more clearly, and suggesting everything from clarifying examples to more perspicuous formulations of views. Indeed, much of Maggie's own work on deontic pluralism and intimacy has tendrils that have penetrated our thought. It is hard to imagine more supportive and stimulating colleagues and friends than Maggie and Richard. Sincere thanks go to our coauthor on the Appendix, Greg Restall, who was kind enough to arrange a grant for Mark to visit Melbourne for two months. During that time Mark and Greg worked out the basics of the formal Appendix and discussed in detail how a formal perspective could illuminate and refine the philosophical meat of the book. The three of us developed later versions of the Appendix together, and we fully expect the tripartite collaboration to continue. Many people have helped us with their suggestions, objections, skepticism, and sympathy. An undoubtedly partial list includes William Blattner, Taylor Carman, Alan Gibbard, Mitch Green, John Haugeland, Elisa Hurley, Paul Hurley, Andre Kukla, Coleen Macnamara, Chauncey Maher, James Mattingly, John McDowell, Niklas Moller, Mark Okrent, Terry Pinkard, Alex Pruss, Joseph Rouse, Charles Taylor, Michael Williams, and audiences at Queens University, Georgetown University, the University of Virginia, the International Association for Phenomenological Studies, the Johns Hopkins University, the University of Cape Town, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Melbourne, and the University of Cincinnati. Special thanks go to Colleen Fulton, the world's greatest R.A., who gave us invaluable comments on the entire manuscript, and to Philip Kremer and Juliet Floyd, who prepared wonderful critical responses to our work for the workshop that Richard organized at Georgetown. We have been exceptionally well supported by various institutions. It is only because the Georgetown University philosophy department, through the efforts of its superlative chair, Wayne Davis, welcomed

Acknowledgments

xi

Rebecca as a visitor for three years that the opportunity for this collaboration came to be. Carleton University awarded Rebecca a Marston LaFrance Research Award, which gave her an entire paid year of release from teaching to finish this book. Several trips between Ottawa, Washington, and Tampa for the purpose of writing together were funded by Rebecca's grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Mark was able to work with Greg Restall in Melbourne thanks to a grant from the University of Melbourne visiting scholars program. Camille Smith did a superb job of editing the entire manuscript, and Phoebe Kosman and Lindsay Waters of Harvard University Press helped us throughout the editing and publishing process. Finally, as is standard but no less genuine for that, we thank our wise spouses, Richard Manning (same person, different guise) and Amy Hubbard. They put up with long trips, extra parenting duties, late nights, early mornings, grouchiness when the issues were particularly recalcitrant, and excessive giddiness when the solutions came quickly They rolled their eyes only internally when we lapsed periodically into a cryptic dialect comprehensible only to the two of us. Our children, Eli Kukla-Manning and Emma Lance, inspired and forbore. Throughout, much slack was taken up.

1

Pragmatism, Prag matics, and Discourse: Mapping the Terrain In the beginning was the Word!" Here Fm stuck already! Who helps me go further? The spirit helps me All at once I see the answer. And confidently write: "In the beginning was the Act!" —Goethe

In this book we examine how speech acts alter and are enabled by the normative structure of our concretely incarnated social world. In other words, we examine language through the lens of pragmatism, in the metaphysical sense that takes the phenomenon of language to be, in the first instance, a concrete, embodied social practice whose purpose is meaningful communication. We argue that, by beginning with our analysis of the normative functioning of speech acts, we can clarify the structure (and sometimes make progress toward a solution) of some key issues in metaphysics and epistemology, including the role of perception in grounding empirical knowledge, how we manage to engage in intersubjective inquiry with objective import, the nature of moral reasons, and the capacity of subjects to be responsive and responsible to norms. Using an image that would grip the imaginations of at least three generations of philosophers, Wilfrid Sellars placed us—that is, us beings capable of language, thought, intention, meaning, and normative accountability—within a 'space of reasons', set over and against a space of mere causes. For some close followers of Sellars, most emblematically Robert Brandom, this space is first and foremost a space of inferential relations between declarative propositions.' John McDowell's post. 1.

Robert Brandom, Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994).

2

` Yo?' and 'Lot'

Sellarsian space of reasons is a provocatively richer and perhaps more ambiguous one. The relationship between the deliverances of experience and the space of reasons is complex rather than merely oppositional for McDowell. 2 But none of the authors who have developed and philosophically mined the metaphor of the space of reasons have taken particularly seriously what its overall pragmatic structure may be, nor have they given detailed attention to how different normative pragmatic relations might importantly inflect and constitute this space. We aim to rectify this absence through an exploration of what we call the "pragmatic topography" of the space of reasons. We develop a framework for thinking about the normative pragmatic structure of discursive speech acts, guided by the presumption that the pragmatic structure of the space of reasons can be no less rich than that of discourse. Like any beginning, this beginning in the concrete normative structure of discourse embodies two commitments: that the starting point exists, and that it is a good place to start. Existentially, we are committed to the claim that language has systematic normative effects and functions, that these essentially depend on the concrete ways in which speakers are enmeshed in social communities and environments, and that discursive performances systematically transform the normative statuses of speakers and of those spoken to. Prescriptively, we are committed to the principle that this dimension of language and discursive practice forms an explanatorily useful entering point for thinking about larger questions concerning our contact with the empirical world, with normative force, and with one another. We can afford to be quite liberal about what counts as a speech act; for our purposes, a speech act is a communicative act that functions normatively within a structured system of communication. We don't much care about nailing down the boundaries of the notion, but it is clear that we can count many gestures, written signs, facial expressions, and more as speech acts. Such acts may or may not have a determinate syntactic or semantic structure, but it is an integral consequence of our account that they have a rich and determinate pragmatic, communicative structure— one that is of the right sort to let them participate in a discursive system that lends itself to semantic and syntactic analysis, and of the right sort 2. See in particularjohn McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1994), and McDowell, "Having the World in View: Kant, Sellars, and Intentionality,' Journal of Philosophy 65 (1998): 431-450. SellarsIs own view of the relation between the spaces is hard to pin down.

Pragmatism, Pragmatics, andDiscourse

3

to use for making claims about, and upon, the world and one another. A crucial upshot of our analysis will be that meaningful speech acts are fundamentally indexed to particular agents with particular stances, substantial relationships to other particular agents, and locations within concrete social normative space that are ineliminably first- and secondpersonally owned by this or that living, embodied subject who has a particular point of view and is capable of making and being bound by claims. Our central conceptual tool, introduced later in this chapter, is a typology of speech acts—or, more precisely, of normative dimensions of speech acts—that is orthogonal to the usual systems of pragmatic categorization (by performative force, etc.). We believe this typology has surprisingly large philosophical payoffs. There is nothing uniquely privileged or architectonic about our typology; there are plenty of legitimate ways of dividing up speech acts along pragmatic lines, and surely different ways have different benefits and clarify different philosophical issues. What we claim on behalf of our typology is, first, that the mere fact that it is substantially different from the categorization systems used by linguists and other philosophers of language serves to de-naturalize the more traditional systems, and to broaden our philosophical imagination and vision, and, second, that its use can make some seemingly impenetrable philosophical questions appear quite straightforward.

1.1 Varieties of Pragmatism There are two large camps of philosophers who fly the banner of pragmatism, plus an additional camp of those who do not necessarily identify as 'pragmatists' but who study the pragmatics of language. Although we think that we are true to (what ought to he) the spirit of pragmatism, and although we are centrally concerned with the pragmatics of language, we depart substantially from all three camps. First, there are philosophers who find their roots in the classic American Pragmatists such as Dewey James, and Pierce, and often also in the early work of Heidegger and his French successors such as Pierre Bourdieu and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. 3 This group has productively focused on embodied practice as the ineliminable site of human meaning, and has worked to shift 3. Typical recent examples include Shannon Sullivan, Living Across and Through Skins (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), and Samuel Todes, Body and World (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001).

4

'Yol' and `Lo!'

Pragmatism, Pragmatics, and Discourse

epistemological attention to local and contextual epistemic practices, and away from the quest for transcendent truths, universal principles, and absolute certainty. Second, there is what we might call "Pittsburgh School Pragmatism," represented paradigmatically by Wilfrid Sellars, John McDowell, Richard Rorty, Robert &random, Donald Davidson, and John Haugeland, 4

5

m any—though not all—philosophers who work on formal pragmatics

andchrteizby-duconsmatirep onlsm the philosophy of mind and epistemology with roots in Wittgenstein. These philosophers are committed to the principle that the best place from which to begin thinking about intentional phenomena such as meaningful speech acts and contentful mental states is with our practical interactions with the world and with others, and their normative structure. For example, in the preface to Making It Explicit, Brandom writes: The explanatory strategy pursued here is to begin with an account of social practices, identify the particular structure they must exhibit in order to qualify as specifically linguistic practices, and then consider what different sorts of semantic contents those practices can confer on states, performances, and expressions caught up in them in suitable ways.) Finally, there are philosophers of language such as William Alston and John Searle, who work in close collaboration with linguists and focus on speech act theory, looking backwards to Austin and Grice.t These philosophers seek to develop a formal pragmatics that can sit alongside formal theories of semantics and of syntax. In the imperfect tripartite division of language into syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, there is rough agreement that syntax is the study of well-formedness, or grammaticality, semantics is the study of meaning, and pragmatics is the study of the way bits of language are used in the performance of speech acts. While 4. For example see Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), Donald Davidson, Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); McDowell, Mind and World; and Brandom, Making It Explicit. 5. Brandom, Making It Explicit, xiii. 15. See for example William Alston, Illocutionary. Acts and Sentence Meaning (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000); John Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); and Wayne Davis, Meaning, Expression, and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003).

share with both camps of pragmatism an explanatory privileging of the pragmatic dimensions of language, this last group departs from the first two in generally treating-syntax, semantics, and pragmatics as independently analyzable, and taking mental meanings and representations as given independently and in advance of performative utterances.' We share some methodological commitments with each of the three camps we have just described. The priority of the pragmatic in the order of explanation is important to us; we shall return to this point in detail below. We believe that meaning and normativity are phenomena that are ineliminably grounded in socially located human bodies, that reductionism and classical representationalism are bankrupt projects in philosophy of mind and epistemology, and that there is an important place for formal theories in attempts to understand the pragmatic structure of language. On the other hand, we see each of these three orientations as having serious limitations. The first camp has tended to privilege embodied practice over conceptual discourse and thought, seeing the former as more fundamental and more interesting than the latter!' To do so is to assume that discourse and thought are not themselves embodied practices, 9 and it is also, we think, to undervalue the philosophical centrality of language and discursive judgment in making possible our status as epistemic and moral subjects and our receptivity to the claims and character of the empirical

world. Our points of convergence with and divergence from the second and third camps—the Pittsburgh School Pragmatists and the theorists of formal pragmatics—deserve some detailed discussion right up front. Sellars, Brandom, Davidson, and other anti-representationalist are methodologically committed to a particular explanatory starting point 7. For instance, Kent Bach writes: "Different types of speech acts (statements, requests, apologies, etc.) may be distinguished by the type of propositional attitude (belief, desire, regret, etc.) being expressed by the speaker . Many philosophers would at least concede that mental content is a more fundamental notion than linguistic meaning, and perhaps even that semantics reduces to propositional attitude psychology" (online..sfsicedut—hbach/grice.htm, accessed 10/10/07). 8, Classic examples include Hubert Dreyfus, What Computers Still Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), and Todes, Body and World. 9. Joseph Rouse, in How Scientific Practices Matter: Explaining Philosophical Naturalism • (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), does an excellent job of systematically defending a picture of discourse as continuous with, rather than derivative upon, embodied practice.

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Tol' and To!'

in philosophy of mind and language, namely an account of the role that discursively formed encounters with the world and with one another play in constituting the normative statuses of participants in a discursive community—an account of the acts that form what Brandom (attributing the thought, if not the phrase, to Sellars) calls the "game of giving and asking for reasons." It is attention to the social practices of discourse, according to this approach, that is our best way into thinking about how language manages to be suitably responsive to the world, and hence how this responsiveness is codified in a semantics and a syntax. Furthermore, Sellars tenaciously argued—following Hegel and Wittgenstein—that intentional mental states are best understood as derivative and dependent upon meaningful discursive practice, and his philosophical descendents have championed this commitment. So on this picture, philosophical explanation moves from discursive use, to content and grammar, to mind. We share a commitment to this order of explanation. In this book we will not argue separately for the rectitude of this order, but we hope to demonstrate its fecundity. We think that only by beginning with discursive practices can we understand, on the one hand, how discourse comes to be responsive to the world and capable of expressing and communicating content, and on the other hand, how any practices manage to be practices of reason-giving, truth-telling, and responsibility-imputing, rather than just elaborate conventional dances. In this sense, we are certainly continuing a project with its lineage in the work of (in particular) Brandom, Sellars, and Hegel. However, authors like Brandom think not only that pragmatics is explanatorily prior to semantics and syntax, but also that the latter are reducible to the former, that meaning just is a pragmatic feature of a speech act, properly understood. The major project of Brandom's Making It Explicit is to spell out how semantics and syntax can be derived fully from pragmatics. In contrast, we remain steadfastly agnostic on issues of semantic-pragmatic reduction. It is consistent with all we say that semantics retain significant forms of autonomy from pragmatics. Tempting as it will surely be to some readers, we ask that our use of key Sellarsian and Brandomian terms and ideas such as the 'space of reasons' and 'commitments and entitlements' not be read as our implicit acceptance of this reductive move. We assume that both mental states and speech acts are meaningful

Pragmatism, Pragmatics, and Discourse

7

only insofar as they are properly situated within a body of discursive practices that is their constitutive precondition. Despite our agnosticism about the reducibility of semantics to pragmatics, our acceptance of the pragmatists' order of explanation puts us at odds with most philosophers working on speech act theory and formal pragmatics. Indeed, for typical theorists of pragmatics, things go almost exactly the other way around. Mental states, particularly intentions, are typically taken for granted for the purposes of linguistic theory. Of course, philosophers such as Searle have accounts of mind, but their theories of mental representation cast it as independent of, and in important senses prior to, language. The job of the theorist, on this view, is to characterize the range of ways a person can then intentionally put a sentence—usually seen as having an unproblematic syntax—to use. Accordingly, such philosophers follow the linguists' odd practice of treating categories of speech acts that mark pragmatic function, such as declaratives, imperatives, and interrogatives, as definitionally grammatical categories (namely moods), and only secondarily as pragmatic categories. Thus, such categories apply to sentences in virtue of their grammar, and one asks questions such as "what can a person do with a declarative?"" But in keeping with our commitment to the explanatory priority of pragmatics, we define such use-indicating categories in terms of their use (which ought to seem quite a sensible approach, we think). Hence, for us, the answer to the above question is that what one can do with a declarative is—by definition—declare. This isn't to deny that we can identify syntactic types as, for example, those that are typically or defeasibly used to produce declaratival acts. But for us, this will be a secondary notion. We always privilege pragmatic categories over grammatical categories when identifying the functional structure of a particular utterance. Thus, rather than "What can one do with declaratives?", a question for us (though not a particularly interesting one) will be "Which syntactic forms can function as declaratives in English?" While our commitment to the pragmatist order of explanation puts 10. See H. P Grice's seminal paper, "Logic and Conversation," in Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman, eds., The Logic of Grammar (Encino, Calif.: Dickenson, 1975), 64-75. The assumption that a 'pragmatics first" approach to language should follow the lines of G rice is common. See for example Peter Grundy, Doing Pragmatics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), a fairly standard introductory linguistics text that adopts the Gricean framework without discussion or argument.

8

Pragmatism, Pragmatics, and Discourse

!' and To !'

9

us on the side of Sellars and Brandom over against most theorists of pragmatics, our focus on tlfe multiplicity of discursive functions puts us at odds with Sellars and Brandom and the rest of the Pittsburgh School Pragmatists. Given the Sellarsian/Brandomian order of explanation, from pragmatics, through semantics and syntax, to mental states, one would expect members of that group to begin their philosophical accounts with comprehensive analyses of the entire terrain of discursive practice—of the pragmatic topography of discourse, in all its richness and complexity, including the whole variety of meaningful and communicative practices that make it up. That is, apart from the details of theory and argument, we would expect such pragmatists to display a particular interest in pragmatic phenomena. Yet, in fact, among members of this tradition, there is an odd disconnect between their commitment to a pragmatist order of explanation and their interest in the pragmatic texture of discourse. First, when authors such as Sellars and Brandom discuss practices, the lived, acting body planted in a concrete environment does not remain in view. These authors give pragmatic accounts of meaning and interpretation, but they are vastly more interested in language and theoretical reason than in the rest of human bodily activity, and they care little about how these two domains fit together. For Brandom, inferentially articulated discourse forms an autonomous domain of normativity, while perception and action serve as the ways in and outof this domain—that is, as language-entry and language-exit conditions, Indeed, he makes the remarkable claim that it is merely a contingent matter that discourse is bounded by perception and action, and that it could in principle exist without them." Although Brandom understands language as a system of shifting commitments and entitlements, he has next to nothing to say about what concrete events such as taking on a commitment or granting an entitlement actually are like. He gives us no story about how to materially identify such events, and he often writes as though different speakers' respective commitments and entitlements may as well be abstract scores that shift around in Platonic space.' Both schools of pragma-

tism, ironically, at least implicitly agree that embodied and discursive practices are separate domains making only peripheral contact—which would seem to be a surprisingly unpragmatic conclusion. In this work we aim to plant discursive practices firmly within the embodied material terrain. For us, concrete action, centrally including the act of perceiving, will form the substance of language and not just a means of entering or exiting it. Second, consider Brandom's pragmatic account of language. Far from starting with an articulated view of the whole terrain of discursive practices, he offers instead an account that focuses almost exclusively on asserting." On the basis of this account, he builds a semantically significant notion of inference, and then proceeds to work out the semantic content of semantically significant sub-sentential bits of syntax. He tells us just enough, that is, about the pragmatics of one type of speech act to define a notion of inference, and then he is off and running with his semantic story, giving hardly a glance and certainly no systematic attention to the rest of pragmatic space. We believe that this narrow focus on assertion is a serious error, and a particularly surprising one for a self-declared pragmatist. We think that it leads not only to missing out on philosophically important dimensions of language, but to hopelessly distorting our understanding of language as a normative phenomenon, including our understanding of assertion and how it works.' Brandom's narrow use of assertion as the sole

11. Brandom, Making It Explicit, 234. 12. In Making It Explicit he gives many pedagogically inspirational stories, such as the story of the but that one brings a sacred leaf to enter. But these are explicitly speculative stories about the causal origins of normativity, and they are not intended to give us insight into the real char-

Wittgenstein, and Kant on normativity. "Interrogative" "performative," etc., do not appear in the index at all.

13. In the introduction to Making II Explicit, Brandom says: "The first step in the project is accordingly the elaboration of a pragmatics fa theory of the use terms of practical score keeping

or language) that is couched in

. The pragmatic significance of performances—eventually

speech acts suck as assertions—is then understood to consist in the difference those performances make to the commitments and entitlements attributed by various scorekeepers ... The defining characteristic of discursive practice is the production and consumption of speCifically

propositional contents" (xiv, first emphasis added). The final sentence of this passage—not to mention the semantic inferentialism—is a clue that assertions are more than an example of a speech act Brandon) will analyze. Indeed, when one turns to the first two chapters of Making It Explicit, in which the "elaboration of a pragmatics" is carried out and the bridge between it and semantics developed, one searches in vain for any discussion of any speech act other than assertions. Indeed, a search of the index under "imperatives" yields 'See commands," which takes us to historical discussions of Pufendorf,

acter of our current practices.

14. We develop these objections to Brandom, and argue in particular that his focus on declaratives precludes an adequate account of observation—material that will connect with the discussion of Chapter 2—in Mark Lance and Rebecca Kukla, "Perception, Language, and the

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'Yot' and To!'

building block for his entire theory of the pragmatic and semantic structure of language and the connection between language and the world recreates and instantiates a failure of vision and methodology that is nearly universal in analytic philosophy. To be specific, analytic philosophers, of any stripe, act as though the most fundamental, important, and common thing we do with language is use it to make propositionally structured declarative assertions with truth-values. Even though philosophers of language occasionally acknowledge and discuss the structure of imperatives, interrogatives, etc., they virtually always treat these as 'special' discursive phenomena that are marginal and derivative in comparison with declaratives. McDowell and Sellars, for instance, take it as an unshakable starting point that insofar as a state has a discursive or a conceptual structure, it has, or is directly derivative upon something that has, a declarative, propositional structure." Davidson shares a similar commitment, and he takes assertions--but not queries, requests, evocations, or hails—as the necessary starting point for interpretation.'t' Even Austin, most famous for drawing the attention of the philosophical world to the variety of "things we do with words," and Grice, who taught us the many "ways of words," both take the declaratival assertion as the paradigm of 'normal' language and then examine various marginal and quirky uses of language by way of their departure from or permutation of this norm. 17 First Person," forthcoming in Bernhard Weiss and Jeremy Wanderer, eds., Reading Brandom: Making It Explicit (New York: Routledge, 2009). 15. See McDowell, Mind and World; Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, 16. See the essays in Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and interpretation, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), especially "Truth and Meaning' and "Radical Interpretation." See Rebecca Kukla, "How to Get an Interpretivist Committed," Protosociology 14 (2000): 180-221, for an extended argument that assertions are an insufficient basis for Davidsonian interpretation, and that Davidson needs to acknowledge a wider array of types of speech acts and varieties of performative Force from the start. 17. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge. Mass,: Harvard University Press, 1975). H. P. Grice, Studies in the Ways of Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967). Continental philosophers of language have shown less temptation to commit the declarative fallacy. Authors such as Heidegger, Derrida, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, and Judith Butler (who is American but in conversation with Continental texts) have given extended accounts of language that begin elsewhere than with its declaratival functioning. See Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: StJNY Press, 1996); Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman and Samuel Weber (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988); Louis Althusser, "Ideology and ideological State Apparatuses," in Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy (London: New Left Books, 1971); Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the

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Nuel Belnap accused traditional philosophical semantics of committing the "declarative fallacy" insofar as it presumed that semantic content in general could he understood entirely in terms of declaratival content.'8 We wish to adopt this term and broaden it beyond its original semantic application, to encompass any philosophy of language, including a pragmatic account, which takes the declarative as the privileged and paradigmatic speech act. R. M. Hare identified something very close to the declarative fallacy when he talked about the widespread feeling, among philosophers, that the declarative (or indicative) "is somehow above suspicion in a way that other sorts of sentence are not; and that therefore, in order to put these other sorts of sentence above suspicion, it is necessary to show that they are really indicatives." 19 In almost every part of this book we will show how the declarative fallacy has distorted understanding and clouded philosophical vision. Indeed, as we see it, much of the potential explanatory benefit of the so-called linguistic turn in philosophy—which was purportedly the turn to approaching classic problems in metaphysics and epistemology by way of an analysis of language20—has been thwarted by a pervasive assumption that the structure of declarative assertions is the privileged or sole dimension of language to which we should attend in order to illuminate key questions in metaphysics and epistemology. Or as Brandom baldly puts the commitment, "Asserting is the fundamental speech act."L Of course it is contentious of Belnap, and of us, to speak of a fallacy here. It isn't that Brandom and others fail to notice the existence of imperatives, interrogatives, etc., but that they feel confident that these will Performative (New York: Routledge., 1997);,Jacques Lacan, "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis" and "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud,' in Lacan, Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2004). Ifeidegger (for instance in Being and Time, Division 1, chaps. 5 and 6) and Derrida (in Limited Inc in particular) launch explicit and rigorous attacks on the shortsightedness of and the philosophical damage done by the declarative fallacy. Derrida's subversive reading of Searle and Austin in Limited Inc is especially amusing and perceptive, 18. Nuel Belnap, "Declaratives Are Not Enough," Philosophical Studies 59 (1990): 1-30, 19, R. M. Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 8. J. 0_ Urmson also pointed out the overemphasis on fact-stating language in analytic philosophy of language in his Philosophical Analysis: Its Development between the Wars (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 20, See, for instance, Richard Rorty, ed., The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 21. Malting It Explicit, 173.

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To!' and `Lo!'

fall into (their secondary) place once the account of declaratives is completed. But it is just this confidence that we, like Belnap, find philosophically reckless. Not only do we agree with Belnap that there are important semantic phenomena that cannot be accounted for in terms of declaratival content, but we argue in what follows that there are deep metaphysical and epistemological issues that are left mysterious on a pragmatist account precisely because of the initial neglect of the full range of pragmatic possibilities. Thus, to recap, in the case of philosophical pragmatics, the very categorization of speech acts—paradigmatically in terms of performative force—is motivated by philosophical starting points that we do not share, and functions to preclude from the outset the sorts of explanations of broader philosophical issues that we purport to provide. In the case of Pittsburgh School Pragmatism, we find the apparent disconnect between social pragmatist philosophy of mind and actual practical discursive phenomena troubling. We embrace pragmatist methodology not because of a bevy of concrete arguments against competitors, but because of the elegance and power of the explanations one can muster for a range of phenomena once one has, as a backdrop, an appropriately spelled out account of the pragmatic structure of discursive performances. In this, our work will "feel" far more akin to that of Brandom than to that of Searle. But for all that, we believe that Brandomian social pragmatism has been led seriously astray by a failure to begin by mapping the whole pragmatic topography of discourse. 1.2 Two Distinctions among Normative Statuses In this book we loosely follow Brandom in understanding speech acts as performances constitutive of changes in normative status among various members of a discursive community. Thus, for instance, to assert that P involves undertaking a commitment to P, taking up the role of one at whom challenges of P may be directed, etc. To order someone to see to it that P, by contrast, involves undertaking to incur upon her a prima facie obligation to see to it that P Further, the performance of any speech act is the sort of thing one can he entitled to, or not. And so on. All speech acts, we claim, strive to bring about certain normative changes: for example, assertions strive to impart beliefs and grant inference licenses, orders strive to impute responsibilities for action, and

Pragmatism, Pragmatics, and Discourse

13

so forth. As already mentioned, we are not committing ourselves, here, to any thesis about the systematic relationship between semantics and pragmatics. Rather, what we want to adopt from this strand of thought is the insight that speech acts can be productively analyzed in terms of the normative statuses that enable them and the normative changes they effect through their performative structure. Our primary conceptual tool in this work is a categorization of speech acts insofar as they have a particular kind of functional design qua linguistic performance within a discursive community. When we identify types or dimensions of speech acts, we will be doing so by way of differences and similarities between such normative functions. For this reason, we stipulate that our names for different types of speech acts— declaratives, imperatives, interrogatives, and several other "ives" that we will introduce along the way—demarcate pragmatic functional categories. When we speak of imperatives, for instance, we are directly speaking of a pragmatic category of speech acts that strive to serve a particular normative function within a discursive practice. It is usually, though not always, the case that sentences in the imperatival mood are used to issue imperatives, and vice versa. Typical sentences marked by linguists as imperatives—e.g., "Mark, revise this example!"—are such that, in typical circumstances, their production amounts to the performance of an imperative. But there is no one-to-one correspondence between normative pragmatic structures of acts and grammatical forms of English. The utterance "It's cold in here" can function (at least) as an imperative or a declarative, depending on context. By stipulation we insist that what makes a speech act an imperative is its discursive function, rather than its syntactic structure. The function of a speech act should not be confused with either the intention of the speaker in uttering it or the standard use of that string of words in the community. Of course, it would be absurd to think that there could be a whole system of discourse that had a normative structure completely divorced from either speakers' intentions or conventional uses; there has to be at least a defeasible concordance between function, intention, and standard use, and it is patterns of intention and use that serve to institute the contentful pragmatic structure of a language in the first place. But, just as there are philosophers who wish to reduce semantics to intentions or to conventional use and other philosophers who resist them, we recognize the possibility of philosophical at-

14

Pragmatism, Pragmatics, and Discourse

'Yo!' and to!'

tempts to reduce pragmatic function to intention or convention, and we reject them. Along the way, we will have occasion to give examples of speech acts that manifest a disconnect between actual pragmatic structure and intended or conventional effect. For now, we just want to make clear that we reject any analytic identities between function, intention, and convention, even while acknowledging that there is a constitutive, defeasible connection between these things. 22 Now once we understand speech acts in functional terms, it makes sense to think of them, like any functions, as having inputs and outputs. (Indeed, given the long tradition of thinking of discursive judgments as functions that traces back to Kant, it is remarkable that no one has previously tried to carefully articulate the inputs and outputs of such functions.) If speech acts function to bring about changes in normative status, then they take normative statuses as inputs and produce them as outputs. Specifically, we can distinguish between the norms governing the proper production of a speech act, which give rise to statuses that entitle its performance, and the changes in normative status that their proper production strives to make. For instance, on the input end, assertions are properly performed if they are, or can be, doxastically justified. Orders, on the other hand, are properly performed only if the speaker occupies the relevant sort of authoritative social position with respect to the person(s) to whom the order is issued. On the output end, the production of an entitled assertion is inferentially fecund; it entitles its speaker and others to draw conclusions from the claim asserted. In the case of an order, its proper production has normative effects such as a prima fade responsibility, on the part of the one ordered, to carry out the order. So, for example, consider the case of an imperatival speech act, 22. In many places throughout this hook we mention, and leave to one side, ideas that rely on a notion of defeasibility. We say that various defeasible connections must exist, though the corresponding universal connection does not. While we quite consciously leave the deep issues regarding how to understand deleasibility for another time, we do not doubt that aspects of our account depend upon how one understands this important notion. See Mark Norris Lance and Margaret 0. Little, 'Defeasibility and the Normative Significance of Context," Erkenntnis 61 (2004): 435-455; Lance and Little, "Defending Moral Particularism," in James Dreier, ed.. Debates in Moral Theory (London: Blackwell, 2005), 305-321; Lance and Little, 'From Particularism to Defeasibility," in Mark Lance, Matjaz Porte, and Vojko Strahovnik, eds., Chat/ening Moral Particularism (New York: Routiedge, 2008); and Lance and Little, "Where the Laws Are," in Russ Shafer-Landau, ed., Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

15

whereby Rebecca orders, "Mark, revise this example!" The normative input here is Rebecca's entitlement to issue this imperative, something she has in virtue of facts such as that she and Mark are writing a book together, have agreed to collaborate in certain ways, etc. The primary output, or the primary normative status resulting from the input, is a normative burden upon Mark to revise the example (or to defend his refusal to do so). It is essential to the imperative being the sort of speech act that it is that this kind of output follows from this kind of input—that Mark's obligation be consequent upon Rebecca's entitlement. Now consider a declaratival speech act. Sarah says, "Bakhtin is the most important literary theorist of the twentieth century" The input here is Sarah's entitlement to utter this declarative, which she has—if she does have it—by way of her warrant for being committed to the content. What her declaration aims to do is to entitle beliefs, inferences, and reassertions for both Sarah and others, and this is its output." Finally, consider an Austinian example: the preacher pronounces a couple married. Here the input is the preacher's entitlement to marry people, in virtue of her particular status in the community, the circumstances of the event, etc., whereas the output is the normative status provided by the marriage itself. Throughout this hook we make heavy use of this distinction between input and output—that is, between the normative statuses constitutive of entitlement to a given speech act and the normative changes (in the status of the speaker, or of others in the discursive community) that the act strives to

produce. Notice that what a speech act strives to accomplish, as part of its normative function, is not the same as what it does accomplish. Sarah's assertion that Bakhtin is the most important literary theorist of the twentieth century may strive to impart beliefs or pass on inference licenses to others, but it may fail to do so if Sarah is not heard, believed, or understood. The department chair's order that everyone in the department sign up for service on a university committee may fail if the department members do not acknowledge his authority to so order. To impute such a notion of 'striving' to speech acts is not to attribute any kind of spooky 23. This is its output

ctua declarative. Sarah may also seek, with this speech act, to annoy

one of her poststructuralist colleagues, to help establish her status in the field, to baffle her mother, etc. The existence of multiple layers of normativity and function governing discourse does not undermine our ability to distinguish between and isolate these layers.

16

'Yo!' and lo!'

agency to them, nor to plump for any particular metaphysics of striving, but merely to play off of their having a functional structure in the first place: anything—a machine, a policy, an action, a vital organ—that has a function may he said to strive, by design, to fulfill this function. Likewise it might fail to perfectly fulfill what it strives to fulfill, and thereby count as defective to that extent. (Whether such strivings can be 'naturalized', or fully explained in non-teleological language, is a question that does not interest us here.) 24 Crucially, then, the output of a speech act is the normative statuses the speech act strives, as part of its function, to bring about—not what it actually manages to bring about. Meanwhile, the input is what would entitle the performance of a speech act, if it were entitled, which of course it may not be. Hence inputs and outputs are themselves normatively defined. Our first key distinction among normative statuses—that between inputs and outputs—falls fairly automatically out of our casting of speech acts in functional terms. Our second distinction regarding discursive performances draws on a conceptual distinction and bit of terminology that we borrow from moral philosophy. In that context, it is common to distinguish between "agent-relative" and "agent-neutral" reasons—that is, between reasons whose force is indexed to particular agents with particular positions in normative space, and reasons that are not targeted at anyone in particular in this way. But although this language has up until now had philosophical life primarily within ethics, it does not seem to us that there is anything about this abstract distinction that should make it specific to the moral domain. So, for example, if there is a clear enough distinction between agent-neutral and agent-relative moral entitlements and obligations, we might well wonder whether there is a distinction between agent-neutral and agent-relative discursive or epistemic entitlements and obligations. We believe that there is such a distinction. Once we identify speech acts as functions on normative statuses, we can describe either the input or the output of these functions as agent-relative or agent-neutral. In general, when considering a normative status such as an entitle24. But for those who are interested, see Richard Manning, "Biological Function, Selection, and Reduction,' British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 48 {1997): 69-82, for a compelling argument that they cannot be.

Pragmatism, Pragmatics, and Discourse

17

mentor a commitment, we can ask whether it is in virtue of its pragmatic structure (as opposed to in virtue of its content, for instance) indexed to specific people inhabiting specific normative positions, or whether it is `for everyone', that is, structurally blind to distinctions among agents. This distinction will need a lot of clarification, but in rough terms, the distinction between agent-relative and agent-neutral normative statuses is one between those that by their very structure are 'personalized', and those that are 'structurally public'—that is, inherently available to whoever is perceptive or lucky or interested enough to be in a position to occupy them. A pretty reliable ordinary-language test of agent-neutrality is whether the normative status can be ascribed to a generalized "we," as in "we know that E" or "we ought to treat one another with respect"—or as Heidegger would say, to Das Man. Agent-neutral commitments and entitlements need not be universally held; indeed it is almost never the case that everyone is in a position to take up every commitment and entitlement that she or he could or should take up in ideal circumstances. An agent-neutral reason will not grip everyone. But we can say that agent-neutral normative statuses are universal as a regulative ideal. It is only through ignorance or other defect—albeit, perhaps, a completely routine and exculpable defect—that anyone fails to have an agent-neutral normative status, since there is nothing about this status that is specific to anyone in particular. So far, this is highly abstract. To concretize and clarify, consider the difference between the imperative, "Drop and give me ten push-ups!" and the declarative, "Paris is the capital of France." It is in virtue of one's position within a structure of authority (as a teacher or foreman or colonel, say) that she is entitled to issue the imperative. In its normative pragmatic structure, the legitimacy it has is personal; it is the colonel who is entitled to give the order to the lieutenant. And while there may be lots of colonels, the entitlement is still inherently colonel-entitlement. Nothing about this entitlement even suggests a similar entitlement on the part of a private to issue the order to a lieutenant. Hence this entitlement is agent-relative. The declarative, on the other hand, has an agentneutral input—in virtue of the objective purport of the sentence, it is a speech act that finds grounding in the world in a way that is not specific to who is asserting it. In rough and ready terms, the input is agentneutral in the sense that what entitles it is "true for everyone"; it is im-

711

18

I II

I

'Yor and 'La!'

personally available, even if (though) not everyone will be in a position to take advantage of this availability, because of ignorance, conflicting false beliefs, inferential ineptitude, and the like. Our imperative also has an agent-relative output: it changes the normative status of those people to whom the order is directed. The imperative targets a specific, personalized audience. In reality, it may be that not everyone at whom the order is directed obeys it, or that some passerby `obeys' the order inappropriately for fun, or because she misunderstood it as aimed at her. But regardless of how smoothly the concrete normative uptake of the order goes, it is part of the functional design of the speech act that it target specific people upon whom it makes a normative claim. There is always someone (or several someones) at whom the speaker is directing her order; the order has no ordering force whatsoever when it comes to those who are not targeted by it, even if they happen to overhear it, and—interestingly—even if they agree that the order was perfectly legitimate. In contrast, our declarative has an agent-neutral output: the assertion "Paris is the capital of France" seeks to impute the entitlement to assert this claim to the discursive community in general, and demands that others allow its content to constrain their inferences and beliefs. Regardless of who concretely hears it, believes it, or takes it up (which will typically be less than everyone), the pragmatic normative purport of the utterance does not in any way personalize its effects or demands. We recognize that this last claim is complex, and we will be expanding upon and defending it at length below.

Pragmatism, Pragmatics, and Discourse

in box 4, and that declaratives, properly understood and restricted, always belong in box 1 (keeping in mind that for us these mark out pragmatic rather than grammatical categories). The case of imperatives seems uncontentious: they are speech acts that are entitled by specific facts about a speaker's normative position and relationship to the target of the imperative, and they serve to make a demand upon the specific person or persons at whom they are targeted. Hence they always belong in box 4. On the other hand, not all box-4 speech acts are imperatives. When we make a claim based in our particular normative position, upon another person insofar as she occupies a

Input ---xAgent neutral -

Output

Agent - relative

l'

1

2

Agent neutral

Neutral input Neutral output

Relative input Neutral output

Agent-relative

Neutral input Relative output

-

1.3 A Typology of Speech Acts

'1 '1

.11 II

At this point, we have drawn two distinctions among normative statuses—between inputs and outputs, and between agent-relative and agent-neutral statuses—and thus we have the resources to categorize speech acts according to a two-by-two grid, as shown in Figure 1. Thus the colonel's imperative, "Drop and give me ten push-ups!" belongs in box 4 of the grid, as it has both an agent-relative input and an agent-relative output. And the declarative, "Paris is the capital of France," belongs in box 1, as it has both an agent-neutral input and an agent-neutral output. Indeed, we argue that imperatives always belong

19

3

Figure 1

4 Relative input Relative output

20

'Ye and to!'

particular normative position, we perform a box-4 speech act. One way to do this is to issue an order, using an imperative. But we can also implore, apologize, promise, invite, and reproach, all of which are box-4 speech acts. Insofar as a declarative makes a claim about a public, democratically accessible truth, seeking thereby to make an entitlement to reassertion and inference generally available for public use, it will belong in box 1. Most of the everyday speech acts with a declarative surface grammar— "Cats like to sleep on mats," "There are no analytic a posteriori truths," etc.—function as box-1 declaratives in this sense. However, we will argue that not all truth-claims belong in box 1, and also (again) that surface grammar can never be a perfect indicator or guarantor of pragmatic structure (including location on the grid). We will reserve the term 'declarative' for sentences that have this thoroughly agent-neutral structure. Thus it is in effect an analytic truth, within our system, that declaratives belong in box 1—albeit an analytic truth that has its genesis in a substantive insight about the functioning of a broad class of speech acts. At the same time, it is not an analytic truth that all box-1 speech acts are declaratives. In Chapters 5 and 8, we tentatively suggest an alternative type of box-1 speech act. In general, each box will be inhabited by a variety of types of speech act. Although the examples we have given so far might suggest as much, we cannot in general assume that agent-relative outputs are requirements to act whereas agent-neutral outputs express general truths. The output of a speech act, for our purposes, is neither an act nor a truth, but a set of normative statuses. What makes the output of a speech act agent-neutral is that it applies, de jure, to everyone, in a way that is not indexed to particular features of anyone's normative position. The right to assert a truth is just one such change, with no special pragmatic privilege at this level of analysis. So, consider a marriage ceremony: part of the very structure of the act conferring the status of marriage is that what is conferred is a status that demands universal recognition—now we must treat you as married, not (primarily) in the sense of asserting that it is the case, but in the sense of acting as if the status obtains (for purposes of taxes, dinner invitations, deathbed privileges, and the like). It is in fact insulting to take a marriage ceremony as having only agent-relative rather than agent-neutral significance. In normal, well-

Pragmatism, Pragmatics, and Discourse

21

functioning cases, then, the speech acts that constitute a marriage have some agent-neutral outputs (in addition to the blatantly agent-relative outputs that they have for the new spouses). 25 On the other hand, the normative status of entitlement to a truthclaim is always agent-neutra1. 26 We will come back to this important fact at length below. For now, note that the shared and public character of truths—the fact that they are democratically available and hold in a way that is essentially not conditioned by our personal normative relationship to them—is part of what we mean by calling them truths. Missing this point is what is wrong with the undergraduate's chant that something is "true for you, but not for me." While we all are in different positions of epistemic access to the truth, a truth-claim, by its very structure, is not a claim for me or for you but for all of us. As Lynn Hankinson Nelson puts it, "I can only know what we know." 27 We do not mean to suggest that discursive performances will always exhibit only one normative transitional structure. Indeed, were we to be maximally precise, we would continually insist that our grid provides a system for categorizing normative functions that speech acts instantiate—always recognizing that any actual utterance will perform multiple functions—rather than a system for categorizing utterances. In later Chapters we argue that speech acts necessarily incarnate multiple funciions that belong in different boxes. Although for pedagogical reasons eve tend to focus, in the beginning, on speech acts insofar as they cenlly exemplify one or another of the normative patterns, this is a delibrate oversimplification. Not only do speech acts incarnate multiple notions, but further, once one has a range of acts instituted within a 25. Given its insufficient clarity in drawing this distinction, together with its tendency to n together issues of the normative source of entitlement with features of the nature of that tidement, the discussion of these matters in chapter 3 of The Grammar of Meaning by Mark orris Lance and John O'Leary-Hawthorne (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997) ould be seen merely as a suggestive precursor of the typology presented here_ Not only is that ount radically incomplete, at least one of its authors now considers it confused in important

peers.

26. Some sentences that make truth-claims can only coherently be uttered by specific peosuch as the sentence "1 am the father of Emma," But "lam the father of Emma," spoken by rk, declares exactly the same truth-claim as "Mark is the father of Emma," spoken by anyelse. Hence the entitlement to the truth-claim is agent-neutral. See Chapter 2, section 4. 27. Lynn Hankinson Nelson, Who Knows? From Quine to a Feminist Empiricism (Philadelia: Temple University Press, 1992).

Pragmatism, Pragmatics, and Discourse

Tor and tor

22

discursive community, one will be able to combine them in complex ways. A declarative may also be an imperative ("It's still cold in here!"). When we call it a declarative, we are focusing on a particular normative function that it serves—specifically one that takes an agent-neutral input and yields an agent-neutral output, by stating a public truth. When we call it an imperative, we are focusing on its function as an order to do something about the temperature, targeted at a specific person from someone in a specific position of authority. We leave this section, then, having provisionally offered examples of types, or dimensions, of speech acts that fit into two of our four boxes, as shown in Figure 2.

input —0.Agent-neutral

Agent-relative

1 Neutral input Neutral output

Relative input Neutral output

Output

Agent-neutral

2

Declaratives

3

Neutral input Relative output Agent-relative

Figure 2

4

Relative input Relative output Imperatives

(promises, invitations, reproaches...)

23

1.4 More about Agent Relativity and Agent Neutrality -

-

The notions of agent-neutrality and agent-relativity we employ here are complex and utterly essential to our project, so it is worth spending time clarifying and exploring them. The distinction between agent-relativity and agent-neutrality is not simply one of extensional scope. An agent-relative output, for example, could apply de facto to everyone. This might be because of its - semantic structure ("Everyone raise your right hand") or because of empirical facts that determine its extension ("Those of you under nine feet tall, wear this badge"). The output of these orders is agent-relative, even though they in fact target everyone. The universality of their target is in neither case a function of their pragmatic structure. By the same token, we have not defined agent-neutrality in such a way that every being on the planet, or every Kantian agent, must be contained in the scope of an agent-neutral status. We have left open the size of 'the' discursive community, as well as its boundaries and its ontology, although we take up these issues in detail in Chapter 8. We have said nothing so far that determines whether 'the' discursive community, which provides the 'we' across which discursive functions may range, is singular or whether there might be different discursive communities in different contexts, bounded by lines of nation, language, expertise, or whatever else. If discursive communities are multiple, then someone outside the scope of the community to which a speech act is referenced is not part its functional universe of discourse. We can draw a distinction between two species of agent-relative normative statuses. On the one hand, there are "kind-relative" statuses. These are statuses that apply to people in virtue of their membership in Some general kind. On the input end, these are kind-relative entitlements: all colonels have certain entitlements to issue orders to privates; Martha's entitlement to officiate at marriage ceremonies issues from her status as a justice of the peace in a particular jurisdiction; and so forth. On the output end, these are kind-relative claims - a community might prohibit all felons from voting, or call upon all civilians to evacuate an area in the path of a hurricane. In each of these cases, the normative entitlement or claim attaches to the kind or property. If a law is passed that prohibits convicted felons from voting, this is an act that has, as an output consequence, an imposition of a prohibition on members of a kind.

24

'in!' and 'Lot'

By contrast, some normative statuses are "agent-specific." Such statuses apply to a particular agent (or some particular agents) in light of concrete, particularized facts about her normative position, and have no implications even in the ideal for others. When Martha pronounces Bob and Jerry married, her entitlement to do so is agent-relative and kindrelative, but Bob and Jerry's new status as married is agent-relative and agent-specific: the ceremony alters the normative statuses of Bob and Jerry, qua concrete individuals, rather than qua fungible instances of a larger category If Mark promises Rebecca that he will revise their paper, this generates an entitlement on the part of Rebecca to expect him to revise the paper and a commitment on the part of Mark to do so. More generally, promising is an act that creates agent-specific obligations on the part of the promiser. There is no impetus in the pragmatic structure of promising that this normative status be inheritable by others in virtue of their sharing properties or kind memberships with the promiser. Agent-specific normative statuses need not be singular; they can be held by several concrete, particular people. (In the next chapter, we will see examples of statuses that must be singular.) I may make a promise to more than one person with a single speech act, for instance, in which case each of them will have a special claim on me. 28 But since the difference between agent-specific and kind-relative statuses does not concern the number of people with the status, we must have some other means for telling the two types of status apart. Notice that kind-relative statuses have counterfactual import. If one passes a law that forbids felons to vote, it applies to all felons, and if additional felons were to exist, it would apply to them as well. Kind-relative statuses do not distinguish between actual and possible instances of the kind. Agent-specific statuses are different. One cannot make a promise to merely possible agents. One can use a kind to designate the range of people to which a promise applies—"Attention citizens of Gotham: I promise to rid your city of masked super-villains! "—but this is a promise to the actual people of Gotham. This restriction to actual rather than counterfactual marks a normative transaction as agent-specific rather than kind-relative. Agent-neutrality raises its own specter of especially tricky issues and 28. Though this hook is a collaborative work, and though we undertake joint commitment to all the claims made throughout, the nature of much of what we discuss requires the use of the first-person singular. We trust that our shifts in this regard will not lead to confusion.

Pragmatism, Pragmatics, and Discourse

25

possible misunderstandings. To begin with, when we say that the input of a declarative is agent-neutral, the point is that there is nothing about the entitlement to a declarative speech act that structurally indexes that entitlement to any particular agent or agents with specific normative positions. Rather, what entitles a declarative speech act is the character of our shared, public world. 29 Now in fact, it will rarely, if ever, be the case that everyone has an entitlement to perform a declarative. Contingencies of expertise, location, access to testimony, etc., will determine who can actually take up an agent-neutral entitlement and properly utter a declarative. If Jones justifiably declares, "Mitosis is a form of reproduction," then Smith might still not be in a position to declare this—either in virtue of having committed himself to the Stork Theory of Reproduction, or because of simple ignorance of this fact. Indeed, surely there are properly performed declaratives that express knowledge that only a few people, or maybe even only one person, have the epistemic skills to discern. A particularly gifted physician, for instance, might be able to diagnose a rare disorder on the basis of an examination, and might be genuinely warranted in declaring that a patient suffers from this disorder. This might be so even though no one else would be entitled to make this declaration, even with access to the very same facts and sensory inputs. And yet, we want to claim, the input entitlement in these cases remains agent-neutral, because it purports to express entitlement to facts that are public and in no way agent-relative, even if the epistemic conditions that allow these facts to be used to warrant claims are themselves agent-relative. 3'' That is, the agent-neutrality or agent-relativity of an input is based on the nature of the entitlement itself, wherever it came from.n 29. Does this mean that we cannot declare anything about 'private' entities such as mental states? We accept a basically Wittgensteinian line here. We think that we do, in fact, have access to one another's mental states. We can see and know that other people have various emotions, beliefs, etc. To the extent that there is some truly private element to our mental life—if Such an idea is coherent—that would be just the kind of thing that we could not talk about in language. As we progress through this book, it will become clearer why such Wittgensteinian Sympathies are required and justified by our project. 30. Most people—though not all!—are particularly gifted at discerning their own mental Kates. But this does not mean that what is true about a person's mental states for that person is not true about that person for someone else. 31. Thus, our distinction does not align with Dummett's distinction between the criteria and consequences of application, discussed, among many other places, in his Frege: Philosophy of Language, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).

I

26

1 1 111

`Yo!' and Tol'

Furthermore, along with the agent-neutrality of the inputs, in such cases, goes the universality of these inputs as a regulative ideal. That is to say, to the extent that someone does not have access to an agent-neutral entitlement, he is defective, albeit perhaps in an extremely common and blameless way. If everyone had all the epistemic skills and evidence available to them that anyone had (as well as the same antecedent commitments, biases, level of effort, etc.), then everyone would be entitled to utter the same declaratives as everyone else (subject to some interesting qualifications and precisifications we discuss below). There is nothing about the entitlement that indexes it to any particular kind of agent. This is not true of imperatives, which have agent-relative inputs. It is in no sense a defect in a concert pianist, for instance, that she is not also a colonel, and hence not entitled to issue certain sorts of imperatives to privates that colonels are entitled to issue. Analogous points can be made about declaratives on the output end. When one puts forward a claim as a declarative—as a claim about the way things objectively are—one professes that the claim is true, not simply "true for me," or some such. In Brandomian lingo, Jones's entitled declaration, "Mitosis is a form of reproduction," issues reassertion and inference licenses that are not indexed to any specific agent or kind of agents. The output of her declaration is agent-neutral, in the sense that nothing about Jones's speech act, insofar as it is serving a declarative function, targets any particular kind of agent. Brandom would say that it issues such licenses universally, but this language is quite misleading. Because of ignorance of Jones's claim, ignorance of enough about Jones to make trust in her word rational, incompatible beliefs, or any of a number of other reasons, many people— most people—are not suddenly entitled to reassert Jones's claim and use it in inference just in virtue of her having made it. Thus the issuing of a "universal" reassertion license cannot mean that everyone will he in a position to make use of it. Rather, the actual agent-neutrality of the output goes along with its universality as a regulative ideal. It is, as it were, a claim for everyone, which strives to contribute to the bank of public knowledge shared by the discursive community. There is a practical point to uttering a declarative, qua declarative, as long as there is anyone left who has not yet taken up the agent-neutral entitlement it offers. Again, the contrast with imperatives is instructive. When the colonel issues an order to the private, her order is specifically targeted at that per-

Pragmatism, Pragmatics, and Discourse

27

son. Others are not bound by it, not because her order was defective, or because they are defective in the uptake of the act, but because they were not its structural targets, even in the ideal. Notice that in ordinary language we speak both of what 'is known', or what 'we know', as well as of what Jones knows or what I know. That is, when keeping track of what we know, we seem to keep two sets of books, as it were: those governing particular people, and those agentneutral facts about what is known. There is an important sense in which once Daniel Mazia discovered that mitosis is a form of reproduction, or once our skillful doctor discovered that Mr. Brown had rare disease x, it became true that we know these facts, even though not everyone in the community knows them. As a textbook might put it, "We have known since 1951 that mitosis is a form of reproduction" (a statement most assuredly not true of the authors of this hook). Consider a useful analogy for these two sets of books. In typical team sports, we can look at a goal either from the point of view of its effect on the score of the game, or in terms of its effect on individual players' statistics. In the latter sense, we can intelligibly say that the midfielder scored a goal in the eighty-ninth minute. In that sense, the accomplishment was agent-relative; it was her goal and not anyone else's. But in the former sense, the team scored the goal. In terms of the primary scoring regime of soccer, it is quite incoherent to attribute a goal to any particular player. Indeed, the sense in which the goal is the midfielder's is the sense in which we give the midfielder some sort of special credit for bringing it about that the team scored a goal. The midfielder (with or without help) accomplished or brought about the scoring of a goal-forReal-Madrid. The analogous point applies to declarative speech acts. When a logician proves that R has 3,088 Ackerman constants, she personally brings it about that we know this, that it is known, and the accomplishment has an agent-neutral status. In both cases, an individual makes a normative achievement for all of us, as a representative, as it were, of the whole. Agent-neutral inputs are ideally universal, in the sense that were all people to live up to all the normative ideals—including all the epistemic norms—that apply to them, they would all have access to all the agentneutral input entitlements. They would be able to know and do everything whose entitlement is not structurally agent-relative. Whereas it is a defect in an agent that he fail to be entitled to an agent-neutral entitle-

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'Vol' and `Lo!'

28

ment, it is a defect in the functioning of a speech act that it fail to impute its agent-neutral entitlement universally. Normally, both are unremarkable, thoroughly exculpable defects. A declarative speech act may fall short of being a successful performance because of problems with the speaker (not everyone trusts her, or she wasn't in fact entitled to say what she said), the audience (some people were not bright enough to get the point, or have a false belief that is incompatible with her claim), or, most commonly, the performance itself (not everyone heard it, as is virtually always the case). All or almost all declaratives will be at least somewhat defective. There is nothing spooky about this virtually universal defectiveness: no one ever shoots a perfect game of golf either. There is a trivial sense in which simply not knowing something that is true is a defect. One is less than omniscient any time one fails to know something true. And yet, we want to claim that the proper performance of a declarative, at least the first time it is uttered, turns failure to be entitled to that declarative into a defect in a different and stronger sense. Otherwise, there would be no reason for us to claim that such an entitlement is part of the agent-neutral output of a declarative speech act, given that not everyone will be in a position to take up the entitlement. In uttering a justified declarative, a speaker offers a truth-claim up for public consumption, or adds it to the public bank of knowledge—her claim is now part of what we know, in the agent-neutral sense we described. An individual's failure to know what her discursive community knows puts her in a position of discursive deficiency—susceptibility to legitimate correction by others—that is concretely different from a mere failure of omniscience. While the mere fact that P can never constitute someone's grounds to correct your belief that not-P, our agent-neutral entitlement to P always does. 32 Before 'we' discovered that there were planets orbiting stars other 32. Often, the one who achieves this agent-neutral status will also achieve personal justiEcation, but this is not essential. imagine a scientist asking her diligent but relatively uneducated research assistant to run a test in the lab and to report back to her, telling her 'A if the test comes out one way and 'E if it comes out another way. After properly running the test, the RA receives the result that she knows is to be reported as 'A!, and hence she declares 'A to her supervisor. Now in fact, 'A might be a scientific result that is proven by the test results. Hence we now know that A. But the research assistant might not understand that 'A! describes a truth proven by the test. (For all she knows, the test just provides incremental evidence that A). Hence she would not be justified, personally, in believing what she declares at the time that she declares it

29

than our sun, for instance, we were all in some sense defective for not knowing this fact; however, no one had a proper entitlement to demand that others believe it. But once 'we' discover these planets, anyone who claims that there are no such planets can properly be corrected. Thus the proper performance of a declarative has implications for the normative status of everyone in a discursive community—for example by turning some epistemic statuses into new sorts of social defects—even though it is unlikely to fulfill its ideal discursive function of passing on a universal reassertion and inference license. The achievement of an agent-neutral entitlement always precludes entitlement by anyone else to any claim incompatible with the claim in question: once we discover planets orbiting other stars, it can never be the case that anyone can be properly entitled to the belief that there are no such planets (although, given incomplete knowledge, someone may still have good reasons for such a belief). To summarize: in the case of a declarative, the entitlement that follows from its performance is the agent-neutral entitlement "our knowing that P" An immediate normative upshot of this idea is that the achievement of the entitlement constitutes anyone's failure to know as a socially significant sort of defect—ignorance or unjustified incompatible belief. On the other hand, no such agent-neutrality is built into an imperative, such as the colonel's imperative "Raise your hand when your name is called." Nothing in the structure of the colonel's entitlement to issue this order suggests that everyone ought to be able to issue this order, or that everyone ought to respond to the order, even in the ideal. It is no defect, no matter how exculpable, not to follow the colonel's order, if you are not the one to whom the order was issued.

1.5 Several Caveats Speech acts are embedded and embroiled within the elaborate normative structure of human practices, and as such, it is often tricky to focus our attention on a single dimension of their discursive normative structure. Here are some warnings concerning how our attention can be led astray. The function of a speech act insofar as it transforms discursive normative statuses needs to be distinguished from the various other normative functions and effects it might have. Just as a football player can perform actions that uphold or violate the rules of football reasonably independently from whether those same actions uphold or violate

Nor and 'Lor

30

norms of etiquette, morality, aesthetics, or good grammar, the norms governing communication are multilayered and not all of them specifically concern discursive pragmatics. An order may be designed not only to impute an obligation but also to insult, praise, humiliate, remind, collude, display power, etc., and it has such normative effects within a whole network of norms that are not particularly discursive— norms of etiquette, institutional structure, morality, and so on. Someone who interrupts a mathematics colloquium to snidely interject a counterexample is violating norms, but not necessarily mathematical norms. Someone who makes a dumb point in a meeting is violating norms of rationality, but not necessarily Robert's Rules of Order. The norms of keeping secrets, being polite, sticking to parliamentary meeting or debating rules, etc., are all norms governing discourse that are independent from the layer of narrowly discursive normative functioning that we are isolating here. An order may fulfill its pragmatic discursive function perfectly while violating a myriad of other kinds of norms (including, perhaps, other narrowly linguistic norms: "You give that book to her and I right now!"). But we can still isolate (or do a reasonably good job of isolating) its pragmatic discursive function and its place in a network of discursive norms. 33 It is perhaps impossible—and certainly beyond our capacity—to offer a clean definition demarcating which parts of the normative structure of a speech act properly belong to its discursive functional structure. However, we hope that the notion has intuitive appeal and will become clearer as we progress. Not only do we need to separate the norms governing the pragmatic discursive function of a speech act from the other norms that govern it, but we must also differentiate between the accidental, circumstantial effects of a speech act and those that are essential to its proper functioning. In the domain of semantics, at least some mild form of meaning ho33. This is not to say that such discursive norms and other social norms governing language won't have a complex, mutually constitutive, intertwined relationship to one another. For instance, that a speech act occurs in the context of a meeting governed by Robert's Rules might well have everything to do with the proper reading of its pragmatic structure and functioning as a speech act. Speech acts performed by the chair, for instance, are likely to have a different performative structure and force from behaviorally similar acts by the other meeting attendees, or from those by the person who comes in during the meeting to refill the coffee urn. That the functioning of a speech act within Robert's Rules helps constitute its functioning

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31

lism is accepted by the majority of philosophers; most would admit that the contours of the meaning of a sentence or concept are in some sense shaped by or subject to an elaborate and extensive network of semantic relationships. At the same time, only the most harebrained holistic extremist believes that every one of the meanings in this extended network is relevantly part of the meaning of any one term. 34 We acknowledge that our beliefs about evolution, pet shop ethics, carrots, and good-luck charms are, in some sense, relevant to the contours of the meaning of 'rabbit', but at the same time we are (most of us) comfortable saying that nothing about pet shop ethics or good-luck charms is integrally part of what we mean when we talk about rabbits. In these postWittgensteinian days, it would be foolish to think that we could draw a hard and fast line of this sort or specify in advance a litmus test for something's being integral to a meaning, but we negotiate the distinction mostly without difficulty all the same. In just the same way, we need to hold on to an intuitive, reasonably robust, yet not fully specifiable distinction between the normative effects that are integral to a given pragmatic structure and those that are its external normative fallout, as it were. When Rebecca orders Mark to revise his example, many changes in normative status occur: Maggie, who overheard the comment, now believes that Mark will change his example; Karen, who also overheard, now is entitled to order both Rebecca and Mark to close the door to keep the noise down; Mark, who is tired of Rebecca criticizing his examples, now feels slighted and irritated; Rebecca is now entitled to believe that she will find the example in its final form more compelling than it is in its current form; and so forth. But the change in normative status that Mark undergoes—namely, his new prima fade responsibility to revise the example—is integral to the imperatival structure of the original speech act in a way that the rest of this normative fallout is not. Similarly, any speech act with an agentneutral output—one that changes everyone's status impersonally—will have all sorts of agent-relative fallout: Rebecca's claim "Mark's dog is hungry," uttered within earshot of Mark, functions to make an impersonal truth-claim, even though, along the way, it also serves to give Mark the agent-relative commitment to feed his dog, and so forth. (But here is

within discursive communication proper does not mean that there is no distinction between

34. For one non-harebrained interpretation of holism, see Lance and O'Leary-Hawthorne, The Grammar of Meaning, chapter 2, which also makes out a normative notion of the analytic/

these.

synthetic distinction that we take to mesh rather nicely with what we say here.

32

'Yo!' and 'Lo!'

an example of why surface grammar can at best be a guide to pragmatic structure; Rebecca might utter these very same words for the express and primary purpose of ordering Mark to feed his dog.) It is important to keep in mind the distinction between effects that are essential and those that are accidental to the discursive function of a speech act, lest every speech act look like just a messy mixture of agentneutral and agent-relative inputs and outputs. As this work progresses, it will become increasingly clear that most and perhaps all speech acts do have both agent-neutral and agent-relative inputs and outputs, and not only as a matter of accidental fallout, but essentially as a condition of their functioning at all. But the terrain of inputs and outputs that any speech act engages is not a jumble but a prioritized structure. We have seen that speech acts are embedded within layers of norms of various sorts, not all of which concern their essential discursive function. We have also seen that output statuses function as regulative ideals that a given speech act, qua discursive act, strives to—but may not— achieve. It follows that we cannot determine the agent-neutrality or agent-relativity of the output of a speech act by looking at whether it in fact has the same normative impact on everyone. Indeed, because of the intersection of competing layers of norms, we cannot even assume that a speech act with an agent-neutral output ideally or by intention affects everyone the same way. Consider the analogy of gift giving. 35 Suppose that Mark makes a statue and presents it as a gift. Imagine three different ways in which he might offer this gift. • He makes it for his mother, Helen, as a Mother's Day gift. It is for her properly having the agent-relative status of belonging to Helen, a status it would have even if she died, rejected it, destroyed it, or in any other way became unable to help realize this constitutive purpose. In this case Mark's gift-giving performance has an agentrelative output. • He makes a public statue, as a gift to the community. In this case, the statue is for everyone, in the agent-neutral sense. It will be for everyone, in this sense, even if not everyone will see it, not everyone wants it, not everyone even knows that it exists. This giftgiving performance has an agent-neutral output. 35. With thanks to Maggie Little for suggesting the analogy

Pragmatism, Pragmatics, and Discourse

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• He makes a public statue, as a gift to the community However, since his work happens to be an aesthetically stunning representation of a naked homosexual couple, the city decides that it would not be appropriate to mount the statue on the public square in front of the local nursing home. Instead it is placed in a park in the midst of the bohemian district, where conservatives and the elderly rarely travel. In this case, the gift is still offered to the public and the act of gift giving still has an agent-neutral output. But there are social proprieties that determine that the statue will end up in a place where only some people will be in a position to take advantage of this gift. The statue belongs to the community, but because of norms external to those of gift giving, only some members of the community will make use of it—and appropriately so. Likewise, if someone utters a declarative by telling a secret, or in e context of a closed meeting, this does not detract from the agentneutrality of the output of this declarative. Other social norms will govern who is in a position to hear and use the claim. In that sense, the declarative will fall short of living up to the discursive regulative ideal of niversality, because of the conflict between this ideal and other social arms. Though only some will receive the claim, nonetheless qua derative—qua knowledge claim—it is for everyone. Like the statue, it is ublic property, even though only some will have practical access to this roperty. Though there may be good non-epistemic reasons for those tin on the secret not to know the truth, they are nonetheless ignorant, hich is an epistemic defect. It is true that for a secret telling to function as such, it must not fully cceed in executing its declaratival function. But this should neither be uzzling nor lead one to doubt that it still has this declaratival function. nsider an intentional walk in baseball. Here, the pitcher is trying to 'tch balls, so as to, for example, load the bases. But the idea of an intenonal walk is essentially derivative on the basic idea of a pitch, the confitutive goal of which is to throw a strike. It would not be a pitch at all "thaw participating in that goal, and this despite the fact that its denytive function requires that it partially fail in its more fundamental one. his same tension between fundamental and derivative structure is oprive in such linguistic phenomena as secret telling, sarcasm, rhetori1 questions, etc. There is no conceptual puzzle built into the fact that

34

'Ye!' and T.o !'

acts of speaking are determined by multiple systems of norms, which are often not fully consistent with one another, 1.6 Entitlement and Epistemic Responsibility We have argued that any properly performed speech act with an agentneutral output transforms anyone's failure to have access to entitlement to that output into a kind of a defect. Once it is known that P, then anyone who doesn't know P is substantively ignorant, by the standards of the discursive community, and one who believes not-P is unjustified, and in a status of disagreeing with something known. However, as we mentioned, there is an important sense in which the mere fact that something is the case is sufficient to make failure to know it—and hence failure to be entitled to declare it—into a defect, namely the defect of non-omniscience. But this might lead us to wonder: What difference does it make, normatively speaking, if someone actually performs a declarative, from the point of view of the normative status of everyone else? If it was already a defect not to know something true, how does the fact that this truth has now been declared make any agentneutral normative difference? We argued that the declaration puts the claim into social space in a new way. But one might object that there could be nothing agent-neutral about this achievement. Uttering a claim, including a properly entitled one, isn't going to make all the ignorant people know it, so the most such an utterance can do is create some new beliefs in some people, and this effect is a matter of degree. Some declaratives are taken up by nearly everyone, some by a special few who are in the know, and some by nobody. Presumably, the claim expresses something that was already, agent-neutrally true, and the effect of the claim seems to be to help some people know this truth, rather than to change everyone's status agent-neutrally. 36 Taking up this important challenge in detail will allow us to explore some of the contours and complexities of epistemic responsibility. On the one hand, we are not responsible for knowing everything that is true, even though we are in some sense defective in virtue of our lack of omniscience. None of us can be held accountable for knowing the number 36. We are grateful to Richard Manning for raising this worry, in his "Comments on Kukla and Lance," presented at Georgetown University, April 2005.

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of rocks on Neptune or what Julius Caesar had for breakfast the morning before the Ides of March. Even more strongly, there are many things that we perfectly well could find out if we wanted to, but in which no one has a stake, nor any reason why she should have one, and we're not answerable for these things either. We are not responsible for knowing how many leaves are on the birch tree behind the old schoolhouse, although we could become responsible for knowing such a thing if it came to matter for some reason (and one can always dream up such reasons). In other words, there seems to be a special class of epistemic defects that matter to us, insofar as we are actually situated within a concrete epistemic community, in which members have concrete epistemic positions and concrete concerns. While we are not responsible for knowing everything, we are—singly and collectively—always responsible for knowing more than we actually do know. The mere fact that we haven't bothered to notice something or find something out doesn't mean that we are not epistemically responsible for doing so. It is indeed an epistemic failure, on my part, if I don't notice that my son is afraid to go to school, and it is a failure on our part, as a community, that we don't know how to dose various life-saving drugs for female patients because we have only tested them on male subjects. I am responsible for knowing commonly cited facts, noticing the brute features of my environment, and drawing straightforward inferences; if I don't do these things, I am not living up to the epistemic norms that bind me. Though there is less that plays a role in the space of reasons than all that is the case, there is nonetheless more than all that has been recognized or justified. When we are defective in the sense of failing to live up to our epistemic responsibilities (as we all always are to some extent), we are defective in a stronger sense than that of mere failure of omniscience. We have positive duties to observe, investigate, and think—positive duties that imply that there is such a thing as culpable epistemic negligence. While you may be afraid to find out what your child is doing with her evenings, you may nonetheless be responsible for recognizing the fact that she is a drug addict. Though scientists may not have bothered to put women in their clinical drug trials, they are nonetheless unjustified in drawing generalizations that fly in the face of the relevant (unknown) facts about the effects of the drugs on women, because they are responsible for knowing these facts. Some events in the world, given how they are positioned within a social world of epistemic

36

'Yo and tor

agents with concerns and stakes in how things are, have the normative significance of being such that you ought to attend to them. 37 So the boundaries around what we are responsible for knowing carve out an area larger than the known and smaller than the knowable. How exactly these boundaries should be drawn depends on an endlessly complex cocktail of our collective capacities, skills, projects, interests, values, and environment. If we did not have epistemic responsibilities to know that could outstrip our actual knowledge, then the notion of failing in our epistemic responsibilities would be meaningless, and inquiry would cease to be a normative activity. There has to be a possible gap between what we are responsible for knowing and what we know. And if we had epistemic responsibilities only for drawing inferences from what was already known, rather than for seeking out and attending to new empirical facts through skilled observation, then the empirical world would not serve as a tribunal to which we hold ourselves accountable in inquiry. This means not only that we can exercise our receptive capacities, but that we are under an epistemic injunction to do so in specific ways. 38 Now of course some kinds of epistemic responsibilities are agentrelative. I am responsible for noticing my son's fear in a way that you are not. This is a moral difference between us. But there is also a sense in which we can talk about agent-neutral epistemic responsibilities. Insofar as a fact is or should be something that 'we' know, to that extent we are all answerable to it, and we each fail to meet our individual epistemic responsibilities, however minimally or exculpably, if we don't know it. While it may not be morally required that you know about my son's fear, if you don't know about it, you don't know something that matters. No one can blame me for not knowing arcane facts about muons published in specialized physics journals. But clearly this lack of knowledge is an epistemic defect in me in a way that my lack of knowledge of the number of rocks on Neptune is not. We know about muons because muons matter to us, and I know less than is known. Further, the fact that something is known, while it may not provide a 37. We take our account of normative accountability in this section to he deeply sympathetic with that given, in much more detail, in Rouse, How Scientific Practices Mutter, from which we have inherited the language of 'stakes' in particular. 38. Many epistemological theories ignore this requirement, explaining at most why the empirical beliefs we do have can be justified, but leaving one the option of defending one's beliefs by simply locking oneself in a sound- and light-proof room.

Pragmatism, Pragmatics, and Discourse

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positive duty for me to find it out, most certainly does provide a positive prohibition against my denying it. Were I to deny something that is known, I would be subject to social correction; that is, I would be liable to being held to the epistemic norms by others in the community. And even though it is clearly not my personal social responsibility (given my training and expertise) to find out how heart medication should be dosed for women, it is our failing, in which I participate, that we don't know this. In this broad sense, anything that either is or should be known by anyone is something that 'we' should know, precisely because of the agent-neutral outputs of our epistemic activities. This is part of what is special about epistemic responsibilities as opposed to other sorts: the fact that truth itself is agent-neutral goes tightly hand in hand with the fact that our narrowly epistemic responsibilities to it are shared. In light of all this, let us return to the question of the difference that the performance of declaratives actually makes to the status of other members of a discursive community. Some declaratives create new epistemic responsibilities by adding to the body of collective knowledge; they report on a new piece of knowledge—be it an empirical truth-claim justified by an observation, or a complex inference, or whatever—for the first time and thereby enter it into social epistemic space. In this case their agent-neutral import seems clear. The real question, then, is what to do with those declaratives that reassert what is already known, most paradigmatically by telling it to someone who did not yet know it. Such declaratives can seem to have no agent-neutral outputs. The truth-claims they assert are already known `by us', so they do not enter those claims into agent-neutral social space or create new agent-neutral epistemic responsibilities. Their pragmatic function is specifically to tell some people who don't already know about something. How can this involve an agent-neutral output? The answer turns on remembering that speech acts, on our account, are nonnative functions that strive to accomplish something but will often fall short of doing so. We have argued that the agent-neutrality of the output of a declarative (or an observative, for that matter) goes along with an idea! of universal uptake. Such speech acts seek uptake from everyone, although they will rarely achieve this. Thus, when we offer up new knowledge in an observative or a declarative, that knowledge is for everyone but will only be taken up by some people. Universal uptake is part of the telos of these speech acts, but not part of what they typically accomplish. But this means that there is still a performative point to ut-

38

Pragmatism, Pragmatics, and Discourse

`Yo!' and 'LW'

tering a declarative that states something that has already been stated, in a new context, at a new time, to new listeners, etc. It is true—and important—that such repetitive declaratives which anaphorically pick up on the content of a prior speech act do not in any way change the ideal normative statuses of anyone in the community, for the prior speech act already established that ideal, and turned failure to live up to that ideal into a social epistemic defect. Rather, they normally change the facts about who lives up to that idea] by actually taking up the claim. But this means that the output of the declarative—qua declarative—is agent-neutral, even though the practical point of uttering it is only to change the normative status of specific (formerly ignorant) people. Like its anaphoric predecessor, its output is a truth-claim on everyone. Indeed, it calls upon those who did not already accept the claim to do so, not in virtue of specific agent-relative facts about them, but agent-neutrally, as mere members of the discursive epistemic community. There is an important sense in which thefirst utterance of a declarative can effect a normative transformation that is different from what the subsequent utterances will accomplish. But this does not take away the practical point to reasserting declaratives, or the agent-neutrality of their Output. And again, utterances will never be purely declarative—they will enact multiple functions and have multiple inputs and outputs, and they will also be caught up in various levels of social and ethical normativity that do not directly concern their functioning as truth-claims. So, of course, there will be times when I specifically want you to hear and accept a particular claim. In this case, my speech act strives for an agentrelative effect. (For detailed discussion of such tellings, see Chapter 7.) But insofar as I want you to accept my claim as a warranted truth (and not, for instance, as something that I am demanding that you say because I am your boss), I want you to accept it as making an agent-neutral claim on you and giving you an agent-neutral entitlement. I want you to accept it not as true for you and me, but as true tout court.

1.7 Where We Go from Here In this introductory chapter we have focused on two types of speech acts, namely declaratives and imperatives. We have done so both be-

34

cause their structure, with respect to our typology, is relatively straightforward, and, perhaps more to the point, because these are the pragmatic categories of speech acts most familiar to philosophers. However, the attention we so far have paid to speech acts that fall into boxes 1 and 4 of our grid naturally raises the question of what sorts of speech acts might fit into boxes 2 and 3. A speech act in box 2 would be one with an agent-relative input and an agent-neutral output. Thus, its entitlement would be indexed to a specific kind of agent, or a particular agent, but it would offer up an agent neutral normative status that is not so indexed. Although we will argue in Chapter 4 that Austinian performatives are not the best example of box-2 speech acts, some Austinian performatives provide relatively clear and philosophically familiar examples of how a box-2 speech act would work. Consider an old philosophical favorite, namely a baptism: "I name this ship the Queen Gizelba." This speech act has an agentrelative input: only someone with a specific authoritative position, not even ideally extendable to everyone, can baptize a ship. But the output of the baptism is agent-neutral: its main effect is to make it true for everyone that this is now the ship's proper name, and to create a public entitlement to use this name, in conversations, legal documents, or whatever else. A box-3 speech act would primarily function to draw upon an agentneutral entitlement in order to impute an agent-relative status. That is, it would use publicly available features of the world in order to target a particular agent or kind of agent for special normative entitlements or commitments. In Chapter 5 we will argue that many deontic claims— those we will call 'prescriptives'—are examples of speech acts with this structure. A claim such as "Jim ought to do a better job of taking care of his dog" does not have its performance entitlement indexed to any particular kind of agent. If it is properly performed by anyone, it is because it reflects agent-neutral (moral and empirical) features of a public world. On the other hand, the claim has special, nonfungible normative implications for Jim. So far we have defended or provisionally suggested the categorizations of speech acts shown in Figure 3. In Chapters 2 and 3 we will examine the contents of box 2 in detail. Chapter 4 provides a brief interlude in which we consider the status of Austinian performatives. Chapter 5 will be devoted to box 3. In -

40

`Yo!'

and

to!'

Pragmatism, Pragmatics, and Discourse

Chapters 6 and 7 we will turn to a different—and in our view fundamental—category of box-4 speech acts. Chapter 8 concerns the character and constitution of discursive communities and the agents that inhabit them. Our special concern with declaratives in this first chapter should not be read as another inscription of the primacy of the declarative, which would amount to an instance of the declarative fallacy. By the end of the book we will have argued that at least two other pragmatic functions of language are as fundamental as its declaratival function. These are (1) giving expression and calling attention to a speaker's receptive recognition of an empirical state of affairs ("La, a rabbit!") and (2) call-

Input --0-

Output

Agent-neutral

Agent-neutral

Agent-relative

1

2 Relative input Neutral output

Neutral input Neutral output Declaratives

3 Neutral input Relative output Agent-relative

Figure 3

Prescriptives (i.e. ought-claims)

Baptisms

4 Relative input Relative output Imperatives (promises, invitations, reproaches...)

41

ing or hailing another person ("Yo, Fiona!"). In distinctively different ways, our abilities to perform Lo-utterances and Yo-utterances are transcendental conditions upon the possibility of speaking a language with which we communicate with one another about a shared objective world.

1 1111

Observatives and the Pragmatics of Perception

I. .1 1(1 11" 11 1 ,1 1 1 11111 1111

2

1 1 11"11 ,11111111

Observatives and the Pragmatics of Perception

I

;hi

I. I I

1

Among categories of speech acts, declaratives and imperatives have received the lion's share of attention from philosophers of language, and indeed we upheld this trend in Chapter 1. Declaratives and imperatives share a significant feature: the pragmatic scope of their input matches that of their output. That is, where declaratives are agent-neutral in both input and output, imperatives are agent-relative in both input and output. Historically, focusing on these two types of speech acts has, not surprisingly, obscured the whole distinction between inputs and outputs: philosophers are used to thinking in terms of agent-neutrality or agentrelativity, tout court, but they have not noticed that the question of the scope of a norm, reason, or speech act has to be asked separately with respect to its input and its output. However, some of the most philosophically interesting work that we do, as members of discursive communities, gets done by actions that instantiate 'mixed' normative functions, belonging in boxes 2 and 3 of our grid (that is, with agent-neutral inputs and agent-relative outputs, or with agent-relative inputs and agentneutral outputs). Our purpose in this chapter is to explore some inhabitants of box 2 and their philosophical significance. A successful box-2 speech act must be one that, as a matter of its pragmatic structure, has an agent-relative input. As in the case of an imperative, entitlement to its performance must be structurally indexed to an agent (or agents) with a particular normative position that is not generalizable even in the ideal. At the same time, it must have an agentneutral output. As in the case of a declarative, it must pass on entitlements and commitments that are not indexed to particular agents, but 42

43

are rather public, whether or not everyone manages to take them up. It must make a claim that is not for anyone in particular, but rather has `universal validity', as Kant would say. What might such speech acts be? Near the end of Chapter 1, we suggested that certain Austinian performatives, such as baptisms, seem to belong to box 2: only someone with a specific normative position can perform a baptism—taking a stroll through a neonatal nursery and shouting names at other people's babies does not constitute baptizing them— but a successful baptism makes it the case for everyone that this thing or person has this name. In Chapter 4, however, we will argue that while such examples may be helpful for initial clarificatory purposes, most Austinian performatives are not the most compelling, paradigmatic, or philosophically interesting or important examples of box-2 speech acts as such. Kant is perhaps the only figure in the history of philosophy who has identified a type of speech act that belongs in box 2—that is, one with agent-relative input and agent-neutral output. In his discussion of the structure of aesthetic judgments of taste in the Third Critique, Kant argues that judgments of taste are essentially singular, by which he means not only that they are about a single, concrete particular rather than a category of objects (though this follows immediately from his analysis), but also that they require a personal encounter with the object of judgment. He writes: "There can . . . he no rule in accordance with which someone could be compelled to acknowledge something as beautiful . . . No one allows himself to be talked into his judgment about that by means of any grounds or fundamental principles. One wants to submit the object to his own eyes."' The point here is not that no generally valid rules can predict with perfect accuracy which objects will be beautiful, though this is likely to be true too, but that even if we had such rules, inferring the beauty of an object on their basis wouldn't count as an aesthetic judgment of taste at all—what it is to make an aesthetic judgment is to aesthetically respond to a concrete, sensuous encounter with an object. As such, only my inherently agent-relative encounter with an object can be the ground for my judgment of taste, regardless of how confident I am on the basis of general principles that I would or wouldn't find this oh1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of fudgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 215-216.

44

Observatives and the Pragmatics of Perception

"ior and `Lo!'

ject beautiful once 1 encountered it. A judgment of taste, therefore, does not pass on a reassertion license—or better, a rejudgment license. "One wants to submit the object to his own eyes," Kant says, "and yet, if one then calls the object beautiful, one believes oneself to have a universal voice, and lays claim to the consent of everyone." Kant argues at length that even though my judgment of taste requires a personal encounter, in so judging I impute this judgment agent-neutrally, to everyone. I cannot pass on an entitlement to the same judgment as mine, but in judging I demand universal agreement. Even though I am well aware that in fact not everyone may judge as I do, in judging beauty I judge that the object is beautiful for everyone, in the sense that it is a defect in others if they fail to judge as I do. The judge "does not count on the agreement of others with his judgment of satisfaction because he has frequently found them to be agreeable with his own, but rather demands it from them [and} rebukes them if they judge otherwise." Although they cannot pass on universal reassertion licenses, they make a universal demand upon others to judge for themselves as I judge should they encounter the same object. In other words, my singular judgment of taste has an agent-neutral output, and it makes the normative claim that others are in error if they disagree with me, thereby 'laying claim' to universal agreement. Judgments of taste are not objective truth-claims, because of the agent-relativity of their input, but they have, as Kant puts it, subjective universal validity. Kantian judgments of taste are structurally agent-neutral in the validity they claim, even as they are structurally agent-relative in their entitlement; hence they belong in box 2. 2 Kant's claim is stronger than that the inputs of judgments of taste are agent-relative. For one thing—in the lingo of Chapter I—he is claiming that these inputs are agent-specific. It is not merely some particular social category of person to whom the entitlement of an aesthetic judgment 2. Ibid., 215-216,212-213. Because philosophers have not, in the past, distinguished between the inputs and outputs of judgments—which in retrospect is surprising, since Kant himself provided the framework [or thinking of judgments as normative functions—interpreters have struggled to make sense of Kant's talk of "singular judgments." Indeed, Kant himself changes the meaning of the term over the course of the critical philosophy. in the first critique, the `singularity' of a judgment concerns the extensional scope of its content—it is a judgment about only one thing. But in the third critique, the 'singularity' of a judgment is a feature of how the judgment is made—it is entitled only by a personal encounter. in the past, philosophers have not had good language available for making clear that this later Kantian singularity is a pragmatic category—it identifies a structural feature of the input of the judgment.

45

pplies. Though entitlement to give orders to privates may attach to ieutenants, and entitlement to name a child to any of its parents, aeshetic entitlement of this sort applies not to a specific category of person ut to a specific person. But Kant's claim is even stronger than that: for Ira, the input of a judgment of taste is essentiallyfirst-personai: it is esential to a judgment of taste that what I give expression to, in judgment, is my own response to the object I encounter. I can make no judgment of taste on behalf of another, no matter what our relationship or our similarities. While some have argued that aesthetic judgment in fact plays an essential role as a moment in regular objective assertion, for Kant, at least on the surface, Kantian judgments of taste form an esoteric category cut off from the main concerns of epistemology. 3 His discussion of them provides us with a beautiful historical precedent, but we will not focus on them as our paradigm of box-2 speech acts. Rather, in the rest of this chapter we turn to a category of speech acts that we believe share important structural similarities with Kant's judgments of taste. We argue that these speech acts play a pivotal role in discourse about and knowledge of an objective empirical world.

2.1 Observatives Consider the difference between two speech acts: • When my friend asks why I am crouching near a bush with a carrot, I declare, "There's a rabbit in the bush." • As I see a rabbit dart into a bush I call out, "Lo, a rabbit!" We claim that while both speech acts directly imply the presence of a rabbit in the bush—both would be misspoken if there were no rabbit in the bush—they differ crucially in pragmatic structure, in such a way as to make the latter, a speech act of a type we will call the 'observative', inhabit box 2 instead of box 1. First let us introduce the term `recognitive' for any speech act a function of which is to give expression to a speaker's recognition of something. • A recognitive does not, as such, assert a proposition about the content of 3. For further citations, see Rebecca Kukla, "Introduction: Placing the Aesthetic in Kant's Critical Epistemology," in Kukla, ed., Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant Critical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2006), 1-34.

46

Observatives and the Pragmatics of Perception

'Yo!' and 'Lo!'

what the speaker recognizes—although many recognitives will also be declaratives and do this as well. Rather, the pragmatic function of the recognitive is to discursively mark and communicate the event of recognition itself. English contains a few words and constructions that are specifically designed to mark this recognitive function, although most of them sound rather archaic: Tor, lior, and, as we will discuss in detail in Chapter 6, 'Yo!' and other hails (e.g. 'Ahoy!). Most often, however, we issue recognitives using utterances whose surface grammar is not distinctive. "There's a rabbit in the bushl" can either be a mere declarative statement of a truth (for instance, a truth we already knew or were told by someone else), or it can be an expressive response to actually seeing a rabbit. Because recognitives are not routinely marked by their surface grammar, we will, as a matter of notational convention, follow what seems to be the loose ordinary-language practice of using exclamation points to indicate the recognitive function of an utterance. So "I see a rabbit." is our way of writing a declarative statement about an observational state, whereas "I see a rabbit!" indicates that this utterance centrally gives expression to a recognitive event. Observatives, by stipulation, are those recognitives that give expression to our recognition of an empirical fact, object, or state of affairs in observation, and most paradigmatically in perception. (For more about other kinds of recognitives, see Chapters 6 and 7.) That is to say, observatives are much like what philosophers have called observation reports, except that the latter term does not distinguish between mere declarative reports on the content of observation and expressions of the event of observational recognition. The importance of this pragmatic distinction is a major thesis of this chapter. Opinions will differ as to the scope of the notion of observation. There are varieties of skillful recognition that will seem to many not to be instances of observation. We might think, for example, that someone can be in a position to 'see' that Rebecca is uncomfortable at parties with people she doesn't know well, or perhaps that a particular mathematical proof is inelegant. That is, philosophers will differ with respect to how narrowly they wish to tie the notion of observation to sensation. We want to remain neutral on this issue, and to avoid taking a stance concerning the boundaries of the empirical, the co-extension of perception and observation, and so forth. Our concern is with observatives insofar t as they give expression to recognitive episodes that provide direct, non-

47

inferential, receptive knowledge of the empirical world, regardless of disagreements over the scope of such knowledge. The output of an observative is agent-neutral. My epistemic accomplishment in expressing my observation of a rabbit establishes a public fact—indeed, it establishes a set of public facts, such as that there is a rabbit present, and that I see it. Again, if there were no rabbit present, 1 would have misspoken (although we shall argue below that its not quite right to say I would have spohen falsely). Accordingly, my warranted speech act provides anyone who accepts my entitlement to it with entitlement to the claim that there is a rabbit present (and that I see it, etc.). In virtue of a successful observative—"Lo, a rabbit!" for example—"we" now know (or "one knows") that there is a rabbit nearby. My observative directly and agent-neutrally licenses beliefs, inferences, and declarative speech acts concerning the presence of a rabbit (among other beliefs and declarations). Yet my observative does not seek, even as an ideal, to bring it about that anyone else has observed the rabbit, nor likewise that anyone else is entitled to utter "Lo, a rabbit!" Entitlement to the observative (the To!' speech act) is inherently one own. In uttering this speech act, I express my receptive recognition of a rabbit. This speech act does not merely make the declarative claim that a rabbit is present. Nor does it merely make the declarative claim that I see a rabbit. Rather, it serves a special recognitive function: it marks or expresses my detection of a rabbit. It is the recognizing, and not just what is recognized or who is recognizing, that is given expression in such a claim, and since what is expressed is the indexed recognition itself, this entitlement is not generalizable, even in the ideal. In this sense, observatives have a pragmatic structure analogous to Kantian judgments of taste. Tri this chapter's discussion of observatives, we sometimes focus on Lo-utterances because our most familiar examples of observatives in the philosophical literature come from Quine, who was fond of the locution. However, Lo-utterances actually form only a proper subset of observatives, and indeed one that has an additional distinctive pragmatic function. Notice that Lo-claims do more than just express recognition; they also ostend. That is to say, they call upon some others to attend to and recognize that which I am currently recognizing. If I see a rabbit that no one else is in a position to see—perhaps everyone but me is in another room of the house—I might call out an observative: "A rabbit!"; or --

48

-{

`Yo!' and to!'

"There goes a rabbit!" But it would be inappropriate for me to utter "Lo, a rabbit!" The To!' both expresses my observation and calls upon specific others to share in my attention and thereby to observe the same thing for themselves. Since this ostensive function is directed only at those around us who are in a position to re-create our receptive encounter, it is an agent-relative output of the Lo-utterance. This means that Lo-claims have a complex structure, involving both a box-2 observative function and a box-4 ostensive function. We will take up the importance of such special ostensive observatives in the next chapter, and again in our final chapter. Observatives—unlike declaratives—do not issue reassertion licenses. To perceive is to be uniquely placed, indexically, with respect to what I see. Perceptual episodes are inherently particular and non-fungible in just the way that the inferential and assertional entitlements to which they give rise are not. The inference and assertion licenses I 'pass on' when I express what I perceive meaningfully maintain their identity through their different incarnations in different speakers, but the original perceptual episodes do not. My utterance, "Lo, a rabbit! ," may commit you to the belief that there is a rabbit present. You may even declare that the rabbit is present on the basis of this belief, without having managed to see it: imagine, for example, that you are peering into a bush trying to see the rabbit that I have authoritatively sworn is in there, and when a passerby asks you why you are staring at the bush, you declare, "There is a rabbit in the bush." But unless you see the bunny yourself you are not entitled to utter "Lo, a rabbit!" Indeed, it would be deceptive for you to do so. And if you do see it, the source of your entitlement is this recognition—your recognition—not your acceptance of my entitlement to my own observative. Even if we insist that you see the very same thing as i do on a given occasion—you see the bunny also—we have two perceptual episodes grounding two different receptive entitlements, and not one. Just as only taking aesthetic pleasure in an object yourself can constitute an aesthetic judgment of beauty, likewise only seeing the rabbit yourself entitles you to this speech act—as opposed to, for instance, making a warranted inferential claim that there is a rabbit present. Observatives, that is, are licensed only for a concrete individual, from her particular, first-personal point of view, Perception paradigmatically yields new entitlements. But Rebecca's perception yields entitlements for her only insofar as she recognizes that she has perceived the bunny her-

Observatives and the Pragmatics of Perception

49

self, whereas Mark earns his entitlements through learning that someone else has perceived the bunny. These are not interchangeable sources of entitlement: my perception will only yield new entitlements for anyone if they originate with me—no one else but me can be the first to pass on my perceptual entitlements. To perceive, then—as opposed to just inheriting entitlement to a belief—is to be first-personally claimed by what I see. To express this firstpersonal episode in language is to take on a singular responsibility for correct observation in a way that is not an expression of any kind of shared, agent-neutral commitment. The receptivity of perception is one of the essential means by which my commitments and entitlements do not merely accrue to me, but make a claim on me. The perspectivally owned character of perception is not just a phenomenological fact that needs separate accommodation, but rather it is essential to the cash value of the game of giving and asking for reasons. This is a Kantian Commitment on our part. Part of the point of Kant's transcendental synthesis of apperception in the `I think' is just this necessarily firstpersonal ownership of objective representations. Kant himself may well be caught in the declarative fallacy here, insofar as he tries to capture this first-personality by adding an extra bit of propositionally structured representational content—the judgment that one is thinking the representation—to the original representation. For us, this first-personality is an irreducible feature of the pragmatic structure of the receptive event There are three distinct claims here. First, and most simply, the input entitlement to an observative is agent-relative. Second, just as with Kant's aesthetic judgments, it is agent-specific: 1 am entitled to my observative utterances, not insofar as I am a fungible instantiation of some category of agents, but because they give expression to my unique and fully con4. This leaves open the interesting question of whether one must be able to make explicit 0ne's own first-personal ownership of a receptive episode in order to count as a genuine perceiver. An anonymous referee pointed out that it is dubious that animals, for instance, could have such an explicit grasp of their own relationship to their perceptual states, while at the Same time it is hard to deny that they are perceivers. Everyone will agree that there is some imPortant sense in which animals perceive; the open question here is whether there is some richer ePiaternic practice that those of us who can explicitly recognize our first-personal states are engaging in when we perceive. So, For instance, Sellars and McDowell deny that animals are Perceivers in the full-blooded sense in which we are, for this reason, whereas Brandon and }Langeland have less strict prerequisites for such perception.

50

r and To r

crete encounter with the world. Third, the observative expresses my first-personal uptake of this agent-specific entitlement. Any speech act, including a declarative speech act, calls for a firstpersonal uptake of entitlement. Knowing that Mark is entitled to endorse the Kondo-Addison theorem provides me with no inferential guidance unless I know that I am Mark, and hence that I am entitled to endorse the theorem. But it does not follow from this that all speech acts—or even all speech acts with agent-specific entitlements—serve to express this first-personal uptake. When Rebecca says, "You are Eli," in the right context, she does so out of an agent-specific entitlement to baptize her child (and her speech act falls into box 2). But there is nothing in this sort of baptizing speech act that expresses her first-personal uptake of this entitlement.' In contrast, observatives have the essential function of giving expression to this first-personal uptake, and hence the first-person voice is a structural feature of their defining pragmatic function. At this point we can make explicit a final feature of the input entitlements of observatives: since they are both agent-specific and firstpersonal, they are also—like Kantian judgments of taste—essentially unshareable. That is, they express a first-person singular perspective, and never a first-person plural perspective. We come, to be entitled to a belief on the basis of observation because we encounter the world in a certain way. But such events of receptive encountering are essentially individuating, in a very specific sense. As Heidegger would put it, they are in each case mine. The point is that such concrete receptive encounters by their very nature build in essentially singular first-personal ownership of that encounter; observational episodes cannot even conceptually be understood as floating free of being someone's observational episode in particular. Whatever our metaphysics of subjectivity happens to be, and wherever we think that the boundaries of the individual may lie, it is built into the structure of certain events that only individuals can be the subjects of such events. Heidegger argued that only I can die my death: this 5. Conversely, it seems that there are speech acts that do serve—as part of their pragmatic structure—to express first-personal uptake of agent-neutral entitlements. Imagine that T claim to understand a well-known but difficult theorem. You doubt it I respond by saying "Watch!' and then writing down the proof. Here, it seems, l am expressing my first-personal uptake of agent-neutral entitlement to the theorem. if the term were not already a name for a grammatical type, we would he happy to label such performances "demonstratives.'

Observatives and the Pragmatics of Perception

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eath cannot be shared and no one can die for me (though someone tight die herself in order to spare my life, which is quite different). Just

essentially, no one but me can have my experiences or partake in y observations: they can be neither shared nor displaced. We might hink that only human beings can be individual subjects, or that the tatus should be extended to animals, corporations, social groups, or hatever. 6 We might think that individuals are in various ways inelimiably socially embedded, bound up in relationships, or historically contracted. But the structural point we are making here cuts across all of hese views: whatever individual subjects turn out to be, only one of hose can die a death, live a life, or recognize a rabbit in a bush.

,2 Observatives and Occasion Sentences On the basis of our analysis in the last section, we can say that observatives, given their agent-relative input and their agent-neutral output, beong in box 2 of our grid. At this point, we have defended the classifications indicated in Figure 4. Contemporary philosophers of language have not identified observa-i fives as speech acts with a distinctive pragmatic structure. This is odd, since observation reports have frequently been pressed into distinctive pragmatic service. Davidson, for instance, uses occasion sentences as the starting point for triangulation from the language of the interpretee to the language of the interpreter to the world itself.' Indeed, he takes our capacity to recognize speech acts as observation reports—or, more precisely, as assents to sentences whose truth fluctuates with the passing scene, as he puts it—as a primitive condition for the possibility of interpretation. It is odd, given this special pragmatic place that Davidson assigns, not just to observation, but specifically to the special speech acts that report on observations, that he did not concern himself with giving any kind of pragmatic analysis of these acts. For example, Davidson proposes no mechanism for differentiating between proper observatives, in our sense, and declarative speech acts 6. We (Mark and Rebecca) disagree as to whether a group or a corporation could potentially count as an individual subject in the relevant senses. 7. Davidson's triangulation argument shows up in multiple papers, but the classic source is "Three Varieties of Knowledge," reprinted in Davidson, Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001).

Observatives and the Pragmatics of Perception

'Yo!' and to!'

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with which I describe my own observational episodes—both of these simply count, for him, as observation reports. But it's hard to imagine how declarative descriptions of the contents of observation could anchor interpretation in any special way that other objective truth-claims could not. A Cartesian might try to mark out the speech acts that play a privileged role in anchoring interpretation at the level of semantic content, claiming that descriptions of the contents of our own experience ("I see a rabbit") are epistemologically prior to claims about the world. But such a view is not open to Davidson, who, like all post-Kantian neopragmatists, holds that the ability to have beliefs about the world is as primordial as the ability to have beliefs about the contents of one's own

• .

Input

11 111

—4.

Output

Agent-neutral

Agent-relative

if

Agent-neutral

1

2

Neutral input Neutral output

Relative input Neutral output

Declaratives

3 Neutral input Relative output Agent-relative

Kantian judgments of taste, baptisms, some recognitives, i.e. observatives

4 Relative input Relative output Imperatives (promises, invitations, reproaches...), ostensions

Ij Figure 4

1' 1

53

So there is no way to find the special role of observation in the semantics of claims like "I see that P." And semantics will not help us e turn simply to speech acts such as "There is a rabbit in the bush," for the content of such acts is just what is shared between observational and inferential episodes. A Davidsonian might well respond that what makes occasion sences distinctively useful in anchoring interpretation is the way they causally connected to the world, rather than their semantics or their ot pragmatics. But all speech acts are causally connected to the world some: how or other, and Davidson would need some non-question-begging way of making the causal origin of occasion sentences distinctively important. It certainly seems that these causes are important precisely be' cause they give rise to speech acts that are recognitive responses. But such responses need to be pragmatically distinguished from other speech acts we are to demarcate which causes give rise to them, rather than the other way around. Hence, we believe, Davidson implicitly depends upon o r ability to sort observatives from other inferentially fecund speech acts in virtue of their pragmatic function. 8 More generally, we suggest that observatives have been playing an important theoretical role in phisophy of language for some time now, and our analysis should be unrstood as making precise a notion upon which we were already dendent. perience.

3 Observing That and the Declarative Fallacy -

ven though they are not themselves assertions, observatives are firmly lant0 within the conceptually articulated space of reasons. "Lo, a rabit!" is an utterance that makes use of the concept `rabbit'; although it resses a receptive encounter, what it captures is not a preconceptual riven' but a conceptually articulated experience. (For discussion of the nceptually rich character of the content of observatives, see Chapter •) When philosophers have considered non-declarative, expressive lan8, Because Davidson focuses on sentences rather than speech acts, it would be hard for him draw this distinction. For after all one and the same sentence—such as "I see a rabbit"—can e as either an observative or a declarative report on one's observational state. Davidson and ine, despite their lack of pragmatic analyses, often use explicitly observative locutions such "La, a rabbits" for their examples of occasion sentences. This perhaps enables them to focus on speech acts that tend to do the pragmatic work they want without having explicitly idened their distinctive pragmatic structure.

54

`Yo!' and To!'

guage in the past, they have focused on inarticulate expletives like 'boo' and `yay'. Indeed, expressive language has been taken as almost synonymous with 'non-cognitivist' language.q However, observatives function differently from such traditional examples of expressive language. They ground beliefs and public knowledge, they facilitate discursive communication, and they allow us to give voice to our encounters with the objective world. Yet we maintain that observatives are not truth-claims, even though they license truth-claims. Truth is inherently public, and for that reason access to the truth is agent-neutral. (Although, again, not everyone will be equally able to access various truths.) While we are not proposing any kind of full-blown theory of truth in this book, we have suggested that the agent-neutral accessibility of truth goes right to the heart of what is distinctive about it truth is never for you or for me. Likewise, truth-claims essentially have agent-neutral inputs. While the content of what I observe is a matter of public truth, the event of my observation is inherently mine, and when and insofar as I give expression to that event in an observative I do not assert a truth, any more than I do when I shout "Ouch!" or give expression to other first-personal events. A revealing piece of evidence that observatives are not truth-claims is that although you might accept my entitlement to my Lo-utterance, and indeed accept on its basis that there is a rabbit present, it is pragmatically inappropriate for you to respond, "That's true!" Typical assertions of "That's true," whatever other function they may have, behave as "prosentences," which pick up their semantic content anaphorically, from an antecedent declarative. In response to a declarative, the claim "That is true" functions both as the assertion with the same content— semantic anaphora—and also as the re-performance of the very same speech act with the same declarative structure.w But if we acknowledge an observative—perhaps by saying "You're right"—we thereby claim the semantic content of the observative but without reinstantiating its pragmatic structure. This new speech act has the same output as the observative, but a very different input. Standard discussions of anaphoric prosentences, then, are ambiguous, failing as they do to distinguish the

,

II

'11.1 t. i

I I ^il

9. Allan Gibbard, Thinking How to Live (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003); C. L. Stevenson, Ethics and Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944).

i

Observatives and the Pragmatics of Perception

55

reproduction of a speech act type from the production of a new speech act with the same semantic content." Observatives often lack explicit propositional content. "Lo, a rabbit!" is perfectly idiomatic (at least insofar as anyone is pretentious enough to say "Lo!" at all). And "Land, ho!" is certainly idiomatic among Hollywood pirates. If we insist upon understanding observatives as a subcategory of declaratives, then we must read them as expressing their propositional content elliptically. But this introduces apparent arbitrariness when it comes to filling in the ellipsis. Is "Lo, a rabbit!" equivalent to "Lo, there is a rabbit present!," "Lo, there is a rabbit in the bush!," or perhaps "Lo, a rabbit is near enough to me for that to be remarkable!"? There seems no principled way to choose among the numerous declaratives that serve as output to the observative, and this makes the declaratival analysis seem decidedly ad hoc. We claim instead that these observatives are complete, well-formed utterances that imply propositianal truths with each of these contents (as well as many more), but that they are not themselves propositional in form. 12 - Now consider an observative that does not immediately raise the problem of ellipsis: "Willard is on the mat!" Unlike "Lo, a rabbit!," or even just "A rabbit!," this observative utterance takes the form of a proposition that can function as a purely declaratival expression. Clearly, there is an important sense in which these two utterances—"Willard is on the mat!" and "Willard is on the mat."—have the same seman10. For philosophers, the most important discussions of prosentential anaphora are Robert Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Oiscursive Commitment (Cambridge, Mass,: Harvard University Press, 1994), chap. 5, and Dorothy Grover, Joseph Camp Jr., and Nuel Belnap, "A Prosentential Theory of Truth," Philosophical Studies 27 (1975): 73-124. For an argument that an anaphoric account of the semantics of truth talk is quite independent of the broader inkrentialist semantic framework in which Brandom places it, see Mark Lance, "The Significance of Anaphoric Theories of Truth and Reference," in Bradley Armour-Garb and • C. Beall, eds., Deflationary Truth (Chicago: Open Court Press, 2001).

11. if truth talk functions only to relate anaphorically to the content of an antecedent ut-

terance, one wonders whether there is a corresponding pragmatic pro-form. a speech type that functions systematically as a re-performance, drawing tint only its content but its pragMatic significance from an antecedent_ Such vocabulary exists in colloquial English, we think. one can utter "You can say that again!" or "Indeed!" (or, in reasonably current street lingo, Word!") as a way of picking up the pragmatic force of a speech act. 12. See Robert J. Stainton, Words and Thoughts: Subsentences, Ellipsis, and the Philosophy of Language (New York: Oxford, 2006), for a compelling argument against reading nonPropositional utterances as elliptical.

56

'Yol' and 'Lot'

tic content. But unlike its declaratival half-sister, the observative still has an agent-relative input, and it still functions to express recognition of something. The fact that these two utterances in some sense share semantic content can make it easy to think that the observative is just a funny version of the declarative—one that just happens to also mark its own causal genesis in an observation, through tone of voice, or perhaps through the addition of a `Lo!' At this point we might be tempted by the thought that this observative is really just a short form for two declaratives shoved together: "Willard is on the mat." and "I am seeing that Willard is on the mat." or something of the sort. But again there does not seem to be a good way of choosing between the various 'declarative translations' of the observative. Does it really mean "Willard is on the mat and I see him there"? Or perhaps, "Willard is on the mat, and the reason 1 know this is that I am seeing him there"? Or maybe, "I see something. Willard is on the mat." Indeed, it seems that all of these express declarative commitments are immediately licensed by entitlement to the observative "Willard is on the mat!" At the same time, there seems to be no reason to pick one of them as the 'proper' analysis of the observative. Though not a declarative, an observative licenses moves to many declaratives. But the fact that these declaratives are licensed by the observative does not show that they are identical to it, and the fact that there seems to be no good reason to choose one of these declarative translations over the others strongly suggests that none of them in fact exhausts or nails down the import of the original. We submit that any such 'reduction' will he either arbitrary or driven by a theoretical commitment that begs the question in favor of the primacy of declaratives. In our view, it should not be surprising that the difference between the propositional observative and its declaratival counterpart cannot be analyzed in terms of a difference in propositional content. What interests us here is specifically that the difference between these two utterances I seems to he one of pragmatic function, and not one of semantics. If we analyze "Willard is on the mat!" as some cluster of declaratives, we do not capture its crucial function of expressing (rather than asserting) the speaker's observational recognition of the fact that Willard is on the mat. The temptation to try to capture the difference at the level of propositional content, we think, is motivated by the tendency of philosophers to privilege semantics over pragmatics, and declarative pragmatic struc-

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tures over others, with the result that all differences between utterances tend to be understood, if at all possible, as differences in semantic con:. tent between declaratives. In other words, it is an instance of the declar', auve fallacy. In rejecting the declarative fallacy, we reject first and fore, most a methodological orientation that assumes that all speech acts have declaratival structure made up of propositional contents until proven therwise; we pointedly shift the burden of proof in the other direction, ereby pushing against a great deal of philosophical inertia. Observatives may express recognition of propositionally structured cts, or they may express recognition of phenomena or objects. In each `case they commit their speakers to believing in the propositions that follow from what they observe. But if we do not buy into the presumption that all speech acts that justify truth-claims have the pragmatic structure a declarative, then it seems clear that what observatives da, whether not they happen to embed propositions, is something distinct from erely asserting their content; instead, they express recognitive uptake) their content, and this expression is of something essentially agentpecific and individuating in a way that a declarative assertion essen- tiy isn't. Recognizing something, including even recognizing the fact t a proposition obtains, is simply distinct—pragmatically distinct— m asserting that something is the case. Thus observatives are not just odifications or transformations of declaratives. Not everything propositional is declarative, and hence it remains posble to agree that observatives are pragmatically distinct from declaraves, while still insisting that observatives such as "Lo, a rabbit!" are iptically propositional. However, we believe that by now we have unercut the motivation for this move. In arguing that we need not read on-propositional observatives as implicit declaratives, we are in fact esting on the idea that they need not have an implicit propositional fracture either. We are content to say that the conclusion that there is rabbit present follows directly from the acceptance of an utterance of Lo, a rabbit!" as properly entitled, without a mediating translation into propositionally formed premise. One simply cannot see a rabbit withut its being the case that there is a rabbit present, and so the former ent implies the later truth. Sometimes we express our recognition of 13. Thus we disagree with Sellars, who counts observation reports as a special "level of Propositions," and with McDowell, who follows him in doing so (for instance during his keynote presentation at the Space of Reasons Conference, Cape Town, South Africa, July 2004)-

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a propositionally structured fact—for example of our observation that there is a rabbit in the bush. At other times we express our recognition of an object, or an event—our observation of a rabbit, or of a rabbit darting into a bush. Debates rage over whether we must see-that in order to see at all. Some defend the strong claim that every seeing involves a seeing-that,' 4 althougnecdslthwakeribngltosethat, generally speaking, is a transcendental condition for the ability to see objects or anything else. It is not our primary purpose here to enter into such debates on the nature of seeing. Our inclination is to assert the weaker and deny the stronger thesis. But surely it is possible to see a rabbit or a rabbit hiding, in addition to whatever other propositionally structured facts we see, and whatever the dependence relations are between e such seeings. We are urging that such non-propositional observations can be expressed in observatives. We are also arguing for the more substantive and contentious thesis that such non-propositional observations and their expressions ground justified declaratives. Now there will be those in the grip of a strong perceptual rationalism, driven perhaps by a Sellarsian critique of the given, who will find this thesis absurd. They will claim that nothing without propositional form could ground another proposition, because it wouldn't have the right kind of structure to serve as a premise in an inference. But such an objection seems to rest on a suspiciously narrow conception of inference. After all, in the domain of practical inference, reasons ground actions that are not themselves propositional. Of course, only propositions can be inferentially related according to the usual rules of propositional logic, but to presume that propositional logic is, or is structurally analogous to, the only inferential game in town—or that it is the inferential game that must govern observation and its expression—is to beg the question. Indeed, this particular form of question-begging can be understood as a form of the declaratival fallacy, as it presumes that the only discursive logic is the propositional logic of the declarative, and that everything that isn't propositionally structured must be somehow mute or inarticulate. We are not attached to calling the licensing moves from observatives 14. This is the position taken by McDowell in John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), and by Sellars in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).

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to declaratives "inference." One reason to deny that it is possible to talk of an "inference" between observatives and declaratives is that our only well-developed accounts of good inference proceed in terms of truthpreservation, which concerns relations among truth-claims. In the Appendix we argue that one can understand the idea of an inference in terms of a more basic idea of licensed normative moves between types of actions (some of which are speech acts). This would include, for instance, practical inferences from beliefs and desires to actions. Within this framework, we can represent licensed transitions between speech acts as particular cases of the general phenomenon of pragmatically licensed act-transitions. But in any case, little turns on whether or not we attach the label 'inference' to the justificatory relation between observatives and declaratives. We could say that knowledge depends both on inference and on non-inferential warranted transitions from observatives to declaratives, or that there are two types of inference. For ease of terminology, we use 'inference' in the broader sense in this work.

2.4 The Ineliminability of the First Person Voice -

Declarative truth-claims are not essentially indexed to any particular speaker or audience—they are inherently "impersonal" rather than structurally bound to a first-, second-, or third-person voice. A declarative such as "Ottawa is the capital of Canada" has no personal voice. Many declaratives do have a voice: "I am sick of crappy Mexican food"; You have schmutz on your face"; "Louise thinks that Toronto is the .capital of Canada." However, to the extent that what we are interested in when it comes to the pragmatic force of declaratives is their status as assertions or truth-claims, any declarative can be translated from one perSonal voice to another without its force being changed in the least—it works the same way regardless of who says it, and to whom. Thus, qua th-conditional assertion, "I am sick of crappy Mexican food" (spoken Mark) is just the same as "Mark is sick of crappy Mexican food," and You have schmutz on your face" (directed at Rebecca) is just the same Ns "Rebecca has schmutz on her face," or (uttered by Rebecca) "I have hmutz on my face." The fundamental impersonality of the declarative deeply linked to the agent-neutrality of its input and output. We have pointed out several times that contemporary philosophers language take the declarative assertion as the fundamental build-

.

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ing block of language. But now notice an interesting effect of this starting point: if we assume that the essence of discourse is captured by the functioning of declaratives, then, since declaratives are essentially impersonal and agent-neutral, we exclude from the start the possibility of discovering that some agent-relative, voiced dimensions of language play an important role in constituting or enabling meaningful discursive practices within a linguistic community. Why should we think that this restriction is important? Throughout this chapter we have argued that speech acts that give expression to perceptual episodes—observatives—are structurally firstpersonal. If perceptual episodes had a normative pragmatic structure analogous to acts of declaring, then they would likewise inherit the structural impersonality or agent-neutrality of declaratives. Perceptual episodes could then be 'passed on' or transferred between agents without loss of identity. Indeed, Brandom apparently understands perceptual episodes as funny kinds of assertions. 15 However, we have argued that perceptual episodes are inherently individuating and unshareable. It is a correlate of this analysis that perceptual episodes themselves cannot be understood as analogous to 'inner assertions', but rather share the firstpersonal, agent-relative input structure of the speech acts that express them. Brandom acknowledges a certain perspectivality of entitlement at the level of the content of our intentional states: the content of an agent's perceptual judgment, for instance, will depend on the orientation of her body and her visual perspective, or the specific way she is embedded in the environment.' But these differences at the level of content go no distance toward getting a hold on the first-personal ownership of perspective that is essential to perception: no array of different perceptual contents inflected by different orientations will mark one of them as mine. 15. See Making It Explicit, 236 and 243; see also the excellent discussion of this point in Joseph Rouse, How Scientific Practices Matter: Explaining Philosophical Mitt! ralisin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 216ff. 16. Brandom, Malting It Explicit, 590. Rouse comments: "To talk about sameness ofc.ontent [for Brandom] is thus to bracket the pervasive and ineliminable differences in conceptual perspective that result from the inferential significance of differing collateral commitments and different embodied locations, It might he more natural to say that, on Brandom's account, one could only inherit a perspectivally shifted conceptual content from others' observation reports." How Scientific Practices Matter, 216-217.

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It is not enough to emphasize that our perceptual judgments are inflected and constituted by our practical bodily relationship to what we observe, although this is true too. This engaged body must furthermore be my body in order for its entitlements and commitments to have any normative bite, and no mere enrichment of bodily and social details will get this in. All these details, no matter how embodied, would not help me be gripped by my situation if they belonged to someone else. An account of perception as an assertion-like episode that is perspectivally marked only by its content is insufficient. Rather, perceptual episodes are first-personally structured, agent-relative events. Voice, as we are characterizing it, is a pragmatic rather than a grammatical feature of a speech act (though it is of course often closely tracked by grammar). The voice of a speech act concerns the manner in which the agent takes up her entitlement to the speech act and strives to assign statuses to others. We argue just below that the capacity of a language to express such perceptual episodes in a first-person voice is a constitutive condition for its existence. To put the point much more simply, any language must allow its users to articulate observatives in order for it to allow its users to articulate anything at all. But if this is right, then there could be no such thing as a language that traded only in impersonal, agent-neutral speech acts. The capacity of language users to express observatives is a constitutive condition for the possibility of their sharing a language that enables its users to pass around empirical truth-claims: no declaratives, then, without observatives. Hence any functioning language must include means for speaking in the first-person voice, and for allowing speakers to perform speech acts with agentrelative entitlements. If we are right, then any philosophical account that commits the declarative fallacy, and considers discourse only as a series of agent-neutral, declarative speech acts, will go wrong. Someone might argue, in contrast, that this feature of language is contingent. Even granting that we are right about the ineliminable agentrelativity of some of our speech, the objection would go, there could perfectly well be a coherent, functioning language that contained the pragmatic resources only for impersonal declarative speech. So, for example, imperatives are inherently second-personal: an imperative must be issued to someone in order for it to count as an imperative at all. The idea of "translating" an imperative into the third or first person while retain-

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ing its meaning or force does not even get any conceptual traction. "Close the door!" makes a specific demand upon someone in particular (or upon several particular people) by addressing the target of this demand. A "translation" into the third person, such as "Mark ought to close the door," is a speech act with an irreducibly different pragmatic structure and function; it does not constitute an order at all. And yet, one might acknowledge this but also think that a discourse without imperatives (not just without a distinctive imperative syntax, but without any pragmatic resources for making second-personal demands upon others) would be inconvenient, but not impossible. Later we argue in detail that second-personal speech is not eliminable in this way, and that the capacity to make second-personal demands in language is as fundamental as the capacity to assert truth-claims. But we will not take up that argument now Instead, we will focus on the ineliminability of the first person. We can legitimately inherit entitlements to declaratives in any of several ways: by having them passed on to us from someone else, by having them follow inferentially from our other commitments and entitlements, or, crucially, through direct experience. However, to the extent that our discourse as a whole counts as about and accountable to the concrete empirical world—rather than just being an elaborate syntactic, non-referential game—our declarative entitlements must be traceable, through chains of entitlement, back to direct experiences, whether ours or someone else's. As McDowell has made vivid, it is this termination of inference in receptive experience that gives our thinking and talking the external constraint that it needs to count as objective claim-making, as opposed to mere frictionless spinning in the void.' 7 This much seems fairly uncontentious. But here's the point: the edifice of empirical knowledge, and with it our justified ability to make empirical assertions, depends upon there being chains of commitments and entitlements that terminate in someone's first-personal experiences. The necessary termination of empirical claims in experience means that whenever we make an empirical assertion, we are committing ourselves to someone having had an experience—a receptive encounter with concrete features of the world—that grounds this assertion. (Again, we are certainly not saying that these chains must terminate in a preconceptual 'given'. Experiences, 17. McDowell, Mind and World, 67 and elsewhere.

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as we have described them, are conceptually articulate affairs.) And although we needn't have any particular idea of who served as the origin of this bit of empirical knowledge, we are committed to thinking it was orneone (or several people) in particular who did. Now we have seen that these perceptual episodes themselves have an nherently individuating and first-personal input structure. They are not experiences that merely happen to be linked with some agent: if I am the riginal perceiver, then I must experience them as irreducibly mine, and hey are not shareable. If there were nobody who could claim a piece f experiential knowledge from this first-personal perspective, then it would not count as knowledge that we share and can make assertions bout at all. From an epistemological point of view, this means that emirical assertions can be justified only to the extent that their asserters have reason to be committed to the claim that these assertions terminate n some particular speaker's perceptual episodes. But if we could never recognize, in language, other people's discursive expressions of their wn, first-personal experiences, then such expressions could not function as discursive reasons in the game of giving and asking for reasons. n that case, we would he left without any way to attach our edifice of eclarative assertions to the empirical world about which it is supposed to make claims. In turn, this means that empirical discourse gets to ount as properly open to justification only to the extent that it has the capacity to recognize discursive expressions of such first-personal experiences. To put the point another way, it is through observatives that individual experiences contribute to public discursive space. Observatives create new epistemic responsibilities for everyone by expanding the space of the known. Indeed, an entitled empirical claim can be thought of as one that can trace its warrant to the kind of recognitive episodes expressed in observatives. Although individual empirical claims can be warranted on grounds that don't trace to an observative, such as abductive grounds, the totality of our empirical knowledge must all rest, globally and holistically, on observatives. Yet it is not enough that people be able to express the content of perception in language in order for our claim-making practices to be grounded in linguistically expressed reasons. We must be able to distinguish, within language, between those empirical claims that are merely inherited through the passing on of an inference or reassertion licenses, and those that function as the termina-

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tion of a set of claims in someone's receptive contact with the external world—between inferential commitments to the presence of a rabbit in a bush and first-personal observations of the rabbit, for instance. This is part and parcel of being able to critically assess empirical claims within the space of reasons. Otherwise, we might just have an edifice of circulating claims, without any linguistic means of accessing and marking the essentially first-personal point of receptive contact between language and the world. But this means that we must be able to use language to give first-persona] expression to perceptual episodes. In other words, our language, insofar as it is used to make empirical claims, requires the capacity to utter recognitives, because recognitives are the speech acts that make explicit our first-personal experiential encounters with the world. It may seem that it is enough that we be able to declaratively report upon our experiences, rather than expressing them with a recognitive. But if a declarative such as "I see a rabbit" truly had no recognitive, pragmatically first-personal component, then in effect we would be taking a third-personal stance toward ourselves, and reporting on an experience "from the outside." Such an assertion is the kind of thing that can be translated into the third person and reasserted—or in Brandomian terms, it issues a reassertion license. You can now assert, "Mark sees a rabbit," and this (again, to the extent that it is a pure declarative) will be the same assertion. But if this were all we could do in language—that is, make assertions that were agent-neutral in this way—then making such assertions would not give expression to the termination of empirical knowledge in a first-personal, owned experience: an experience that is practically grasped as mine. To the extent that I give expression to that when I say "I see a rabbit! ," I am not merely making a declarative, agentneutral report but uttering a recognitive, at least implicitly. And it is because we can recognize this pragmatic move in discourse that we count as a discursive community whose members are speaking in a way that is held accountable to the world. But why, we might wonder, must we be able to give discursive expression to our recognitive episodes at all? Could we not anchor assertional entitlement in acts of perceiving without giving the recognitive aspect of that perception public expression? Not without relying upon the myth of the given that Sellars notoriously exposed in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Minimally, avoiding this classic Sellarsian demon means

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not treating any empirical epistemic accomplishment as in principle immune from discursive examination, challenge, and discussion. But if recognitive entitlement—the entitlement that comes from a receptive first-personal encounter with the empirical world—plays a distinctive role in justification, then this distinctiveness must itself be able to be brought into the space of explicit critical examination within the game of giving and asking for reasons. For instance, we must, at least sometimes, be able to challenge a claimed receptive entitlement. This requires that our language have the resources for making recognitive discourse explicit. We conclude that any satisfactory account of language that takes pragmatics as fundamental cannot be built upon narrow attention to assertions. Indeed, the very practices of passing around commitments and entitlements to assertions cannot themselves exist except in the context of a richer set of linguistic practices. Specifically, we conclude that any philosophical account of language that attends only to agent-neutral assertions that have no essential voice will be insufficient. Recognitive discourse is a kind of discourse that is voiced and agent-relative in its input, and it is constitutive of any language with the expressive capacity to make meaningful empirical assertions. The subject who participates in discourse concerning a public, empirical world is one who can speak in and recognize the entitlement of the first-person voice.'" 18. We have only argued that a language expressing empirical content—a language responsive to an objective empirical world—must contain observatives. One might think there could be, say, a language of pure mathematics. We don't think so for several reasons. For one, we are 'Ikat convinced that any talk is genuinely contentful in holistic abstraction from empirical Ian,guage. For another, we are not sure that there could be such a thing as justification in mathe. 'macs without the recognitive uptake of such facts as that this is a genuine proof.

The Pragmatic Structure of Objectivity

3

The Pragmatic Structure of Objectivity

3.1 Observatives, Observation, and Answerability to the World At the beginning of this book, we claimed that what we were ultimately interested in was the pragmatic topography of the space of reasons, and we suggested that the space of reasons could have a structure no less rich than that of the space of discourse. Up to now we have kept our focus on language. However, we believe that our analysis of discursive pragmatics in general, and of the observative in particular, has fairly direct implications for analyses of reasoning and observation themselves. There is a tight relationship between reasons and claims. Spelling out an exact theory of this relationship would require a book unto itself, but surely something like this is true: both reasons and claims can have conceptual articulation and propositional structure, and both have normative force. Successful claims (whether truth-claims or claims upon our actions, loyalties, or whatever) give us reasons (to believe, act, etc.), and in turn, reasons make claims upon us. Spoken claims succeed in claim• ing only insofar as they provide reasons, and reasons are the kinds of things that we can express in claims. Perhaps not all reasons are of a sort that could be translated into discursive claims, but surely lots of them are, particularly including reasons for belief and inference. Many mental events that provide reasons, including observing, coming to believe, inferring, deciding, and so forth, are of a sort that can be expressed in discursive claims. Indeed, post-Kantian philosophers such as Sellars, Davidson, Brandom, and McDowell are quite comfortable understanding our capacity for conceptually articulate mental activity as 66

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essentially parasitic upon our capacity to engage in similarly conceptually articulated discourse. Some claims must be spoken in order to do the work they are supposed to do. There is no such thing as issuing a mental imperative, at least not to someone other than oneself. But it seems plausible to suppose that some reason-giving mental events can be understood as having a pragmatic structure that mirrors the structure that their expression would have. In these cases, we can use the same name for the mental event as for its spoken correlate. A declarative mental event would be an occurrent doxastic commitment to a declarative truth-claim, for instance. When I come to believe that there is a rabbit in the bush (as I often but not always do coincidentally with seeing the rabbit), I achieve a normative status that is implicitly agent-neutral. Even if I do not share my new belief with anyone, and hence don't actually try to transform anyone else's beliefs, I am still committed to a public truth whose normative force has nothing to do with me personally—a truth whose denial would be a mistake on anyone's part. In other words, I engage in a mental act with a structure analogous to the act of declaring. At the end of the last chapter we argued that perceptual episodes— like the observatives that gave expression to them—have an inherently first-personal and agent-relative input structure. Our working hypothesis is that the activity of observation should be understood as having a pragmatic structure analogous to that of the observative that expresses it; more generally, that episodes of recognition should be understood as having a recognitive structure, as opposed to a declarative structure. We think that understanding observation as a normatively structured activity, which takes an agent-relative, individuating, first-personal input and achieves an agent-neutral status, can help clarify a set of important philosophical puzzles and issues concerning the epistemological status and function of this activity—that is, the activity of recognizing features of the world that are sensuously received through our encounter with them, in a way that grounds empirical belief and inference. If observations have a recognitive structure analogous to that of observatives, then we can understand them as fully discursively and conceptually articulated participants in the space of reasons, and yet as not having the structure of declarative propositions. On the one hand, observations and their reports have full-fledged rational relations to beliefs, which they can license or contradict. Observations and observative

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and `LoP

speech acts are, on our account, properly governed by the so-called constitutive ideal of rationality'—they are held to the tribunal of the world and embedded in the discursive structure of the space of reasons. Yet at the same time, observations are not beliefs, and observatives are not belief-reports; observations are not themselves adoptions of commitments to declarative propositions, though they directly license such commitments. We all exhibit a solid practical skill at determining what follows rationally when we see a rabbit. To acknowledge this skill, we need not insist on interpreting this event of seeing as one of becoming committed to some particular declarative belief. Moreover, this skill is one that draws essentially upon the conceptually articulated structure of our observation—the relationship between my recognition, "A rabbit?", and my belief that there is a rabbit in the bush is not mutely causal, but rather clearly and intimately linked to the way my recognitional episode invokes my use of discursive concepts such as 'rabbit'. In Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, Sellars dealt the death blow (in our opinion) to the so-called myth of the given by showing that experiential states that are not themselves conceptually articulate cannot ground inference and hence cannot function articulately within the space of reasons. In the wake of this argument, many philosophers have treated experience insofar as it can justify belief as having the form of full-on propositional belief itself. For instance, Richard Manning claims that "it is irrational to draw inferences from what one does not believe." 2 Likews,Davdonfmulycie,"Nothngausreo for holding a belief except another belief." 3 Sellars himself encouraged this commitment; he takes his arguments against the possibility of a non-conceptually-articulate given that can ground inference as arguments for the claim that only something with propositional form can ground inference to a declarative proposition. Although our goal here is not to give a close reading of Sellars's texts, we claim that none of his arguments against the given support this stronger conclusion. The famil1. See Donald Davidson, "Mental Events," in Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001). 2. Richard N. Manning, "Interpretations, Reasons and Facts," Inquiry 46, no. 3 (2003): 346-376,371. See also Barry Stroud, "Sense Experience and the Grounding of Thought," in Nicholas H. Smith, ed., Reading McDowell on Mind and World (New York: Routledge, 2002). 3. Donald Davidson, 'A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge," in Davidson, Subjective, Interstibiective, Objective (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 137-158.

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iar fact that practical reason always involves moves from the appropriateness of a claim to the appropriateness of an action should already cast into doubt the idea that the particular pragmatic and semantic form of a normative consequence must be the same as that of its antecedent. In casting doubt on the assumption that only commitments to declaratives can serve as reasons for commitments to declaratives (to translate Davidson's dictum into language more helpful for us), we are merely opening a space for our argument about the structure of observation and its relationship to empirical knowledge. We are certainly not claiming that we have a full-blown theory of the rationality of such moves within the space of reasons—not that philosophers have .offered much in the way of theories of material inference in any case. Despite this theoretical gap, we think that our pragmatic placement of observation reports helps us coherently occupy a much-sought-after philosophical ground between notoriously problematic positions. Philosophers who believe that only propositionally structured beliefs can serve as reasons for declarative claims face a dilemma: either the actual causal interactions between our sense organs and the world have no rational relation whatsoever to the kind of experience that is caught up in the space of reasons—in which case, as McDowell has often charged, our beliefs are left "spinning in the void" without making proper contact with the world that they are about—or we must say that somehow the world is itself already prepackaged in the form of propositions, and that ;perception is just a kind of reception of those propositions from the world. Perception, on this account, somehow involves the absorption from the world of fully formed declarative propositions, which seems to gommit us to a level of rationalist excess that makes many of us uncomfortable.' Several philosophers have tried to find a middle ground between "spinning in the void" and a propositionally prepackaged world by seeking some sort of intermediate status for perceptual episodes. Frequently :this search turns into a quest to articulate a level of "nonconceptual con;tent" taken in through perception. 5 Such nonconceptual content is sup4. Indeed, in his repeated urging that the world is "what is the case," McDowell comes close 03 this sort of position. See Manning, 'Interpretations, Reasons, and Facts." 5. See for instance Tim Crane, "The Non-Conceptual Content of Experience," in Crane, ed., The Contents of Experience: Essays on Perception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, .1992), 136-157;p. W. Hamlyn, "Perception, Sensation and Non-Conceptual Content," Philo.

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posed to serve as the bridge between the causal impact of the world and the propositional attitudes, especially doxastic attitudes, which we form on the basis of this impact; it is meant to provide the transition into the space of reasons. As Michael Luntley puts it, "The idea of nonconceptual content is required in order to make sense of the thought that experience is an openness to the world; that the world is delivered in experience and thereby impinges on the operation of concepts within the space of reasons." 6 Here the content of perception is treated as transitional or "prow-conceptual," making contact with our conceptual capacities but falling short of having conceptual structure. A major point to introducing such a layer of nonconceptual content is to take account of the rationally relevant and yet receptive character of perception—the sense in which it is "openness to the world"—that seems lost if we insist with Davidson that nothing could be a reason for a belief except another belief. Such accounts of nonconceptual content suffer from at least two problems, however. First, they are always at risk of raising the specter of a "third man." Given that it is difficult to understand how conceptual judgment can be accountable to a world that is not itself already conceptually structured, it is equally difficult to understand how such conceptual judgment can be accountable to the nonconceptual contents of perception. For that matter, it is also unclear how causal impacts on our sense organs yield content that is "prow-conceptual." Thus appeals to nonconceptual content seem simply to double the original explanatory conundrum.' Second, these accounts generally leave open large quessophicul Quarterly 44 (1994): 139-153; and Christopher Pe.acoc.ke , 'Does Perception Have a Nonconceptual Content?" Journal at Philosophy 98 (2001): 239-264. 6. Michael Luntley, abstract of "The World Delivered," presented at the Space of Reasons Conference, Cape Town, South Africa, July 2004. 7. The person who most directly and extensively grappled with this specific type of thirdman problem was Kant, who posited schemata as the 'bridge' between the brute manifold of intuition and spontaneous discursive judgment in the Critique of Pure Reason, ed, Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1.998). Where in the chain from the world to judgment Kant first wants to introduce conceptual structure, and whether he indeed sticks by his commitment to a level of content that serves as a bridge between the world and our judgments, are questions that receive vigorous debate in the secondary literature. See for example. McDowell, ''Having the World in View: Kant. Sellars, and Intentionality," journal of Philosophy 65 (1998): 431-450; and Richard 'N. Manning, 'The Necessity of Receptivity," in Rebecca Kukla, ed., Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant's Critical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 61-84.

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tions about what kind of content they are pointing to. We know that it is

not conceptual content, but since we use concepts whenever we talk, theorists of nonconceptual content understandably have a hard time explaining in any positive way what such content might he like. Thus these accounts are often unsatisfying in remaining almost exclusively negative. (The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy opens its sympathetic entry on nonconceptual mental content by commenting, "The notion of nonconceptual content is fundamentally contrastive.") 8 Such accounts motivate themselves by correctly pointing at an important gap in our philosophical story of the path from the world to judgment, but they often do no more than posit a 'something' that will close that gap. 9 McDowell has also tried to understand perception as 'in between' the brutely causal impact of the world on our sense organs and full-fledged doxastic judgment. For him, perception directly engages our conceptual faculties but falls short of belief. Like advocates of nonconceptual content, he too is motivated, not only by the gap that seemingly troubles Davidson and similar figures, but by the need to capture the receptive character of perception in contrast to the spontaneous character of committed judgment. However, for McDowell, perception is not protoconceptual but proto-doxastic. This is different from the appeal to nonconceptual content; his percepts are indeed conceptually articulated, and indeed propositionally structured. Thus he does not have a thirdman problem, in the sense that it is clear how such percepts hook up with the space of reasons. He holds on to the sensible idea that only conceptually articulated experience could bear rational relations to conceptually articulated beliefs, while getting rid of the assumption that everything conceptually articulated is a belief. We think that so far this is a promising approach to a solution to the problem of rational responsiveness to the world. Unfortunately, many commentators have been thwarted in their attempts to make sense of these quasi-doxastic percepts—these mysterious half-breeds—in McDowel1. 1 ° He often seems to just assert the coher8. Jose Bermudez, plaio.stanforci.e.cluIentrieVcontent-nonconceptuall, accessed 10/10107. 9. For example see William P Alston, "Sellars and 'The Myth of the Given'," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (2002): 69-86; and Alston, "Back to the Theory of Appearing," Philosophical Perspectives 13 (1999): 181-203. 10. See for example Davidson, "Response to McDowell,' in The Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. Lewis E. Hahn (Chicago: Open Court, 1999); Manning, "Interpretations. Reasons, and

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ence of such an option without giving a positive explanation of what perception is and how it works. Davidson is among those who have been frustrated by this move, writing that "McDowell holds that what is caused [by features of the world in perception] is not a belief, but a propositional attitude for which we have no word," and that it is "entirely mysterious" what kind of 'taking in' of the world this constitutes. He complains that McDowell "gives no explanation of why features of the world cause the particular propositional attitude they do, nor of why an attitude which has no subjective probability whatever can provide a reason for a positive belief."" In return, McDowell has repeatedly punted the burden of proof.' 2 We agree that McDowell has not said enough about how perception works to satisfy those who cannot share his sanguine silence. However, we also think that the reason his proposal has seemed so baffling is that everyone, including McDowell himself, has presumed that if what is absorbed in perception is not a full declarative judgment, but still engages our concepts, then it must somehow be a proto-declarative. Indeed, like Sellars, McDowell often simply equates the propositional and the conceptual, presuming that insofar as our concepts are exercised in perception, the form that perception takes must he propositional form." McDowell interprets perception as having the form of a declarative judgment, only without the judging part. For McDowell, we perceive that the cat is on the mat, etc.: "That things are thus and so is the conceptual content of an experience." 14 Perceptual episodes must have propositional structure, and be "on their way" to being declarative commitments to that propositional structure. All we add, somehow, when we commit ourselves to our percepts in belief, is the commitment. But it is not clear how to understand a belief as decomposable into a propositionally structured part and a separate commitment part, and it is hard to understand what either of these parts could be like on its own without the other. This leaves it quite mysterious what kind of state McDowell thinks we are in when we have taken in something that parFacts"; Stroud, "Sense Experience and the Grounding of Thought"; and Brandom, "Placing McDowell's Empiricism," in Smith, ed., Reading McDowell. 11. Davidson, "Response to McDowell," 107. 12. See for instance his responses to Brandom, Stroud, and others in Reading McDowell. 13. He has implied as much repeatedly, and he insisted on this particular commitment in conversation at the Space of Reasons Conference, Cape Town, South Africa, July 2004, 14. McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 26.

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ticipates in the space of reasons and has propositional and conceptual structure, but have not yet issued a judgment about it. One of Kant's most powerful and influential moves in the Critique of Pure Reason was to understand concepts in terms of their possible roles in judgments, rather than understanding judgments as concatenations of concepts. His Table of Judgments gives the possible logical forms that the activity of propositional judging can take, and his Table of Categories is derived from the Table of Judgments. For Kant, empirical concepts are really rules for activities that essentially form a part of judgmental activities, which in turn take one of the forms outlined by the Table of Judgments. McDowell gives no hint that he wishes to depart from this core Kantian commitment to the priority of judgments over concepts. In fact this move is one of the banners of those who share a commitment to the usefulness of the space of reasons imagery, for all their differences. Yet McDowell offers us no tools for understanding what it means for the spontaneous activity of the concepts to be engaged in perception, without this activity constituting judgment. He does not provide any pragmatic story about what we can do with a proposition, in the course of our epistemic inquiries, other than either declaring it (in speech or thought) or refraining from declaring it, where the latter is only negatively defined. 15 Once we cease to presuppose that everything that has any conceptual structure has the form of a declarative—that is, once we avoid this particular manifestation of the declarative fallacy—we open new room for ; 1 makingcoutleMDw'saifyng.Ieudrtobsvations as having the pragmatic structure given expression in observatives, then we can hold on to several key results at once. Observatives directly express our receptive contact with the world, and yet they are thoroughly embedded within the rational, discursive, inferential structure of the space of reasons. Hence they can provide reasons for belief . without being beliefs. Observations are, as McDowell insists, both conceptually structured and non-inferentially acquired, and thus they do 15. This is not to say that we do not accept a fundamental insight behind Kant's understanding of concepts in terms of their possible role in judgments rather than judgments as a concatenation of concepts. The key here is Goethe's point: in the beginning is the act. One cannot understand it conceptually significant action by putting it together with the right glue, taking concepts as functionally divorced from actions. The mistake is to assume that the only discursively significant type of action is judging.

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not fall prey to the Sellarsian critique of the given. They are not the same as doxastic commitments, even if they generally accompany such commitments. To observe is not just to inherit entitlement to a belief, but rather to recognize how things show up to me. I recognize what I see with my concepts, and hence such recognitions already bear articulate rational relations to the rest of the space of reasons, including beliefs. (I see a rabbit as a rabbit, embedded within my web of beliefs about rabbits.) But my observation is not itself the production of a propositional judgment, nor does my expression of this observation in an observative give voice to one. (My observation has the form "A rabbit!," is not grounded in but rather entails beliefs such as "There is a rabbit present.") Unlike McDowell, we do not claim that observations somehow involve less commitment than do declaratively structured beliefs. So we can avoid the objection that there is no way that something to which we are not yet committed—for which we have "no subjective probability," as Davidson put it—could provide a reason for a belief. Observations, on our account, are not beliefs that are missing something, but different pragmatic events that are not themselves declarative judgments, even though they commit us to truths. As they are for McDowell, observations are for us entries into declaratival judgment. However, their status as such entries derives not from their being mere "petitions for judgment," as Brandom (glossing McDowell) puts it,'" but instead from the fact that they serve as the direct point of receptive contact between us and the world that is the tribunal of such judgments. Observations are not "on their way" to being beliefs, and they are no less firmly planted within the conceptually articulated space of reasons than are beliefs— they have a different pragmatic structure altogether. McDowell has accused Davidson, and by extension others who make beliefs the only ground for beliefs, of descending into a coherentism that leaves our beliefs without "friction" from the world that they are about and to which they are accountable. In granting the world only causal, arational efficacy in constituting our standing in the space of reasons, Davidson does not seem to allow any moment at which that world can show us what we must think about it. Davidsons own insistence

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upon the pivotal role of occasion sentences in anchoring interpretation, and with it the space of reasons as a whole, marks his own recognition of the necessary role of receptivity in accountable knowledge. But McDowell has plausibly argued that, if these receptive encounters are merely causal, they cannot serve to add the necessary friction. If the world merely causally produces full-fledged belief in us, then the causal origin of such belief in the world seems to be neither here nor there, epistemically speaking; the resulting beliefs, once we have them, seem indistinguishable from any other beliefs and without any special features that would let them serve as touchstones of empirical accountability. In order to avoid coherentism, we need not only receptive contact with the world, but special recognitive events: events that are conceptually structured and bear articulate rational relations to belief, but that bear their recognitive character on their sleeve, as part of their normative structure and not merely as their causal origin. This is the analogue, at the level of mental events, to the point we made about language at the end of the last chapter. There we pointed out that in order for observative expressions to play their necessary role in the discursive game of giving and asking for reasons, they had to express in language their distinctive, first-personal expressive structure. Here, the point is that in order for observations themselves to ground inference and play a role in rational judgment, they must likewise display their recognitive structure. We can put this McDowellian point in Kantian terms. Kant argued that our concepts, which we spontaneously apply in judgment, are "empty" without receptive intuition (just as intuition will be "blind" except as synthesized under concepts)." But if there were nothing inside the space of reasons that marked when our conceptual judgments had directly receptive content, then the receptivity of intuition could play no rational role in filling in our concepts, which would in effect remain empty, The mere fact that the content of a conceptual judgment has its causal origin in the world does not make our receptive responsiveness to the world accessible to reason itself. What keeps our concepts from being empty is not just that we are impacted by the world, but that this impacting itself constitutes our recognizing when and how this is so. Hence this recognitive function of reason is essential to its empirical meaningfulness and accountability.

16. Brandom, "Placing McDowell's Empiricism," 94-95. McDoweil's view here seems prima

facie implausible_ Perhaps when it merely appears to one that such and so we can see this as a sort of petition. But when one sees, one would think the petition had already been granted.

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17. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A51/B75.

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We saw earlier that this recognitive character cannot be borne by the semantics or the mere causal origin of a speech act or a propositional attitude, which is why Davidson's assents to occasion sentences won't do the trick. McDowell's proto-doxastic perceptual takings-in can be read as his attempt to identify such a layer of recognitive events, and to demarcate them not by their semantics (which they share with the judgments they become) but by their pragmatics (they are missing spontaneous assent). Understanding this layer of recognitive events as observations with the normative structure of observatives—that is, with essentially singular and receptive agent-relative inputs, and producing agent-neutral outputs in the form of justifications for truth-claims and beliefs—does a better job of filling this McDowellian niche. Such events are essentially conceptually articulated and distinct from beliefs, and they bear their receptivity on their sleeve: their receptive connection to the encountered world plays a direct role in their pragmatic structure, rather than needing a separate account. Like McDowell's takings-in, they are distinguished from beliefs by their pragmatics rather than their semantics. But we find it implausible to claim that observation doesn't involve immediate (fallible, overridable) commitment to the truth or existence of its contents, and we think that McDowell has mislocated the pragmatic difference he is looking for, perhaps because of his failure to imagine a positive, non-declarative pragmatic structure for an event that grounds empirical judgment. Sellars was right to insist, in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, that observations and observation reports "do not rest on other propositions in the same way as other propositions rest on them."° Observatives cannot, for instance, ever be inferences from declaratives (or from anything else); their receptive structure rules this out. But Sellars was also right that this does not imply that we can have them, or the knowledge they yield, prior to or independent of all sorts of declarative, propositional knowledge and commitments that we have in place. It is only once we inhabit the conceptually articulated space of reasons, which surely includes being properly in the grip of all sorts of propositional beliefs, that we can be concept-users of the sort whose normative entitle18. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), §38 (emphasis added).

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ments can be affected by interaction with the world, and hence who can issue observativesi 9 The activity of observing, or perceiving, is a substantive skill." Though falling short of offering a full theory of perception, we can say a bit about this skill: an event occurs in the world and we perform an action of looking at that event or at the objects involved in it. As many neo-pragmatists have argued in detail, perceiving is no mere passive mirroring or being-pushed-about by the world. One deploys concepts, focuses attention, ignores much, highlights some, and articulates the result. 2' But for all this complexity, observation is a matter of events in the world licensing the actions of epistemic agents. One's entitlement to an observative arises, if it does, as a result of her normative achievement in the act of perceiving. Such a story requires that events in the world have normative significance. But there is nothing in principle puzzling about events in the natural world holding normative significance within our practices. That a natural resource is in a particular place means, in the right context, that I am entitled to take it; the violence of the storm constitutes a ground for not allowing my daughter to play outside; the edges of the pool table constitute the limits of a legal shot, etc. In all these cases, we enable features of the world to have normative significance—to matter to us in various ways—through our own engagement in normative practices that are essentially embedded in and responsible to various features of their environments. The normative involvement of the world in our practices is built into our running and driving on the world's fields and 19. In Section I of Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, Sellars says: "I presume that no philosopher who has attacked the philosophical idea of givenness or, to use the Hegelian term, immediacy, has intended to deny that there is a difference between inferring that something is the case and, for example, seeing it to be the case. If the term 'given' referred merely to what is observed as being observed, or, perhaps, to a proper subset of the things we are said to deterMine by observation, the existence of 'data' would he as non-controversial as the existence of • Philosophical perplexities.' Sellarss detailed discussion of the variety of types of interlinguistic dependence and his argument that these distinctions make it possible, without regress, to believe that observation reports are dependent [or their authority on the existence of other warranted commitments occur in §§32-38. 20. For an excellent extended account of perception as a skill, which is reasonably compatible with our views, see Alva Noe, Action in Perception (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005). 21. For a nice discussion of this point see Joseph Rouse, How Scientific Practices Matter: Explaining Philosophical Naturalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

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roads, sailing on its oceans, trading its objects, and so forth. We use worldly objects directly in the practices to which they matter, including in the game of giving and asking for reasons. The rabbit darting into the bush, when related to my skillful perceptual activities in the right way, is what legitimates my belief that there is a rabbit in the bush. But if Davidson is right that only a belief can justify another belief, or more generally if the space of reasons is no more than the space of declaratives and their contents, then we have a serious problem—for the world does not have beliefs, nor make assertions, nor contain propositions, whatever metaphors we might like to invoke. However, by making room for observatives, we can claim that what we are open to, in observation, is the normatively significant events in the world that are caught up in our perceptual activities. Observations are the activities through which we engage with the elements of the world, the complex transitions from the competent and interactive moving about of our body— focusing eyes, picking things up, all the rest—to normative output. But if it is true that our perceptions are recognitions and the observatives that express them express recognitions, then we build receptivity right into the structure of observation. Perceptual episodes are different from judgments, but not because they are less conceptually articulated or inferentially fecund. Rather, they do something different: they take up, acknowledge, or recognize the normative significance of worldly events and objects. They put us into singular, first-personal receptive contact with the world and thereby render us answerable to it. 3.2 Intersubjec tivity Consider what the structure of knowledge would look like if agentrelative entitlements could not give rise to agent-neutral commitments and entitlements. (In fact, it is impossible to properly imagine such a thing; some willing suspension of disbelief is required for this mental exercise.) In this case, Jones's agent relative entitlement to P, based in his observation that P, would have no normative implications for Smith's relationship to P Smith could know that Jones has this status, and happily go on either failing to believe P, or even believing not P. Imagine Smith asserting not P to Jones's face. Jones replies: "But I am entitled to P" Smith could then rightly return: "But this implies nothing for me." To agree that no social constraint arises from an agent-relative entitlement -

-

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would be to patently deny the socially shared nature of our epistemic projects. We might instead suppose that the only way in which other people's observations can have normative epistemic consequences for me is by way of theoretical inference: Smith observes that Jones is entitled to P, and she believes that Jones is reliable. She concludes that P is true, and that is her reason to believe P But this analysis makes no room for the crucial fact that, whatever other normative significance it has, Jones's Commitment to the truth of P has the import of standing in opposition to anyone's not believing P, or believing not P. Two agents in these positions are disagreeing, and argument or a change of belief is called for. For this reason, the beliefs of others cannot simply serve as `natural' evidence for our own beliefs; rather, we must understand others' beliefs as making a normative claim upon us. What one says, in saying P, is that anyone who will not accept P is wrong. it is precisely the agent-neutrality of beliefs that allows such disagreements to be a coherent possibility Conversely, a practice in which agent-neutral entitlements were not holistically rooted in agent-relative entitlements would be equally distant from language as we find it. Insofar as we constitute a discursive community that empirically investigates a common world, we must meet at least two criteria: First, each of our individual observational episodes must have the sort of content that someone else could also take in through observation. Though my recognition is mine, essentially, and though what I recognize might he something that no one else ever in fact recognizes, if it is a genuine empirical observation it is of something that others could in principle observe as well." Second, our collective agentneutral entitlements must rest on a sufficient range of such reproducible observations. In particular cases we can come to know something on the basis of just one person's having observed that it is the case. But the ability of such an unreproducible event to constitute agent-neutral knowledge depends upon the existence of a vast range of other knowledge -

22. One might worry that "internal" mental states are an important counterexample. For :Bust the sorts of reasons we are in the midst of discussing, we are committed to the view that we :tan indeed observe one another's mental states, Of course, there are probably important qualitative differences between the way that Rebecca observes that Mark believes that the policies of the Bush administration are ill-considered, and the way that Mark observes that Mark believes lids. However, we are happy to accept the weak behaviorist thesis that we have non-inferential Recess to one another's mental states. See Rebecca Kukla, "How to Get an Interpretivist Corn*fled," Protosociology 14, {2000): 180-22, for a defense of this view.

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!' and to !'

based in reproducible empirical observation. Or, to put the point succinctly, our public body of empirical knowledge rests not just on a foundation of agent-neutral declaratives, but of widespread intersubjective agreement. Intersubjectivity is sometimes understood simply as universal agreement. But this kind of intersubjectivity cannot bear any interesting constitutive connection to objectivity—understood loosely, for the moment, as answerability to a public world—for at least two reasons. First of all, a claim can be objective even if not everyone assents to it—an objective claim Must demand universal acceptance, but this demand will rarely be satisfied. Second, everyone may be wrong: we need to be able to forge a meaningful distance between what everyone agrees to and what is the case, in order for objectivity to have any bite at all. Surely, for example, debates about the objectivity of a rash of UFO sightings are not capable of being settled by a survey. In short, we want the relationship between objectivity and universal agreement to be structural and normative, rather than merely extensional. However, we have the resources now for a richer account of intersubjectivity, which shows more promise for playing a constitutive role in objectivity. Observative entitlements are intersubjective, not in the sense that everyone has them (not everyone does), but in the sense that they have essentially first-persona], singular, agent-relative inputs, yet their output is public, such that others can come to be entitled to an observative with the same content. Later we will see that not all recognitives share this intersubjectivity; it is distinctive of observatives, which voice recognition of features of the public world. This is a kind of intersubjectivity that, in our grid, has a distinctive box-2 pragmatic structure. There is a widespread sense that understanding objectivity as dependent upon intersubjectivity smacks of unsavory idealism or social constructivism. If intersubjectivity merely involves universal agreement, then this worry is justified. But the kind of intersubjectivity that we have built into the pragmatic possibility of objective claim-making—claimmaking that owes allegiance to the world—does not appear to raise any such concerns. Indeed, it earns its subjectivity precisely by involving a receptive encounter with the empirical world. We pointed out earlier that lo-claims are never pure observatives. to!' serves not only to mark my own recognition, but to ostend that which I recognize. "Lo, a rabbit!" involves deixis: in making such an utterance, I

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11 upon or direct certain people—those to whom I am speaking—to serve the rabbit as well. The appropriate response to the utterance Lo, a rabbit!" is not, then, merely to believe the consequent declarative, ut to look and see the rabbit for yourself. Thus lo-claims call people into ust those intersubjective practices of observation that constitute the ecessary framework supporting declarative truth-claiming and epistetic inquiry. In a lo-claim, we explicitly mark the intersubjective charter of observatives by calling others to shared attention to a public orld. In Chapter 8 we return to this kind of intersubjective practice, d argue that our ability to use speech acts like lo-claims, which call thers to direct their attention to a shared object, is essential to the contitution of discursive communities.

.3 Objectivity

• th declaratives and observatives must display fidelity to the objective orld if they are to be legitimate: our declaratives must be answerable to

his world, and our observatives must be responsive to it. The notion of bjectivity, however, is one of the most slippery and most multivalent in he philosophical canon. Many philosophers have approached the philosophical problem of the tune of objectivity by offering a metaphysical account, in which they escribe or enumerate the kinds of things that count as objective, and efine objective claims as those that are about objective things. 23 Such etaphysical accounts have generally taken one of two forms. Somees they have tried to distinguish levels of reality, in an effort to pin own the "really real." So, perhaps, one might claim that values or so23. Such accounts show up in several philosophical domains. One version is the deterined universal naturalistic reductionism of people like Peter Railton in ethics, David M. trong in metaphysics and epistemology, and Hartry Field in science; see Railton, "Moral lism," Philosophical Review 95 (1986): 163-207; Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of Mind ew York: Routledge, 1993); Armstrong, Truth and Tnithmakers (Cambridge: Cambridge Uniity Press, 2004); and Field, Science without Numbers: A Defense of Nominalism (Princeton: 'nceton University Press, 1980). Others take an eliminativist approach following on the expie of Quine. Yet others acknowledge different metaphysical realms but assign them differt grades of objectivity, either by claiming that there are different senses of truth applying to , as Crispin Wright does in Truth and Objectivity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University , 1992), or by simply offering alternative metaphysical accounts of the subject matter of +n-objective discourse, as dualists do, for example David Chalmers in The Conscious Mind: In earth of a Fundamental Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

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cially emergent properties are not just figments of our imagination, but that they are not the "really real" stuff either. We will assert, dogmatically, that no one has been able to make this notion of the "really real" remotely coherent or compelling, except perhaps via eliminativist or reductionist moves. But if the really real is just the real, then the objective is just everything, and there is nothing subjective, and no interesting distinction has been drawn. Other times, metaphysical accounts identify the subjective with what's "in the head" and the objective with what's "out there." This is a fair enough distinction, as long as we are willing to make all empirical psychology subjective and to admit that lots of things are neither objective nor subjective since they are not located at all (functions, waves of civic unrest, etc.). But it is certainly not satisfying as our only account of the distinction, for surely there is an important sense in which we can perfectly well make objective (universally valid, empirical, suitably independent, etc.) claims about psychological phenomena, and likewise various important senses in which we want to be able to challenge the objectivity of claims that have external objects as their topic. We propose to try to understand objectivity the other way around, by beginning with a pragmatic story about the nature of objective and subjective claims rather than with a metaphysical story about the nature of the referents of those claims. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have shown how our notion of objectivity actually incorporates various competing strands that do not fit together neatly, with different versions of objectivity having greater grip at different historical moments. 24 We agree with Daston and Galison (though without committing ourselves here to her particular historical analysis) that our common philosophical notion of objective claim-making is neither neat nor unified, but rather is made up of sedimented layers of mismatched ideas. Pragmatic analysis turns out to be useful in sorting some of these out. Perhaps the most familiar first stab at a distinction between the two kinds of claims is the one still ringing in our ears from when we teach our introductory classes: an objective claim is supposed to be somehow "true for everyone" or "universally true," whereas subjective claims are 24. See Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Books, 2007). See also Lorraine Daston, 'Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective," Social Studies of Science 22 -0992): 597-613; and Daston and Galison, The Image of Objectivity," Representations 40 (1992): 81-128.

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"true for me" or "true for you." Along with this stab goes the idea that we can ask whether various domains of claims—especially moral or other normative claims—are objective and "universal" or subjective and just "true for the individual." We have argued that truth-claims are by their very nature claims with agent-neutral outputs—that part of what is involved in making a truth-claim (and there are lots of other kinds of claims to make, as we have already seen) is making a claim that creates an agent-neutral entitlement, demanding of everyone, regardless of normative position, that he or she take up, reiterate, and use that claim. Hence we would argue that the notion of a claim that is only "true for the individual" is simply incoherent, and should be scrapped altogether. -Truth by its nature claims us indiscriminately, and truth-claims build in a universal demand for acknowledgment, so if this is what we mean by •objectivity (and it is one thing we could mean), then all truth is objec.tive. The association of objective claims with agent-neutrality of output and subjective claims with agent-relativity of output is one elegant way of cashing out the intuition that the objective is the publi_c. - objective claims make normative statuses and entitlements. available to everyone. thideed, they ask, as a regulative ideal, that everyone take up these normative statuses and use these entitlements. All legitimate declaratives nd observatives are objective, in this sense, which is also the sense in 'which they are about a public world—and notice that observatives have this publicity and "aboutness" despite the agent-relativity of their inputs. Imperatives, on the other hand, are not public in this sense. But we can equally articulate a different notion of objectivity that attaes it to agent-neutrality of input rather than output. In this sense, the bjectivity of a claim resides in something like the democratic accesbility of its appropriate production—anyone has a claim on this claim, r the entitlement does not amount to any special normative feature of e speaker. Clearly some such notion is presupposed by the fundament methodological assumption of science that all results are reproducle by any rational inquirer with the relevant equipment. In contrast, a ech act is 'subjective' if its entitlement is indexed to its speaker. In s case, the status of a speech act as objective or subjective does not rn on the truth being claimed, but on the sort of entitlement one can ve to it. On this understanding, declaratives. are again objective, but w observatives are not. Although observatives make a public truth ac;

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cessible, and are therefore objective in the first sense, they do not do so by making their input entitlement publicly accessible. They are expressions of essentially private, first-personal recognitions that cannot, even in principle, be democratically shared. An observative is my speech act, my accomplishment, in a way that a declarative is not, and it is, in that sense, subjective. Similarly, the fact—expressed by a declarative—that two people are legally married is objective, while the performative—"I hereby pronounce you husband and wife"—is subjective, even though it licenses the former declarative. So far we have marshaled notions such as universality, publicity, and democratic accessibility in our discussion of different senses of objectivity. But equally time-honored is the attempt to understand objective claims as those that are accountable to, governed by, or responsive to the world (and indeed this is the prethematized notion of objectivity that we have appealed to in this book so far). Objective claims, we often say, express independent truths, or truths that are grounded in empirical experience, or held to the tribunal of the world, as McDowell would say. It is interesting to notice that this is prima facie a quite distinct sense of objectivity from either of the above. Although epistemology often presupposes that they go together, we would need to offer a specific argument to show that there is some essential link between agent-neutrality of either entitlement or import, on the one hand, and accountability to the world, on the other. 25 Our conceptual framework allows us to give a succinct account of what it is for a claim to be empirical, or receptively responsive to the world: An empirical claim is one that can trace its warrant to or be invalidated by an observative. Although an individual empirical claim can he warranted without being traceable to an observative, the totality of our empirical knowledge must rest, globally and holistically, on observatives. Because we have left the scope of observatives open, this definition likewise leaves the scope of the empirical open. We do not come down on whether you can make empirical claims about values, meanings, abstract entities, or any of the many other domains that have come under contest in this regard. We see this as an advantage of our account. We are happy to say that we can define the notion of the empirical in advance of haggling over its particular contents. To associate objective claims with 25. Rebecca Kukla, in "Objectivity and Perspective in Empirical Knowledge," Episteme 3 (2006): 80-95, makes the case against the existence of any such argument.

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empirical claims is to capture the intuition that objective claims are rewonsive to experience, which is another useful notion of objectivity. But the empiricality or responsiveness of a claim is not, we can now see, actually the same thin.g_as the independence of the truth it asserts. We can say that the object of a claim is independent of that claim when there are no constitutive connections between the making of the claim and the correctness of what is claimed. Austinian performatives paradigmatically fail this particular independence test: in those cases it is the appropriate making of the claim that makes the claim true. More subtly, claims about social proprieties fail this particular independence test; while no one claim about a social propriety makes that social propriety hold or fail, it could not be the case that everyone's claims about social proprieties were systematically wrong. There is a constitutive connection between the claims we make about social proprieties and the social proprieties themselves. Sometimes we understand a claim as objective insofar as its object is independent, in this sense of independence. There is a sense in which the rules of gravity are 'objective' while the rules of baseball are not. Hence we have found yet another locally reasonable sense of objectivity—and surely we could find yet more reasonable ways of de. fining objectivity, and independence too. Both objectivity-as-empiricality.` and objectivity-as-independence could be taken as (different) glosses on what we mean when we say that our objective claims "owe allegiance to the world," as McDowell would Say. McDowell takes care to provide a picture in which there is "external Constraint" on thought. Yet the phrase "external constraint" seems to do double duty for him as a marker of both receptivity and independence. - For instance, against those who would accuse him of an idealism that ,fails to give the world the proper independence, he argues that there is an inherently receptive character to the engagement of our spontaneous conceptual faculties. In order to counter the charge that we are condemned to "frictionless spinning in the void," he reminds us that "to acknowledge the required external constraint, we need to appeal to receptivity." Indeed, "The fact that experience is passive, a matter of re- ceptivity in operation, should assure us that we have all the external constraint we can reasonably want. The constraint comes from outside thinking, but not from outside what is thinkable. 26 But there are, we can now see, many sorts of external constraint we 26. McDowell, Mind and World, 27-28,50-51,28.

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could (and do) reasonably want. On the one hand, we can make the epistemological demand that our claims be justifiable in terms of empirical evidence. This is what McDowell apparently wants when he speaks of the essential role of receptivity in judgment. On the other hand, when he emphasizes the need for an external tribunal of our claims, he seems to be calling for some combination of the need for our claims to have universal output (and hence to be about a public world) and the need for them to be constitutively independent of linguistic propriety (and hence to be about an independent world). These are metaphysical rather than epistemological constraints. That Smith hit a home run yesterday can certainly be a deliverance of receptivity, but the existence of such deliverances will do nothing to assuage those social idealists who want to think of all of objective reality as constitutively dependent on social conventions in the way that this fact is. What McDowell really seems to be looking for is a multifaceted account of objectivity that illuminates how receptivity and independence are both compatible with the engagement of our spontaneous conceptual capacities in experience and judgment. Now there certainly are important categories of claims for which empiricality, intersubjective availability of warrant, universality of consequent, and objectivity-asindependence are ineliminably intertwined. As well, language and thought must be able to sustain both receptive, empirical claims and claims about independent states of affairs in order for any part of language or thinking to be contentful—and this is a point that McDowell has done a wonderful job of bringing home. But these dimensions of objectivity are nonetheless distinct, and play importantly_ different roles within the normative _ pragmatics of discourse.. In this chapter we have explored a number of ways in which we distort the space of reasons if we understand it as in the first instance a space of inferentially articulated declarative claims. Instead, elements of this space have a rich and varied pragmatic structure, Authors like McDowell have worked hard to cure us of our attraction to any picture of the space of reasons that leaves it cut off from a world that can causally impinge upon us, deliver itself to us through our receptivity, or enjoy robust independence from our social norms. We suggest that the pragmatic framework that we have introduced can help alleviate the fear that we face a bridge between mind and world that philosophical explanation cannot cross.

Anticlimactic Interlude: Why Performatives Are Not That Important to Us

By 'performatives', we mean what Austin meant in the first part of Now to Do Things with Worth—that is, roughly, speech acts that in their very utterance serve to enact, institute, or make true what they assert. Consider, for example, a typical utterance of "The meeting is adjourned!" The fact that this speech act is performed—in the appropriate context, by someone of the relevant social position, etc.—constitutes the fact that the meeting is adjourned. There is no antecedent reality being described here. Rather, the speaker is creating the relevant reality through a discursive performance.' Other examples that have become philosophical classics include acts of promising, baptizing, and marrying. Such performatives have been analytic philosophers' favorite examples of utterances whose entitlement conditions are more normatively complex than the possession of epistemic warrant. The meaning of the term 'performative' notoriously drifts around in Austin's classic work on the pragmatics of speech acts. In particular, he begins by defining 'performatives' as a pragmatic subclass of speech acts but ends by focusing on the fact that all speech acts have a performative dimension and force. Indeed, performative force has functioned as the 1. Of course on any account there will be matters of degree. A lower-court decision to the effect of the law implies that such and so," or a referee's determination in a sport in which appeals are possible, does not in itself—even with the right background context—institute the truth. But it is nonetheless partially constitutive. It is, in some clear enough intuitive sense, productiv e of the truth that it asserts rather than merely reflective of sonic preexisting truth. Whatever other worries one has about the category, it is a simplification to think of the class of performatives as the class of utterances which by themselves constitute truths. The concerns we raise in this chapter apply independently of this complication.

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main conceptual tool for categorizing speech acts by their pragmatic structure. Be that as it may, we reserve the term `Austinian performatives' for the kind of speech acts that Austin marks out at the start of How to Do Things with Words, namely speech acts that constitute truths, not by causing a change in states of affairs, but by instituting new states of affairs in and through the very act of their utterance. Such speech acts—and the paradigmatic examples we have inherited from Austin, such as baptisms and commitment ceremonies—would appear on first blush to fit into box 2 of our grid. As Austin made clear, the entitlement to performatives depends on specificities of the normative position of their speaker, in the context of the social scenario in which the speech act occurs. Thus performatives seem to be classic examples of acts with agent-relative inputs. Only a religious or state authority can perform a marriage by pronouncing it; only the chair of a meeting can adjourn a meeting by asserting that it is adjourned. Meanwhile, it seems fairly natural to say that what these speech acts primarily do is to make true what they assert, and hence that they have agent-neutral outputs— in fact, it is this constitutive function that has drawn them together as a salient class of speech acts. Thus the functional effect of the utterance "The meeting is adjourned" seems to he to make what it pronounces— that the meeting is adjourned—true, not just for you, but simplic iter Because they are so familiar to us as examples of speech acts with a different pragmatic structure from declaratives, one is tempted to think of them as the paradigmatic examples of box-2 speech acts. But there are at least two reasons why performatives aren't as neat or illuminating as examples of box-2 speech acts as are observatives. First of all, as Austin makes explicit, performatives manage to function in the way that they do because of their function within social ritual or ceremony. A pronouncement of marriage does something only because we have established the social institution of marriage and a repertoire of ceremonies for initiating people into it, and what it does is establish a normative status defined within this social institution. Were there not established, conventionally agreed upon rituals and institutions of marriage, there would he nothing that it would be to be married, and nothing enacted by this speech act. Because performatives are so deeply dependent upon "convention" and "ceremony," to use Austin's favorite terms, they create a sense that such speech acts are somehow less

Anticlimactic Interlude

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grounded in reality, less substantial, or less central to the core of epistemology and the functioning of language than are declaratives. Whether or not this intuition can be made precise while retaining plausibility, it is common in analytic philosophy to somehow feel that such speech acts are, if not outright gimmicks or tricks, at least not tied as firmly to the objective world as are "central" or "traditional" elements of language. Even though the truths performatives produce are agent-neutral, public truths, they are truths that are contingent upon our chosen conventions and practices in a special way—they seem to have "mere" conventions at their core. They are things we make true, not truths drawn forth by hard epistemic labor, or truths revealing the structure of independent reality. (Or, again, so we suspect the intuition runs.) Likewise, their distinctive pragmatic functioning is unlikely to unseat for us the intuition that basically, at its core, the pragmatics of declaratives is the pragmatics of language that we need to be worried about. One might well argue that no speech act—declarative, observative, or other—can in fact have any pragmatic function or performative force abstracted from the rituals and conventions that support the functioning of speech (even beyond the obviously conventional rules of syntax and semantics). But regardless of how successful such an argument would be if it were developed in detail, there seems to be no question but that the legitimacy of observatives is tied to objective facts that enjoy a kind of robust independence from social ceremonies and conventions of just the sort that performatives lack. Hence observatives cannot be written off as `gimmick sentences', whose universal purport and status as truth-claims is dependent upon a trick of pragmatics. Observatives, which mark a receptive recognition, stand for their legitimacy before the tribunal of the independent world in as straightforward a way as any declarative; no plausible epistemology of our knowledge of the external world is going to be accomplished by assigning observation a second-class status. At,. tendon to observatives, then, makes it clear(er) that what distinguishes box-2 from box-1 speech acts is not the distinction between noting and making, nor between objective truth and social convention, nor between receptivity and spontaneity, but rather the pragmatic structure of the entitlement itself. This point is merely pedagogical, of course. That they are less useful examples for the philosophical lessons we hope to draw from the func-

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tion of box-2 structures is no point against the category of performatives per se, nor an argument that they are not genuine denizens of this box. But there is a second, deeper reason for rejecting performatives as the paradigmatic examples of box-2 speech acts. While it is true that performatives 'make things true', and in many cases that this making-true is their most characteristic performative function, it is not as easy to pin down the essential pragmatic output of a performative—that structure in virtue of which we classify it as a performative—as it is to pin down the output of a declarative, an imperative, or an observative. We have emphasized the fact that our boxes capture normative transitional structures, and that typical acts exhibit more than one such structure. And yet, declaratives, imperatives, and observatives are categories of speech acts brought together by a characteristic normative transition. Performatives do not seem to share any such single characteristic normative function. On the one hand, plenty of classic performatives arguably have agent-relative outputs that are more essential to their functioning than any making-true function. So, for instance, consider another Austinian chestnut, namely promising. When Rebecca says to Mark, "I promise to have a draft of this section done by Monday," she indeed makes it true that a promise now has been made—the utterance does enact its own truth. But it is at least as central to the function of what she has done that she has undertaken an agent-relative commitment to Mark to produce the draft on time, and has entitled Mark specifically to expect her to do so and to hold her accountable for producing the draft. Nothing is a promise that doesn't lead to (defeasible) obligations on the part of the promiser and entitlements on the part of the promisee, both of which are agent-relative normative outputs of the promise. 1 2. lt is essential to promises that they generate these particular agent-relative normative proprieties in a particular relation to one another. One has not understood promising if one merely understands that this person now is obliged to do x, and this other person entitled to hold them to doing x. These could be, as it were, free-standing norms. (That parents are obliged to feed their children and children are entitled to demand this of parents does not imply that a promise was made.) What makes something a promise is that the promiser is obliged to the promisee, and that the promisee is entitled, by and through recognizing the promise, to hold the promiser not merely to the act but to her promise. This dialogical, second-personal structure of promising goes missing in Gary Watson's pragmatic analysis of the distinction between asserting (declaring) and promising, in which he explicitly analyzes promises as having (what we would call) an agent-neutral output; see Gary Watson, "Asserting and Promising," Philosophical Studies 117 (2004): 57-77_

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So such performatives arguably belong in box 4, along with imperatives, instead of in box 2. After all, all speech acts institute truths—if nothing else, the truth that they have been performed, and other inferentially and materially related truths. Hence, on a second pass, it seems that performatives do not form a category that maps neatly onto our grid, since some performatives reside most centrally in box 2 and some in box 4; performatives appear to be distinguished by the way they enact social statuses rather than by a distinctive pragmatic structure of the sort we are discussing. But once we notice this, we also notice that seemingly typical box-2 'performatives, such as marriage pronouncements, have not only agentneutral but also agent-relative effects. In addition to making it true that two people are married, marriage pronouncements also impose clear, intitutionally defined commitments and entitlements (as well as subtler, more implicit ones) upon these two people, as well as agent-relative restuirements on others to recognize and respect the marriage in various, differential ways. (The normative force of the marriage for the spouses' employers, who now have a new person to whom they owe benefits, is different from what it is for their parents, who now have a new member f the family, and so on.) Such agent-relative effects seem as essential to the function of the pronouncement as is the making-true of the public fact of marriage. Indeed, there wouldn't be much point to all the fuss about marriage if engaging in it first and foremost added a truth to the universe. Likewise, box-4 performatives such as acts of promising produce em-neutral outputs: not only do they make new truths, but, for instance, they make it the case that everyone is now entitled to treat the promiser as bound by her promise, even though the person(s) to whom the promise is made will also have a special entitlement to hold her to the promise. Thus it is starting to look as if all performatives, though uniformly agent-relative in input, will have a complex mix of agentlative and agent-neutral outputs, and hence will not fit neatly into eier box 2 or box 4. The best we can say, perhaps, is that a given performative may be pirily a box-2 or a box-4 utterance, depending on the centrality of its rious outputs to its pragmatic functioning. Some performatives have o clear priority in either direction: arguably, it is equally central to the et of adjourning a meeting, for example, that we make it the case that

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Anticlimactic Interlude

'Vol' and To I .

the meeting is over (an agent-neutral output), that no more motions can arise (also an agent-neutral output), that the chair no longer has the authority to call on speakers (an agent-relative output), and that the minute-taker need not continue to write down what people are saying (also an agent-relative output). All speech acts have some combination of agent-relative and agentneutral effects: Mark's declaration that Emma gets out of school at 3:15 P.M. not only has agent-neutral outputs in virtue of being a truth-claim, but imposes an agent-relative burden on Rebecca to help finish this writing session in time for Mark to pick up Emma, and so on. Rebecca's imperatival command that Mark revise his example has as a consequence the universally available truth that she commanded this, etc. In Chapter I we dealt with this problem by pointing out that we could distinguish, roughly but robustly, between the outputs that are part of the functional structure of a speech act and those that are accidental effects of it. So perhaps we should be no more disturbed by the apparently "mixed" character of performatives than we are in these other cases. The problem with performatives, though, is that the distinction between essential and accidental pragmatic effects does not seem to be nearly as intuitive or as vivid. It seems that performatives are especially messy in this way; that is, it is much harder than usual to distinguish which elements of their pragmatic functioning are essential to their structure and identity as speech acts. To return to the marriage example: Is it essential or accidental to the pragmatic functioning of the pronouncement of marriage that, for instance, the taxation status of partners now changes, or that the partners have new rights to make difficult decisions regarding one another's health and welfare, or that the partners must be taken—by family members, and by the society at large—as genuine rights-and-responsibilities-bearing members of each other's families? It is because the answers to these questions are not clear that there is so much to argue about in terms of what's at stake in granting samesex couples the right to marry. Indeed, in the case of performatives, the pragmatic essences and consequences of speech acts are often up for active social negotiation. 3 Perhaps there is a systematic reason for this inherent messiness, for it

seems that it is a fairly direct product of the dependence of performatives upon a wide variety of social conventions and ceremonies. A performative exists only insofar as it is placed as a move within a web of Tituals and normative practices, and these webs are often thoroughly ho• tic, without neat centers or peripheries. There is no good answer to the question of how much of such a web must be in place in order to ke possible a given type of speech act. Elaborate, multifaceted, politically charged institutions with vast numbers of implicit and explicit rules are just the sorts of things that support the possibility of performative speech acts, and they are also just the sorts of things whose boundaries, essences, and criteria of individuation are dynamic, contestable, and not determinate in advance of particular pragmatic and political struggles to establish or broaden them. There's no fact of the matter as to which normative conditions, entitlements, and effects within such institutions are robust across context and which are changeable, prior to actual attempts to insist upon or change them. (Again, the current fight over the meaning and possibilities of same-sex marriages is an excellent Case in point.) Thus it is in the nature of performatives not to be neatly parsable along the lines demarcated by our grid—and this is so because of the nature of social institutions and rituals themselves.' The failure of these speech acts to fall neatly into one box or another is no criticism of the analytical framework we are advocating (nor, of Course, is it a criticism of performatives themselves). We have already Doted that individual speech acts can exhibit more than one of the normative pragmatic structures. In what follows we argue that all speech .acts exhibit more than one. Thus, the point of the grid is not to sort speech acts into four mutually exclusive and exhaustive categories, but rather to isolate four distinct types of normative structure that can be present in, and constitutive of, a speech act. In some cases, one normative structure is more central to the nature of a particular act in particular ways, but others are always present. The case of Austinian performatives shows that in some utterances, multiple pragmatic normative 4. In contrast, many imperatives—"Shut the door,' "Please hand me the pen," etc—have

veell defind -

functions that don't rely essentially on the particularities of any such rich and con-

what they effect is a thoroughly social change in status. Likewise, observatives, like declaratives, function to note features of the world, and although they are enabled by various social rituals, this particular function is essential to them in a way that is testable institutions, even though

3. See Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Pelonnative (New York: Routledge, 1997), for an excellent book-length philosophical analysis of such social negotiation.

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robust across background social context.

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dimensions are present, and there is no precise or determinate answer to the question of which are most central. But in every case, including the case of performatives, we can gain clarity about the nature of the speech act in question (in part) by becoming clear on which of these structures are present, in which specific ways, and in what relation to others.

Prescriptives and the Metaphysics of Ought-Claims

t us return to our original typology. When we last left it, we had filled tin as indicated in Figure 5. In this chapter we will explore the remaining empty box, namely box . A box-3 speech act would have an agent-neutral input and an agentative output: it would draw upon a public entitlement in order to efect a normative transition in someone (or some group of people) with a articular normative status. As we mentioned in Chapter 1, we will are that a paradigmatic type of deontic claim belongs in box 3, namely, a laim that prescribes an action for a person or a group of people, such as Rebecca ought to hurry up and finish a draft of this chapter," or "Canaan voters should send Stephen Harper packing in the next election." in order to distinguish such claims from other types of deontic claims such as ought-to-be claims: "There ought to be universal health insurnee in the United States"), and for purposes of terminological elegance, e will call such claims "prescriptives." Although we don't really make se of this, we understand 'prescribe' here in a broadened sense: a preriptive can also say something about what someone is entitled to do, tc. ("Mark and Rebecca are allowed to spend another month working n this chapter.") A prescriptive is simply a speech act that attributes a eontic status to someone or some group of people. In this chapter, we xplore the pragmatic structure of prescriptives, and we argue that they long (partially) in box 3. In essence, we will argue that prescriptives are a species of truthlaim; they articulate truths about the deontic status of some agent or 95

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agents (or perhaps even all agents), and in doing so they prescribe ac-

tions for those agents. We think that it is a strength of our account that this proposal sounds anticlimactic. Once we delve into the pragmatic structure of such truth-claims, however, we will show that this deceptively simple analysis enables us to solve—or, perhaps more accurately, to dissolve—some persistent puzzles that have troubled metaethicists. We end this chapter with an analysis of a philosophically important subcategory of prescriptives, namely, categorical imperatives. Of course, we are not the first to defend the idea that we can solve or dissolve key problems in metaethics by attending to the pragmatics of

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deontic claims, and in particular to their prescribing function. Indeed, this is the core tenet of 'prescriptivism', one of the time-honored metaethical positions. Prescriptivists (whom we will discuss in detail later in this chapter) share with us a central tenet: many of the problems that have appeared intractable in metaethics originate from the undefended assumption that deontic claims should be understood as declarative utterances, and that their philosophical distinctiveness is located entirely in their semantics; in other words, metaethicists have been crippled by the declarative fallacy. In contrast, prescriptivists propose as we do— that we can only understand deontic claims by considering their pragmatic structure. Furthermore, as we will see, prescriptivists agree with us that part of what is distinctive about this pragmatic structure is its agent relative component: prescriptives prescribe an action for someone, and hence surely their pragmatic import for that person is different from what it is for other people. Declarative claims have no analogous agentrelative import; therefore, prescriptivists conclude, prescriptives must not be declaratives. However, we will argue that classical prescriptivism has been an ultimately unsuccessful research program because the only framework available to the philosophical imagination for understanding a speech act as non-declarative and agent-relative has been that provided by imperative speech. Accordingly, prescriptivists have more or less identified prescriptives with funny kinds of imperatives. We will argue that this equation is unviable. Prescriptives are truth-claims, and not imperatives. But their distinctive structure could not be seen clearly until the distinction between inputs and outputs was articulated. With our typology in place, we can both accommodate the insights of prescriptivism and avoid its fatal pitfalls. —

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Input —0Agent-neutral

Agent-relative

Output

Agent-neutral

1

2

Neutral input Neutral output

Relative input Neutral output

Declaratives

3 Neutral input Relative output Agent-relative

Figure 5

Kantian judgments of taste, baptisms, some recognitives, i.e. observatives 4 Relative input Relative output Imperatives (promises, invitations, reproaches...), ostensions

5.1 The Pragmatics of Prescriptives Our proposal, again, is to understand prescriptives as truth-claims that are about the commitments of those to whom they prescribe actions. That is, when I say, "Stephen Harper ought to replace his minister of the environment," I am claiming that it is true of Stephen Harper that he has a commitment—whether or not he recognizes this commitment—to replace his minister of the environment. This commitment is among the

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normative statuses that carve out his position in the space of reasons.' My claim is true just in case Harper really has this commitment, and whether he does or not is a fact about the structure of the public world. The intuitive, commonsense appeal of this analysis is so strong that we do not think we need to defend it, as long as we can show that it yields helpful payoffs. Indeed, we think that the only reason to deny this obvious reading—and to produce the rather tortured accounts of oughttalk that have shaped much of the metaethics literature 2—is if one believes, as many have, that any account that analyzes deontic claims as truth-claims is hopeless from the get-go. There have been two reasons, traditionally, why philosophers have thought this. The first is most classically and starkly summed up in J. L Mackie's "argument from queerness": Mackie associates the idea that moral claims are truth-claims with the requirement that there he 'objective values' about which the truth-claims are made. But, he argues, "if there were objective values, then they would he entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe."' The second is that it has seemed to many that, if prescriptives were truth-claims, then they would be paradoxically severed from motivation. According to most philosophers, beliefs are distinct from desires, or motivating states, and truth-claims are the kinds of things we believe. Hence if prescriptives are truth-claims, it seems that we can believe them to be true without necessarily being motivated to act as they prescribe— we could, for instance, believe that it's true that we ought not to swindle little old ladies out of their life savings, without this belief giving us any motivating reason not to do so. But this has seemed to misconstrue the essence of such claims, which appear to be inherently motivating. 4 It is 1. Notice that our proposal draws no distinction between moral oughts, instrumental oughts, and any ocher kind that may come along; the distinctiveness of moral ought talk is mostly beyond the hounds of this hook, although as we mentioned we will come to categorical imperatives later. Moral ought-claims, on our reading, are claims about moral commitments-about what it is morally good or right to do, whatever that turns out to mean. 2. For instance. see R. M. Flare, The Language of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968); and J. E. J. Altham, "The Legacy of Ernotivism," in Fact, Science, and Morality ed. Graham MacDonald and Crispin Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987). 3. J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (New York: Penguin, 1977), 38. 4. Many authors have taken up this worry, which we discuss in detail later in this chapter. Important examples include Michael Smith, The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), and David McNaughton, Moral Vision (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). Philippa Foot embraced the sev-

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precisely this problem that has led philosophers to seek to understand moral language as having a pragmatic form other than that of a truthclaim, and has given birth to expressivism, prescriptivism, and kindred positions. The problem of motivation is highly relevant for us, and we return to it later in this chapter. We believe that one of the most powerful payoffs of our conceptual apparatus is that it allows us to solve this metaethical dilemma, and show how a claim can both be a truth-claim and essentially provide reasons for action. In contrast, we can quickly dispense with Mackie's version of the problem of queerness. In order for a claim to have a truth-value, it must be able to correspond, or fail to correspond, to some objective state of affairs in the public world, But Mackie's argument presupposes that, in order for this to he so, the words in the claim must correspond to object-like entities in the world. This is the persistent and normally unarticulated philosophical intuition that Derrida, reading Heidegger, has termed the "metaphysics of presence." 5 But one need not delve into the moral domain to see that this assumption is ungrounded. We make perfectly reasonable truth-claims all the time about events and states of affairs that cannot easily be reduced to any component object-like entities that serve as the referents of our words: we speak about intentions, elections, waves of civic unrest, holidays, selection pressures, etc. Unless Mackie is promoting a radical reductionist revision of language that would deny truth-claim status to most of our folk psychological, scientific, and everyday talk along with our moral talk (which he never suggests), there seems to be no reason at all to assume that values in particular must correspond to object-like entities if we are to be able to make truth-claims about them. One might grant this general point and still be impressed by the argument from queerness if one thinks that it is particularly hard to see how deontic claims could describe nice, regular (though perhaps not radically naturalizable) states of affairs—if one feels that these states of affairs would need to have 'spooky' properties. As Mackie puts it, "Plato's forms give a dramatic picture of what objective values would have to erance of moral belief from moral motivation in her classic "Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives," Philosophical Review 81 (1972): 305-316. 5. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatnlogy, trans. Gayatri C. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).

Prescriptives and the Metaphysics of Ought-Claims

be. The Form of the Good is such that knowledge of it provides the knower with both a direction and an overriding motive . . . similarly, if there were objective principles of right and wrong, any wrong (possible) course of action would have not-to-be-doneness somehow built into it." 6 But notice that our account already manages to avoid such worries. If prescriptives are about normative statuses such as commitments, then they require a metaphysics no richer or more mysterious than that required by any of our other claims about normative statuses, including our claims about what we are committed or entitled to believe or infer. Indeed, our everyday ontology is riddled with normative statuses; we appeal to them when we talk about legal contracts, the implications of a scientific result, the structure of a philosophical argument, and so forth. While there may be some who still dream of the eventual reduction of all normative talk to 'naturalized' talk, our equation of prescriptives with truth-claims makes them rest on entities and states no spookier or more immune from naturalization than the rest of such talk. And commitments and entitlements—the topic of prescriptives—do in some obvious but non-pernicious sense 'have not-to-be-doneness (and to-bedoneness, and allowed-to-be-doneness) built into them': this is just what a commitment is—it is what-is-to-be-done. Its to-be-doneness does not need to be understood as some extra property clinging to it, some sticky motivational jelly coating it; to think this would be to conceive commitments as objects differentiated by their predicates, rather than as states of affairs, and thereby to succumb, again, to the metaphysics of presence. Therefore there is no metaphysical barrier to our treating prescriptives as truth-claims.' Thus the ground is cleared for us to begin our pragmatic analysis of these claims and their distinctive function. In Chapter 1 we argued that truth-claims are entitled by access to features of the public, shared world, and hence that their input is necessarily agent-neutral. Nothing can be true "for me" but not "for you"; this is essential to truth and to our ability to reason and communicate about a shared world. Prescriptives are no exception; if it is true that Stephen 6. Mackie, Ltincs, 40 7. Notice also that we can remain completely neutral on questions such as whether normative statuses are 'socially constructed'. Our ought-claims have unproblematic references insofar as there really are normative statuses, regardless of how they got there.

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Harper ought to replace his minister of the environment, then it is true "for everyone" that this is so, and one's entitlement to the claim is con. stituted by access to facts about the world, rather than on specific features of one's normative standing. So prescriptives, like all truth-claims, have agent-neutral inputs. This is not to be confused with the thesis, de'fended by Hare and others, that oughts are based on universal princigales. The reasons for an ought-claim may be as particularist and context'specific as we like, but if it is a true claim, then it describes a public fact, and entitlement to it is agent-neutral. We also argued in Chapter 1 that the utterance of a legitimate truth, claim, by putting this agent-neutral fact into public social space, makes it a defect in anyone else in the discursive community not to share in this entitlement, albeit perhaps a completely exculpable defect of ignorance; such a person does not know what 'we' know. Again, prescriptives are no exception: like all truth-claims, they strive for universal recognition and uptake, and to the extent that they are legitimate, it is a defect not to give them this uptake. Since this effect is agent-neutral, we can say that prescriptives always and essentially have an important agentneutral output. At least one of their central functions belongs in box 1. `indeed, this all amounts to saying that prescriptives serve a perfectly healthy declarative function. However—and here is where things get interesting—they have another essential output as well. For when failing to acknowledge a commitment becomes a defect, this is a very different transformation for the person whose commitment this is than it is for everyone else. There is a . world of difference between recognizing that Stephen Harper is committed to x (or ought to do x) and recognizing that I (who am thankfully not Stephen Harper) am committed to x (or ought to do x). Recog' nixing a truth about (someone else's) commitments is like recognizing any other fact; it commits us to taking account of this fact in our beliefs, inferences, and behavior. We give proper uptake to this commitment by acknowledging this truth. But recognizing that I, first-personally, am committed to x is essentially a matter of practically acknowledging that 1 tun bound to do x. Of course I still may not want to do x, or my reasons to do x may be trumped by reasons to do conflicting things, and so forth. But 1 literally have not understood the force of the truth-claim if I do not give uptake to the fact that I am committed to doing x. If I acknowledge the truth of a prescriptive that is targeted at me, but somehow deny that

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it makes any claim on me to follow its prescription for action, then either I don't understand what I am acknowledging, or I don't identify, firstpersonally, with the person whose commitment it is. 8 John Perry's famous argument for the essential indexical showed that no set of categorical propositions could capture the practical inferential content of "I am here"—a content without which no knowledge is deployable.' Likewise, no set of categorical propositions can capture our placement within the space of reasons, as bearers of particular commitments and entitlements. In order for my commitments and entitlements to exert governing force upon my practices, I must recognize that these are mine. I must grasp not only the shape of the normative web of commitments and entitlements, and not only the ways in which new speech acts change this web, but also where I am located within it-1 must know which commitments and entitlements are mine and which new claims demand uptake from me. This perspectival grasp of the space of reasons is a logical condition for any of these statuses making a difference to me at all. I must not only recognize my commitments and entitlements, but also have practical, perspectival uptake of the fact that they are mine—that they commit and entitle me. When language is functioning ideally, then, the person whose commitments are targeted by a prescriptive will undergo an agent-relative transformation that others are not called upon to undergo: she will recognize herself as bound to do what the prescriptive prescribes (whether that recognition takes the form of doing it, making excuses for not doing it, feeling guilty for not doing it, etc.). No one else but she is called upon to do this by the prescriptive. The prescriptive calls to everyone, agentneutrally, to recognize the truth of the claim it makes, but it also calls to her to give first-personal practical recognition of the claims her commitments make upon her. This is an agent-relative output of the prescriptive, whose utterance is still agent-neutrally entitled. While only I am practically claimed by my commitments, anyone who has access to the truth is entitled to note them. Thus this function of the prescriptive has an agent-neutral input and an agent-relative output, and it belongs in box 3. Hence our grid now appears as in Figure 6, 8. For instance, I might acknowledge the truth of the claim that anyone who has a drinking problem should seek professional help, but not recognize that it is really I who have a drinking problem. 9. John Perry, "The Problem of the Essential Indexical," Nons 12 0979): 3-21.

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Furthermore, the prescriptive always has this distinctive output for those whose normative status it describes. For as we saw in Chapter 1, truth-claims seek, in the ideal, to receive uptake from everyone. But this will always include the person whose commitments the prescriptive describes, and it will always he the case that appropriate uptake, in this person's case, takes this special form. We have said that uttering a prescriptive turns it into a defect not to recognize the relevant commitments. Accordingly, when it is your commitments that are being described, it becomes a defect for you not to give recognitive uptake to the commitments you have. But this is a very different kind of defect from ithe kind that others suffer if they merely fail to acknowledge a truth-

Input —IIAgent neutral -

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igure 6

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claim. Others suffer an epistemic defect, and lack entitlement to beliefs to which they would ideally be entitled. You, on the other hand, suffer a practical defect: your actions are not governed in the right way by the commitments you have, because you fail to recognize these commitments. Merely uttering a prescriptive does not generally give someone a commitment that he did not already have. Normally, whether Mark's commitment to x is a moral commitment to act rightly or a prudential commitment to act sensibly, the true claim that Mark ought to x reflects rather than constitutes the commitment he already has. We have all Sorts of commitments and entitlements that we do not know about, and our not knowing about them does not lessen their reality, any more than it lessens my entitlement to the money left to me in a relative's will if I don't know about it. And here we can note a remarkable disanalogy between doxastic and practical normative statuses: if I do not know of good reasons for believing a claim, I am not committed or entitled to that belief, and this is so even if I am lacking those reasons only because of a defect, such as ignorance. Consider the claim that mitosis is a form of reproduction. The claim is true, and I ought to have reasons to believe it. It's common knowledge, after all. But if I have managed .to remain ignorant of these reasons, then I am not committed to the belief. it's not as though I have the doxastic commitment sitting inside me but just don't know about it—rather, I get the commitment (and the entitlement) once I grasp the reasons. 1 ° Epistemic commitments are produced by epistemic events, such as discovering reasons. Although we could probably invent recherche Austinian counterexamples, practical commitments and entitlements generally don't work this way. 1 have them regardless of my epistemic stance toward them. This gives us another way of getting at the difference between the agent-neutral and the agent-relative outputs of a prescriptive. Imagine that I say, truthfully, "Stephen Harper ought to replace his minister of the environment," and imagine also that disturbingly few people hear and accept my claim, despite my backing it up with solid arguments and evidence. It now becomes a defect not to acknowledge that Stephen Harper

ought to replace his minister of the environment. What sort of defect is this? For all persons other than Stephen Harper who fail to accept my claim, they fail to have a commitment that they should have. They ought to be committed to this claim, but they simply are not. The commitment is missing. Likewise, given their recalcitrance, they would be unjustified in using the claim in inference or acting on it in any way. Stephen Harper, in contrast, is defective in failing to give first-personal, practical recognition to a commitment that he really does have. As long as he does not fire his minister, he is falling short of living up to one of his practical commitments, whether or not he recognizes that he has this commitment. The prescriptive thus seeks to produce (doxastic) commitments or entitlements in third-party listeners, but to induce recognition of (practical) normative statuses in those to whom it applies." (Normally, as we discussed in Chapter 1, the form that the recognition of a practical commitment will take is simply performance of the action we are committed to performing. But this is not always the case: you might recognize that you have a commitment but also that you have a stronger one that conflicts with it, etc.) This difference between the output of prescriptives and that of other declaratives underscores the prescriptive's box-3 status.

10. One reason that Brandon has confused some readers is that he often speaks as if inferential entitlements are automatically transmitted when someone makes a claim, even to people who have no way of knowing about the claim. But we have not been using the term this way in this book.

11. If, on the other hand, the prescriptive was about theoretical commitments to start with—i.e., if someone told me, "You ought to know that mitosis is a form of reproduction"— then the prescriptive might both create the commitment and demand recognition of it at the same time.

5.2 Four Ways of Telling Someone What to Do We have seen that prescriptives always have both agent-neutral and agent-relative outputs; they necessarily enact both box-1 and box-3 functions. Their box-3 function is to call upon someone to recognize her commitments, which involves practically, first-personally recognizing the normative claim they make on her actions. There are in fact several different ways in which you can be discursively called upon to act on your commitments. Consider first the distinction between prescriptives that are spoken in the third and in the second person, at the level of their surface grammar. For instance, consider the difference between the claims "Scott ought to lose some weight" and "You ought to lose some weight" (said to Scott). In the first case, I might utter the claim with no expectation that Scott

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`Yo!' and to r

will ever know I did so. In this case, presumably, the primary purpose of the speech act is simply to declare a fact about what Scott ought to do. I hope to convince the person to whom 1 am speaking (presumably not Scott) that something is true of Scott. Now because it is in the nature of truth-claims to have agent-neutral outputs, and to strive, in the ideal, for universal uptake, my utterance also seeks uptake from Scott, in some attenuated sense. Furthermore, should my claim reach Scott, and should he acknowledge its truth, the shift in his normative status would be quite different from the shift in my conversational partner's normative status, for the reasons we have seen: acknowledgment of this truth on Scott's part would require a firstpersonal, practical recognition of his commitment to lose weight and its claim upon his actions. (Colloquially, he would have to recognize, "That's me they are talking about! I'm the one who has to lose weight.") Hence my third-personal utterance has both agent-neutral and agentrelative outputs. However, at a concrete communicative level, the importance of its box-1, declarative function far outstrips that of its peripheral (yet ineliminable) box-3 function. Although my claim has special normative implications for Scott, it is a stretch here to say that 1 am telling Scott what to do. Let's turn to the second case. This utterance, "You should lose some weight," makes no sense unless I am speaking to Scott and expect him to hear my claim. I am still making a truth-claim—I am purporting to say something true about Scott's commitments—and so for Scott to accept my claim, he must take up an agent-neutral commitment to this truth. In this, he is like any other listener. Yet it is clear that in this case the primary social purpose of my utterance is not to convince Scott of the agent-neutral truth of this claim, but to make him recognize the distinctive weight (so to speak) that it has for him. I seek to induce in him practical, first-personal uptake of the force of his commitment. In this case, the box-3 function of the prescriptive takes center stage. In principle, this is not a deep difference. Both utterances are prescriptives with their characteristic box-1 and box-3 functions; the difference is one of social emphasis and expectations. But the second-personal prescriptives seem (in most cases) to share an ostensive function with the 'Lo!' utterances of Chapter 2 ("Lo, a rabbit! ," etc.). Remember that in such speech acts we not only utter an observative that gives recognaive expression to our first-personal experience, but we also ostend

107

that which we observe. While observatives, we said, have agent-neutral outputs, the ostensive function that often accompanies them has an agent-relative output; it can be understood only as directed at those who are in a position to appropriately direct their attention, and it asks nothing of other people, even in the ideal. In the case of second-personal prescriptives, we rarely utter them for the mere purpose of declaring a truth, which incidentally happens to be about the person we are talking t0. 12 Rather, we speak in order to call that person's attention to the norm that binds him. If I tell Scott, "You need to lose weight," I do not order him to lose weight, but neither do I merely inform him of a truth—I ostend his normative status, which will make a practical claim on his actions once he recognizes it. So whereas my third-personal prescriptive had agent-relative normative implications for Scott, my second-personal prescriptive further demands of him that he attend to and appropriately recognize his normative situation. There is a subtle but from our point of view crucial distinction between such exhibitions of a norm, on the one hand, and the attempt to hold someone to following the norm, on the other hand. Surface grammar is exceptionally slippery and unreliable here, but in the most literal cases, "You ought to lose weight" is importantly different in its discursive function from "Please lose weight!," which is our third and most direct way of telling someone what to do. The latter is a box-4 speech act such as an entreaty or an imperative, and it holds the other to a norm rather than merely ostending that norm. 13 On our account, such a speech act had better be different from the first, since the first, being a prescriptive, belongs in box 3, and the second belongs in box 4. Since "You ought to lose weight" is a truth-claim, anyone who has access to the truth that Scott ought to lose weight is entitled to utter it to Scott. In other words, its input is agent-neutral. It may be very rude for various people to tell Scott this—as we discussed in Chapter 1, there are various levels of social normativity, and not every utterance that is dis12. When people excuse giving all sorts of tactless advice by saying "I am just telling the truth," we take them to be either lying or lacking a fairly basic understanding of conversational

pragmatics. 13. In Chapter 1 we pointed out that imperatives are not the only box-4 speech acts through which we make agent-relative claims upon one another: we can also invite, promise, entreat, etc. What is important for us here, however, is the distinction between agent-neutrally entitled exhibitions of a norm, on the one hand, and second-personal, agent-relative holdings,

an the other.

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To!' and tor

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cursively entitled is socially appropriate. However, qua truth-claim, I will be discursively entitled to this utterance as long as I am entitled to believe its truth. While I may well inappropriately hurt Scott's feelings by calling his attention to this truth, or violate other social norms governing speech, my utterance cannot be accused of pragmatic misfire at the level of its structural discursive function. On the other hand, I may have no standing whatsoever to tell Scott to lose weight, and hence the utterance, "Please lose weight!" may well pragmatically misfire, no matter how politely I say it. It is contestable who has the standing to ask Scott to lose weight—his doctor and his spouse, probably, and perhaps his children. In the United States, some employers have taken themselves to be so entitled. But in any case, such an utterance, like all box-4 speech acts, is grounded in an agent-relative entitlement. I must be someone with the right sort of authority and standing in order to be entitled to ask this of Scott. My knowing that he should lose weight and my wishing that he would, even for his own sake, is not enough. This request not only directs Scott's attention to his normative commitment, but it seeks to hold him to that commitment, and only someone with the right kind of normative relationship to Scott has any status as an entitled holder of this sort. In both cases, 1 say something in the hope that it will make Scott take himself as bound to lose weight. When I utter the prescriptive, I call Scott's attention to his normative status, in the hope that this status itself will exert force over his actions. When I utter the request, I try to use my normative position in order to exert force over Scott's actions. I am, in effect, asking Scott to lose weight for me, or out of recognition of my authority, although presumably a large part of my entitlement to make this request is based in facts about his actual need to lose weight. In The Second-Person Standpoint, Stephen Darwall opens with the distinction between telling someone that she ought to stop stepping on your foot by calling attention to the moral benefits of ending your pain, and telling her to please get off your foot, speaking as the one whose foot is being stepped on, to the one who is doing the stepping.'* While Darwall's analysis of this distinction differs from ours (as will become apparent later in this chapter and in Chapters 7 and 8), the example works nicely for our

purposes. The first utterance is agent-neutral in its entitlement: anyone who witnessed the foot-stepping could have told her she ought to get off your foot, and their entitlement would have been just the same. But you have special normative standing as person being stepped on when it comes to asking her to get off your foot. In the first case you try to make the norm itself guide the stepper's actions, and in the second case you try to guide her actions by holding her to the norm. In practice, it is often hard not to smuggle a subtle holding into a secondpersonal prescriptive; when I point out an 'ought' to someone I am almost inevitably heard as requesting that she obey it, rather than as merely exhibiting its salience so that it can do its own normative work. Conversely, when 1 entreat or command you to act as you ought, it would normally he very odd for me to do so without trying to direct your attention to the fact that you ought to act in this way. That is, when I hold you to your commitments, I do not usually just request that you do what you were bound to do anyhow; instead, I direct your attention to the norm that binds you and ask that you acknowledge its force. As we have seen repeatedly, speech acts frequently combine several normative functions. An utterance such as "Don't you think you owe your father an apology?" will often serve to make a prescriptive truth-claim, direct your attention to the binding force of your commitment, and hold you to that commitment, all at the same time. Subtle as it may often be in practice, we think that the distinction between entitlements to prescriptives and entitlements to holdings is philosophically and ethically important. Margaret Little has given a careful philosophical analysis of how various kinds of intimacies enable us to make different sorts of claims upon one another.' 5 She has worked to separate the fact that someone ought to do x from another person's entitlement to ash her to do x, and in turn, she has distinguished various modalities of holdings (commands, entreaties, etc.) and their distinctive entitlements. Especially in the domain of duties involving intimacies of the body Little argues, our entitlements to hold others to their duties in various ways will depend on the specificity of our relationships to them. She offers the following sorts of examples: there may be cases where I ought to have sex with a stranger—when I find him perfectly attractive,

14. Stephen Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).

and Law

15. See especially Little's forthcoming tntimnte Assistance: Rethinking Abortion in Morality

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there are condoms available, and it is his dying wish, perhaps. But even in such a case, the stranger has no standing to demand that I do as I ought. It is simply beyond the purview of his entitlement to order me to honor this duty, no matter how nicely he puts it (though he may invite me to do so). Little argues that abortion is a domain marked by such intimate duties and likewise by such shades of entitlement. There are cases in which my having an abortion would be a callous and morally inappropriate act, for instance if I get pregnant intentionally and have plenty of financial resources, but decide later that I want to have an abortion just for the spiteful satisfaction of disappointing my mother. But even in such a case, she claims, random people (not to mention the law) have no standing to hold me to gestating against my will. While they would state a truth if they said I ought not to have an abortion, they would overstep their entitlement if they ordered or even asked me not to. Close friends and family may have the standing needed to gently hold me to my duty to gestate, for instance through a Strawsonian reactive attitude that shames me; yet they still do not have the entitlement to order me to gestate.Th This distinction between prescriptive truth-claims and holdings with agent-relative entitlements is inchoately reflected in the common (and nearly incoherent) opinion that 'abortion is wrong' but 'it's nobody's business to judge' women who have abortions. If abortion is wrong, then in fact it is everybody's "business" to judge that a woman who has one has done something wrong—this is an example of the agent-neutrality of the entitlements of truth-claims. Yet it might be nobody's business (or at least no stranger's or government's business) to hold a woman to her commitment not to abort. We all know that the space of the legal should never extend as far as the space of the moral; we can now state precisely one reason why this is so. It is not just that people should be given some latitude to behave immorally in some ways. Laws hold us to acting in certain ways, and the mere fact that a prescriptive is true doesn't entitle a corresponding state-issued holding. (What does entitle a state-issued holding is a difficult and important question indeed; much as we hope to delve into it eventually, we are not going to address it here.) 16. Such shades of holding are examined in detail, in ways that are relevant to our project, by Coleen Macnamara in "Beyond Praise and Blame: A Theory of Holding Others Responsible' . (Ph.D. diss., Georgetown University, 2005).

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So far, we have noted three ways that an utterance may produce pressure on someone, say Ella, to act as she ought: 1. A third-personal prescriptive calls upon everyone to acknowledge a truth about Ella's commitments, and thereby calls upon Ella to give first-personal uptake to these commitments. 2. A second-personal prescriptive seeks to induce such first-personal uptake in Ella by calling her attention to her commitments and displaying their force. 3. An imperative (or entreaty, etc.) holds Ella to acting in accordance with her commitments. Even though the imperative belongs in box 4, and has an agent-relative input, it is a distinctive kind of holding that inherits some of the grounding in facts about the world enjoyed by prescriptives. For notice that this imperative seeks to hold Ella to a commitment that she was bound by anyhow. The imperative, if it is legitimate, may make Ella especially beholden to the speaker for upholding her commitments, but it does not create the commitments in the first place. As someone entitled to the imperative—Ella's mother or spiritual counselor, perhaps-1 am in a special position that allows me to make her responsible to me for upholding her commitments, in addition to the impersonal responsibility she already has; to put this the other way around, if Ella fails to live up to her commitments, she will now have failed me and not just failed to do as she ought. (The stereotype has it that Jewish mothers are particularly good at marshaling this particular normative tool.) But no matter what my relation to Ella, the content of my imperative is justified by the facts about EIla's commitments. My standing does not add to or create this content; it merely enables me to demand Ella's uptake of it. Let's call such an imperative an alethic imperative. An alethic imperative holds its target responsible for living up to commitments that she already has. 17 That is, an alethic imperative is one that demands that someone do something that she is independently bound to do given true facts about the world. (We could, of course, similarly have alethic entreaties, alethic suggestions, alethic permittings, and other varieties of alethic holdings, in all of which we hold someone responsible for living up to 17. See Macnamara, "Beyond Praise and Blame,' for a development of this notion of holdingresponsible.

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preexisting normative statuses. For purposes of parsimony, we will stick to the consideration of imperatives for the rest of this discussion, with the understanding that the generalization to other modalities of holding is trivial.) All imperatives whose deontic content is also the content of a true prescriptive will he alethic imperatives: if it's true that you ought to do x, then an imperative of the form "Do x!" will be an alethic imperative. Conversely, for every alethic imperative, there is a corresponding prescriptive with the same deontic content: If, when I tell you to do x, it was already independently true that you were committed to doing x, then it was also already true that you ought to do x.' 8 (On the other hand, to repeat, the mere existence of a true prescriptive does not on its own guarantee anyone's—not to mention everyone's—entitlement to a corresponding alethic imperative. Special normative standing is required before one is entitled to an alethic imperative, regardless of the truth of the corresponding prescriptive.) The relationship between alethic holdings and the prescriptives that share their deontic content ("Please lose some weight!" and "You should lose some weight") is analogous to the relationship between observatives and declaratives that commit us to the same sets of beliefs ("Lo, fat Scott?" and "Scott is fat."): in both cases, the two speech acts share the same output, but they differ with respect to the agent-neutrality or agent-relativity of their input. Yet not all imperatives (entreaties, etc.) are alethic. Many imperatives are what we can call constative: they seek to create a new commitment through their utterance where none existed before. Normally, if a colonel orders a private to drop and give her twenty push-ups, the private thereby becomes committed to doing so—however, there is no sense in which the private already ought to do the push-ups in advance of the order. In such a case, the legitimate order constitutes a new duty. Constative holdings litter our interactions: when we appropriately ask or tell one another to pass the salt, practice the same piano piece one more time, report to duty at 0600 hours, or welcome a speaker with a round of applause, we use our normative standing to hold people to actions they were not otherwise committed to performing. If such an imperative is legitimate, it will make a new prescriptive true: once you have asked me to IS. This may be a good place to point out that our account does nut preclude the existence of moral dilemmas. Perhaps we can be truly committed to conflicting actions, and hence subject to conflicting oughts.

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pass the salt, assuming it's a reasonable request, then I ought to pass it. But your utterance here tells me what to do by making it so that I should do it, rather than by holding me responsible for living up to commitments I already have.''' Hence we have seen four pragmatically distinct kinds of speech acts 'that call upon someone to do something: 1. Third-personal prescriptives (which belong in box 1 and box 3, but in which the box-1 function dominates). 2. Second-personal prescriptives (which belong in box 1 and box 3, but in which the box-3 function dominates). 3. Alethic holdings (which belong in box 4 but are grounded in true prescriptives). 4. Constative holdings (which belong in box 4 but can make new prescriptives true).

5.3 Two Alternative Accounts In this section we turn to influential attempts to understand oughtclaims as having a distinctive pragmatic structure: R. M. Hare's classic version of prescriptivism, in which he understands prescriptives as odd sorts of universalized imperatives; and J. E. J. Althorn's analysis of moral judgments as 'besires', especially as filtered through Michael Smith's more widely read discussion of hesires. 2° Both these accounts 'share with ours the insight that deontic claims cannot be understood .simply as declarative judgments because they inherently have a distincjive practical import for the person whose `oughts' they concern. Both also share with us a refusal, in rejecting the idea that such judgments are declarative, to simply place them outside the space of articulate discourse, as did the 'Boo/Yay' emotivists such as A. J. Ayer and C. L 19. We can rig an example in which an imperative seems to function constatively even

though it demands that someone do something they ought to do anyhow. I might tell my son to 'go play at the neighbor's house, not because I think he has an independent duty to do so, but ;Just because I want him out of my hair for a couple of hours. As his parent, I have the authority 'to order him to do this. Unbeknownst . to me, perhaps, my son has already promised that neigh. bor that he would come over and visit that evening. In this case, he already had a duty to visit.

‘liowever, my order does not seek to hold him to that duty, but rather to his new duty to do as his parent commanded. In this case, my imperative seems best classed as constative, even •though it holds him to do what he was obligated to do anyhow 20. Hare, Language of Morals; Altham, "Legacy of Emotivism:" Smith, Moral Problem.

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Stevenson.'' Here we hope to show that our analysis is more elegant than these two kindred accounts and better avoids classic metaethical paradoxes. R. M. Hare was impressed by the fact that, like traditional imperatives, moral language, including ought-claims, primarily guided action rather than belief. Because he presumed that truth-claims were to be equated with declaratives, and because analyses of moral judgments as declaratives seemed unable to capture their prescriptive force, he concluded that moral judgments could not be truth-claims. Instead, he sought to understand them as a peculiar, broadened form of imperatives, which for him formed the only familiar pragmatic category of speech acts with prescriptive force. Although Hare's account is out of date and not really a player in contemporary debates, his idea that prescriptives should be understood as more similar to imperatives than to declaratives continues to have substantial influence in metaethics. From our point of view, Hare is exactly half right: prescriptives—or at least prescriptives in their distinctive box-3 function—share an agent-neutral input with declaratives, but an agent-relative output with imperatives. We hope to show that our account enables us to make sense, in a way that Hare was not in a position to do, of both the analogy between prescriptives and imperatives and the places where this analogy breaks down. For Hare, ought-claims, like imperatives, have prescriptive rather than declarative force: "Their primary function is not to give information; it is to prescribe or advise or instruct." According to him, prescriptives manage to provide information only insofar as they depend upon our understanding which background facts must be true in order for them to make sense. However, he claims, they are distinguished from regular imperatives by their (implicit or explicit) appeal to a universal rule. In his view, whenever we say 'ought', we are "invoking some general principle . . . by uttering [an ought] we seem to imply (in a loose sense) that there is some principle that we are invoking—though it may not be at once clear, even to us, exactly what this principle is." He claims that a truly universal imperative would just be an ought. 22 In trying to explain how prescriptives are distinct from regular imper21. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (New York Penguin, 2001); C. L. Stevenson, Ethics and Language (New haven: Yale University Press. 1944). 22. Hare, Language of Marais, 159, 156, 178.

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atives by appeal to some kind of 'universality' or 'generality', Hare appears to be using an attenuated conceptual toolbox to try to capture the agent-neutrality of the input of prescriptives, by finding this universality t the level of their justification rather than at the level of their pragmatic function. For otherwise his appeal to general principles is really quite mysterious. Especially given that Hare, like us, does not restrict himself to moral 'oughts', why in the world would he think that oughts are more grounded in universal principles than are imperatives? Hare's only argument is that even when no such rule is explicit, we can always k for the reason for an ought-claim in order to draw it out. To use his example, if I tell you, "You ought to use the starting handle," you can always legitimately ask me, "Why ought I to use the starting handle?" 23 Hareisctnlyghpreivsantlyuchisamays in order to call for reasons for their legitimacy. But he offers us no grounds for thinking that the legitimate reasons we might offer in response will he any more general than the original claim. ("Because the automatic start-up function is frozen," we might reply.) And even if we Have separate philosophical reasons to he committed to the idea that any hain of legitimate reasons of this sort will bottom out in general rules, e more important point is this: it seems we can ask for exactly the same rt of reasons in response to an imperative. ("Use the starting handle!"; "Why should I?"; "Because the automatic start-up function is frozen.") But perhaps it is only alethic imperatives for which we can demand asons of this sort, and perhaps Hare would claim that such imperatives e simply prescriptives phrased using a different surface grammar. Two ints are necessary in response to this move. First, this seems to do a ye injustice to constative imperatives. If I tell you to close the door, or drop and give me ten push-ups, but I can provide no reason at all for by my request is legitimate, then it seems to be a dubious request. ly in a few rarified situations of very unequal authority can one get Way with the time-honored parental response "Because I said so!"— d even then one would hope that this is not the actual whole rean for the request. Second, we have shown that there is an important istinction between alethic imperatives and prescriptives, and if Hare s elided this distinction, then he has significantly misrepresented the Pragmatic structure of one or the other or both. 23. bid., 156 (emphasis added).

1.16

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Indeed, it seems that Hare is doomed to misrepresent both, given his failure to recognize two distinctions that have been central for us throughout this book. On the one hand, his failure to distinguish the inputs from the outputs of speech acts hides the existence of normative functions that fit into boxes 2 and 3 in our typography—that is, the `mixed' forms where the input and the output have different pragmatic scopes. Without this distinction, Hare has no mechanism for retaining the agent-neutrality of the input of prescriptives while holding on to the agent-relative import they share with imperatives. Hence he is committed to insisting that prescriptives are 'not truth-claims' and that they have no informational content'. But on our account, prescriptives have plenty of informational content—they give us information about people's deontic statuses. Hare in effect leaves us with no discursive means for delivering such information, nor does he defend or seem to believe in any kind of radical elimitivism that would deny its existence. Deontic information becomes weirdly ineffable, on his account. On the other hand, Hare also fails to notice the structural distinction between the first-, second-, and third-person voices. He finds nothing inherently problematic about the idea of 'translating' imperatives, not only out of the second-person voice, but into a completely impersonal voice not marked by speaker or audience: "The imperative mood, therefore, has for our purposes to be enriched in order to make it possible to frame sentences in all persons and all tenses." He suggests the example, "All mules being barren, please." 24 From everything we have said in this book, such an imperative is not merely unidiomatic; it is pragmatic gibberish and has no discernable functional structure. Yet Hare's severance of the imperative from any particular voice or audience is essential for his purposes, for he needs imperatives to be entailed by prescriptives. While he recognizes that imperatives are not entailed by anything if we restrict entailment to propositional inference narrowly construed, he thinks the notion of entailment can and should be extended so as to allow practical and prescriptive inferences. Given this extension, it is important to him that imperatives and prescriptives be the kind of things that can bear entailment relations, so that normative judgments do not become mere noncognitive expressions that lie beyond the space of reasons, as they did for the emotivists. Sensitive to 24. Ibid.. 188-189.

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common worry that any form of prescriptivism will devolve into h noncognitivism, Hare wishes his ought-claims to be combinable conditionals, able to serve as premises of arguments, and so forth. However, Hare can maintain that imperatives are entailed by prescripbiles only by completely erasing the functionally essential role that voice plays in both prescriptive and imperative speech; only thus can he claim that a speech act with an agent-neutral input (to which anyone who is free of epistemic defect would be entitled) could entail one with an a gent-relative input (to which only those with a specific normative posin are entitled). As we have seen, entitlement to an imperative always uires a specific agent-relative normative status, which will necessarily teed the generalized conditions for entitlement to a prescriptive with agent-neutral input. On Hare's account, entitlement to the prescripe "Scott ought to lose weight" entails entitlement to the imperative ued to Scott) "Lose weight!" But entitlement to the first speech act ly requires knowledge of its truth, and this is insufficient to warrant t anyone to issue the imperative. Surely if a stranger, noticing the truth t Scott ought to lose weight, walked up to him and ordered him to lose eight, Scott would be right to accuse her not only of rudeness but of dly overstepping her entitlement to make demands of him. Hare, ough, erases the entire issue of who is entitled to an imperative on the is of the truth of a prescriptive. Hare manages to hide the problem in his text by only giving an examle in which someone is both the speaker and the target of the prescrip❑ e and the imperative. In defending the claim that all evaluative claims essarily entail their corresponding imperatives, he writes: "Valuedgements, if they are action-guiding, must be held to entail imperayes ... I propose to say that the test, whether someone is using the dgement `I ought to do x' as a value judgement or not is 'Does he or oes he not recognize that if he assents to the judgement, he must also assent to the command "Let me do x"?'" 25 Hare has maintained the plausibility of his general claim about entailment by switching to the case of particular speaker, namely the target. the entailment principle may actually work in the first-personal Case: it may indeed be that if you recognize, first-personally, that you to do x (lose weight, etc.), then in so recognizing, you are autoaught to 25. ibid., 163,168-9.

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matically committed to acknowledging the legitimacy of commanding yourself to follow this prescription. This is an interesting claim, and it strikes us as plausible; first-personal practical recognition of your own commitment may intrinsically involve recognizing that you ought to hold yourself to that commitment. But this plausibility seems to come entirely from the uniquely first-personal structure of the uptake that we each give to prescriptives that apply to US—that is, from the output characteristic of their box-3 function, rather than from their general agentneutral output. And of course, it concerns only our own entitlement to the corresponding first-personal imperative; it gives us no reason to conclude that everyone is entitled to order me to uphold my commitments. Hence the entailment link that Hare has identified depends essentially on the very structure of voice and agent-relative statuses that he himself erases from his picture. Hare attempted to mark out the distinctiveness of evaluative language pragmatically, rather than semantically. Furthermore, he tried to do this while keeping evaluative language within the space of reasons. We have followed his lead in both respects. But he tried to give a voicefree, audience-neutral account of the pragmatics of prescriptives, and hence he did not have the conceptual resources he needed to identify the difference between prescriptives and imperatives. Notice that on our account, attention to voice and audience is what has enabled us to understand prescriptives as functioning as truth-claims and as action-guiding at one and the same time: the very same speech act that has declarative force for third parties has practical, action-guiding force for those for whom it has first-personal prescriptive significance. We have, with no need for metaphysical excess, cut ourselves free from what has been viewed as one of the central paradoxes of metaethics, which Michael Smith has perhaps extravagantly dubbed "the moral problem." 'The' moral problem, according to Smith, is as follows: How can moral judgments be both objective, in the sense of being truth-claims about a public world, and inherently motivating or practical reason-giving? The problem in reconciling these two apparent features of moral judgments, in Smith's analysis, comes from our widespread commitment to some form of belief-desire psychology—that is, an ontology of propositional attitudes such that they either seek to fit the world (be-

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liefs), or seek to make the world fit them (desires), but not both at once. Within the framework of such a psychology, if moral judgments function to describe the world, then they cannot at the same time inherently motivate actions that would change it, whereas if their function is to motivate actions, then they cannot at the same time describe it. Smith points out that his analysis leaves three options: we can reject the idea that moral claims are inherently motivating, we can reject the idea that they have descriptive content, or we can reject belief-desire psychology. The first position is associated with `cognitivists' such as Philippa Foot, who take moral judgments to be simply declarative truthclaims without inherent motivating force. On such a view, there is no contradiction in being committed to the proposition "I ought to spend more time with my aging mother" while not recognizing that this commitment gives me any practical reason whatsoever to spend more time with my mother, however much the truth and the practical reason are contingently linked in practice.'s Here, the motivation to do what we judge that we ought to do is external to the judgment—hence the name `externalists' for proponents of this type of cognitivism. 22 The second position is associated with 'non-cognitivists', including prescriptivists and emotivists, who claim that moral judgments are inherently motivating, and that precisely for that reason they ought not to be understood as having any declarative content. We already saw Hare give this argument. 2s The final position is perhaps the least popular: it seeks to retain both the declarative content and the motivational force of moral judgments by rejecting belief-desire psychology, in particular the idea that propositional attitudes cannot have both 'directions of fit' at the same time. John McDowell is the best-known proponent of this third view, arguing in "Virtue and Reason" and other classic essays that in perceiving moral facts, we perceive truths that directly exert practical norma26. Foot, - Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives." 27. See MoNaughton, Moral Vision. 28. Another famous proponent of this argument is Gilbert Harman; see his The Nature of Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). Noncognitivists often find extra ammunition in the idea that cognitivists, in understanding moral Judgments as truth-claims, are committed to an unsavory moral realism. However, we have argued that there are no special metaphysical barriers to treating prescriptives as truth-claims, so this worry need not concern us

here.

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five force upon us—we literally 'see reasons' for action. 29 Smith follows J. E. J. Altham in giving the name `besires' to such double-edged attitudes, which share a direction of fit with both beliefs and desires. McDowell and his admirers aside, besires have been generally perceived as implausible and undesirable additions to a moral psychology, and not just because of their silly name. Our account retains the cognitivists' commitment to the status of moral judgments as truth-claims (while denying that they have merely declarative force), as well as the noncognitivisis' commitment to their inherent practical import. Hence we are best understood as falling into McDowell's camp and rejecting the dualistic underpinning of beliefdesire psychology. On our account, first-personal commitments to claims about one's own commitments—that is, judgments of the form "I ought to x"—do indeed count as tesires', if a besire is simply an attitude that has both directions of fit built into it. This commitment faces the tribunal of the world as beliefs do: if I discover facts that show it to be false, I should give it up. But it also makes a claim on action: if I have this commitment, it directs me to act in a certain way. We believe that this option looks vastly less mysterious when it is situated within the framework we have developed. We need make no claims about the features of the world having the capacity to reach out and grab onto our motivational structure as soon as we recognize truths about them. If we begin from impersonal evaluative claims stripped of any particular voice—such as the 'it is right that.. .' claims that Smith favors as examples—and portray them as truths that somehow, inherently, make a direct practical claim on whoever happens to note them, this can seem mysterious; it looks as if the practical import somehow rests in the truth and is waiting to he noticed. This idea of an inherent motivational property that can cling to states of the world is what most fundamentally struck Mackie as unacceptably 'queer'. The apparent air of queerness surrounding `besires' is dissolved once we distinguish carefully between first-personal and third-personal prescriptive judgments, taking this distinction in voice as a pragmatic distinction as opposed to a semantic or merely grammatical one. Recognizing that I have a commitment is essentially a matter of recognizing a claim over my actions, whereas recog29. See. McDowell, "Virtue and Reason,' The Monist 62 (1979); 331-350; and McDowell, Society, "Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?" Proceedings of the Aristotelian supp. 52 (1978): 13-29.

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nixing third-personally that a commitment exists is a theoretical recognition of a truth. The practical force of my commitment comes from my recognition that it is 1 who am committed. When I recognize my own commitment, I both recognize a truth and, in so recognizing, acknowledge a claim on my actions, and hence this recognition has both directions of fit. Smith distinguishes between 'motivating reasons', which are the things that psychologically move us to act, and 'normative reasons', or actual rational claims upon us. He argues that the temptation to believe in `besires' is based in a conflation of these two types of reasons. In his view, normative reasons are "best thought of as truths," 3n and they have no inherent motivating force; they need not exert psychological pressure on us, which is what motivating reasons do. The apparent existence of `besires', according to Smith, comes from our conflating what are in fact two separate mental states: our acceptance of a normative reason (which is a belief) with our having a motivating reason (which is a desire). However, as we have described them, first-personal recognitions of our own commitments provide a kind of reason that does not fit neatly into either of Smith's categories. It is surely true that we can recognize .our commitments without this recognition creating in us a desire that psychologically motivates us to act. I might recognize that I ought to donate all of my spare wealth to charity or get my cholesterol level checked while experiencing no psychological feeling that I want to do these things, not even one that is trumped by competing desires. Yet when I recognize these things about myself, I don't recognize a mere truth, as I would if I recognized them about someone else. Rather, I recognize that I have a commitment to act. This is one single mental act, not two separate mental states, and it is an act that recognizes a truth and a practical reason at the same time. There is no way of construing this commitment as devoid of practical import; its practical import is what I recognize. I cannot merely theoretically note a discrepancy between what I ought to do and what I actually do; by noting such a discrepancy, I acknowledge my own transgression. To put the point another way, in so recognizing, I must take my own inaction in the face of this commitment as a practical failing on my part. We should not confuse acknowledgment of a practical reason with a psychological feeling of wanting to act in accordance 30, Smith, Moral Problem, 95.

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with it, any more than we should confuse acknowledgment of a theoretical reason with a psychological feeling of wanting to draw inferences in accordance with it. Thus our analysis of prescriptives, and in particular our attention to the special pragmatic structure of first-personal prescriptive judgments, makes several resilient problems of metaethics go away, with little fuss. It accommodates the intuition that there is a tight relationship between prescriptives and imperatives, without needing to struggle with the pitfalls that have attended versions of the claim that prescriptives just are imperatives. It retains the commonsense intuition motivating cognitivism, namely that moral judgments are truth-claims bearing articulate inferential relations to other claims, but without positing metaphysically questionable entities or properties. And it solves 'the' moral problem by taking the mystery out of the idea that a single moral judgment could have both descriptive content and practical import.

5.4 Reasons, Claims, and Addresses Stephen Darwall, in The Second-Person Standpoint, analyzes the structure

of moral claims by taking their voice as essential to their form and function. Since Darwall seems to share several of our motivations and to be trying to get at distinctions that matter to us, it is worth exploring how his account diverges from ours. We have distinguished in this chapter between two kinds of claims that have practical import for the person(s) whose commitments they target: prescriptive claims, which are truth-claims with agent-neutral inputs that have special practical import when taken up first-personally, and imperatives and other holdings, including alethic imperatives, which have agent-relative inputs. Darwall opens his book with the example we cited earlier, which at first glance seems to track this distinction. He writes of a situation where someone is standing on your foot: Compare two different ways in which you might try to give someone a reason to stop causing you pain, say, to remove his foot from on top of yours. One would be to get him to feel sympathetic concern for you in your plight, thereby leading him to want you to be free of pain. Were he to have this desire, he would see your being in pain as a bad thing, a

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state of the world there is reason for him (or, indeed, for anyone who is able) to change. And he would most naturally see his desire that you be pain-free, not as the source of this reason, but as a form of access to a reason that is there anyway ... Alternatively, you might lay a claim or address a purportedly valid demand. You might say something that asserts or implies your authority to claim or demand that he move his foot and that simultaneously expresses this demand ... the reason you would address would be agent-relative rather than agent-neutraF

According to Darwall, not only does the first transaction result in an `agent-neutral' reason to act whereas the second results in an 'agentrelative' reason, but also, the second provides what he calls a 'secondpersonal reason'. Although this sounds roughly like our distinction between prescriptives ("You ought to get off my foot") and alethic imperatives ("Please get off my foot"), two distinctions that we have dwelled upon are conflated in this passage. First, like Darwall, we portray prescriptives as providing access to a reason that is there anyway, and we also insist that this gives them a kind of agent-neutrality, namely at the level of their input. As Darwall aptly puts it, when we show someone what he has a reason to do with a prescriptive, he accepts a "state-of-the-world-regarding" reason: "Qua this form of reason-giving, you would be asking him to agree, as it were, that there is a reason for him to do something rather than asking him to agree to do it." ' 2 You are not drawing on your agent-relative entitlement to make a claim on him, but pointing his attention to an agent-neutral fact. But this agent-neutrality of input does not entail the agent-neutrality of output that Darwall assumes when he says that what we show is merely a state of the world that anyone who is able has a reason to change. A prescriptive may be agent-neutral and state-of-the-world-regarding in its input while being utterly and non-interchangeably specific in its output: for instance, I might point out that because of the special commitments that you have taken on in adopting a child, it is now your obligation to see to it that this child gets the unexpected medical care she needs. Here I am not demanding or entreating that you do so, or drawing on the special relations of authority between us; indeed, I might point this out to a third party instead of to you. I am pointing out a truth that anyone in touch with the truth is (discursively) entitled to point out, namely that 31. Darwall, Second-Person Standpoint, 5, 7. 32. Ibid., 6-7.

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you have a special, agent-relative reason to act that is not transferable to anyone else, even if someone else is in a position to help." Other times, it may well be that my prescriptive gives you a reason to act only because you happen to be one of the people in a position to do something that ought to be done—for instance, turning off a running tap so as not to waste water. In both cases, the prescriptive has practical rather than theoretical import for you only in virtue of your taking up its import first-personally. Darwall need not and should not draw any conclusions about the generality or neutrality of the reason that a prescriptive reveals, in pointing out the neutrality of its entitlement, or the fact that the reason is 'there anyway', independent of my address. Second, here and elsewhere in the book, Darwall conflates the agentrelativity of a claim with its second-personality. He writes: "What makes a reason second-personal is that it is grounded in (de jure) authority relations that an addresser takes to hold between him and his addressee." This definition actually includes two distinct elements: (1) the grounding of a reason in specific, agent-relative relations between people; and (2) the grounding of the force of a claim in a second-personal address. Darwall explicitly associates both of these with his second-personal reasons. For instance, he first introduces second-personal reasons as follows: "A command is a form of address that purports to give a person a distinctive kind of (normative) reason for acting, one I call a second-personal reason." But shortly thereafter he claims that it would he a secondpersonal reason because it "would concern, most fundamentally, his relations to others .. The reason would not be addressed to him as someone who is simply in a position to alter the regrettable state of someone's pain . . . It would be addressed to him, rather, as the person causing gratuitous pain to another person." 34 These features ought to be kept quite distinct. Someone can perfectly well have an agent-relative (or even an agent-specific) reason to act—a reason that is grounded in her particular relations to others and specific to her particular normative position (as the one causing pain, as the one who adopted the child, etc.)—without that reason being presented to her in the form of a second-personal ad33. Indeed, even if I am the adoptive child herself, I still make a claim with an agent-neutral input if I point out your distinctive obligation to me. But as the adoptive child, 1 also have an agent-relative entitlement to ask you to live up to your commitment to me, which is a box 4 speech act. 34. Darwall, Second-Person Standpoint, 4,3-4,7. -

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dress. For that matter, she can have agent-relative reasons of this sort that no one ever points out, or that are pointed out only between third parties and not to her at all. Indeed, she might come to have an agentrelative reason to act because of a transaction between two other people in which she is not involved: If her agent rents out her New York property to a tenant while she is living in Florida, she now has an agent-relative reason to pay taxes on that rental income. Meanwhile, I can be held to acting on an agent-neutral reason through a second-person address; my spouse may beseech me to return that ridiculous Hummer to the dealer and buy a Civic instead, for instance, because we should all stop burning unnecessary fossil fuels. Thus the agent-relativity or agent-neutrality of reasons seems to be a red herring for Darwall, who is (or at least ought to be) more interested in the addressing and holding functions of second-person transactions. Whether or not our reasons for acting are specific to us, and whether or not these reasons are dependent upon particular relations to others, are questions that are simply orthogonal to whether we are held to those reasons by a second-personal demand made by someone with the proper authority to so hold us. Part of the reason why Darwall may have difficulty nailing down the location of the second-personality he seeks is because he consistently talks in terms of the second-personality of reasons (and sometimes 'perspectives') rather than of claims. It makes perfect sense to separate agent-relative from agent-neutral reasons—that is, reasons that claim us in virtue of our special normative position and reasons with generic force. Such a distinction is part and parcel of our distinction between - agent-neutral and agent-relative normative statuses. However, it is not at all clear what it means for a reason to be second-personal (or thirdpersonal, etc.). Second-personality, one would think, is a feature that a transaction such as a speech act can have. A second-personal claim is one that 1 make to you. Transactions can have such a second-person voice because they can have a direction and a transitive object. In this work, we have used the notions of first- and second-personality to describe how claims and speech acts are directed and received (and starting in the next chapter, the second-person voice will become vastly more central to our account). Granted, Darwall admits up front that he is stretching the notion of second-personality and bending it to his own ends, since his concern is

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not with second-personality as a grammatical voice. But it is hard to see how to get any traction out of the use of the term unless we are talking about the kind of thing that can have a direction in this way. And reasons do not seem to be good contenders for such directionality. Reasons are essentially subject to public epistemic appraisal, and they bear publicly accessible rational relations to other reasons. Whether a reason has force only for me or for everyone, a statement of that reason will be an agentneutral truth-claim. One and the same agent-relative reason may be described in a third-personal truth-claim ("Since Mark is the one who is causing Rebecca pain, he really ought to get off her foot"), or imputed in a second-personal address ("Mark, please get off my foot!"). The voice attaches not to the reason but to the claim. While my demand may give you an extra reason to act as a by-product—wanting to do as I ask as a matter of politeness, for instance—this is clearly not the reason that Darwall has in mind. He is explicit that it is your causing me pain that provides the reason for action here, and this seems to be the same across the two cases. Why would Darwall think that the reasons themselves could be secondpersonal? We suspect that this mistake is rooted in his overinflation of the category of constative imperatives (and similar constative box-4 holdings), which are second-person addresses that create reasons that did not exist before. Darwall says of the second-personal case, "What is important for our purposes is that someone can sensibly accept this second reason for moving his foot, one embodied in your claim or demand, only if he also accepts your authority to demand this of him (secondpersonally)." 35 But this seems manifestly false. Surely you can accept that you have an agent-relative reason to stop causing me pain whether or not you accept the authority of my demand, or even hear it at all. Indeed, we may accept all sorts of thoroughly agent-relative reasons for doing something for another person while openly denying that that person has the authority to demand this from us. I might accept that I have a reason to shower compliments upon my spouse when he is feeling unconfident, while denying that he has the right to demand compliments from me. (And I certainly wouldn't think that everyone owes my spouse these compliments.) Darwall apparently believes that a second-person address always holds its target to act on reasons that have force only in35. lbid,, 8.

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sofar as this target accepts the authority of the speaker to hold him to the reason. This is a long-winded way of saying that Darwall apparently believes only in constative holdings, and not in alethic holdings. (This perhaps explains why he grants epigraphic status to Rawls's statement "People are self-originating sources of claims.") He then counts the reasons arising from all imperatives, entreaties, etc., as second-personal reasons—that is, as reasons that have force only because they were given that force by the second-person address. As we discussed earlier, there certainly are reasons that are constituted by addresses in this way. If, as your professor, I ask you to write a paper on a particular topic, you now have a new reason to write that paper, namely that I, with my proper authoritative position with respect to making such demands of you, have asked you to do so. Whether or not this is the only reason for you to write the paper, it is certainly a reason that was constituted by my demand. There could have been no true prescriptive describing your obligation to write this paper in advance of my imperative. Since such a reason owes its entire life to a second-person transaction between us—an address grounded in our proper normative relations—it is easy to think of the second-personality as somehow attaching to the reason itself, Fair enough. 36 However, most of the reasons and addresses that Darwall discusses are not of this sort. When 1 request that you get off my foot, this is an alethic request: I am holding you, secondpersonally, to doing something you already had a reason to do, namely to stop causing me pain. I am holding you to getting off my foot for the very same reason that I (or a third party) would be impressing upon you if I (or she) uttered a prescriptive instead, pointing your attention to the fact that you ought to get off my foot. My special normative relationship to you gives me the right to hold you to your reason, but it does not create the reason. His belief that all second-person holdings are constative, and that they create the reasons that they demand be obeyed, may explain why Darwall believes that his account ultimately supports a contractarian theory of morality. He argues throughout the book that second-person ad36. But even here, the reason so created is perfectly describable by others. 1 may say. "Smith ought to write a paper, because her professor told her to." and this statement will express the very same reason that was constituted by the second-personal interaction. So the reason itself does not, properly speaking, have any particular voice,

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dresses and relations of holding are constitutive of the possibility of moral obligation, responsibility, and community, and hence that something like a Hegelian or Fichtean picture of the foundational role of mutual recognition in moral agency is correct. We agree, and we will argue this in detail ourselves in Chapter 8. However, he also takes this conclusion as sufficient to compel a contractarian account of morality. If you believe both that second-person transactions underwrite all moral commitments and that such transactions always function by creating new reasons, then it perhaps makes sense to conclude that all moral commitments are ultimately contracted into existence through second-person transactions. As we will argue soon, we agree that second-person addresses are the condition for the possibility of moral community and agency. But from all we have said in this chapter, this position allows us plenty of room for robust realism about people's commitments and reasons. A second-person address can hold you to commitments you already had, rather than creating these commitments. 5.5 Coda: Categorical Imperatives Kant, as we know, based his moral theory around the functioning of a special type of ought-claim, the `categorical imperative'. The categorical imperative supposedly makes a claim on each of us, regardless of any of our individuating features or particular ends, sheerly in virtue of our potential for rationality. Now in fact, when we talk to one another about what we ought to do, using prescriptive discourse or second-personal holdings, almost all of our claims are context-specific and have agentrelative outputs. We tell people to call their grandmother, give them advice about how to negotiate a sticky situation at work, point out to them that they ought to have been more tactful or generous in a particular case, and so forth. Almost never do we make unconditional pronouncements about what commitments everyone has, merely in virtue of membership in the moral community or the space of reasons. Even if our moral duties are grounded in perfectly general, context-independent moral rules (maximize utility, etc.), we must acknowledge that virtually all of our contentful moral claims are applications of these rules in particular contexts, with agent-relative outputs, rather than categorical statements of principle. Indeed, many critics of Kant over the centuries have argued that there

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could be no such thing as contentful categorical imperatives—that is, they have argued that maximally general principles can yield contentful commitments with practical import only when situated within contexts that include the type of individuating ends and circumstances that Kant expelled from the domain of pure moral discourse." However, if we can formulate claims about unconditional commitments—about commitments that we have merely in virtue of our placement within the space of reasons—then the pragmatic structure of such claims will be quite distinctive. In particular, they seem, by definition, to be deontic claims that have (only) agent-neutral outputs, unlike the prescriptives that have concerned us in the rest of this chapter. Let us consider the pragmatic structure of Kant's categorical imperative in particular, since Kant is the most explicit and important proponent of perfectly universal moral claims that target us in abstraction from any of our individuating features. Although he calls his moral judgments 'imperatives', Kant himself does not distinguish carefully between imperatives and prescriptives. In fact, his introduction of the notion of a categorical imperative in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals fluctuates at least twice within a single passage between these two types of speech acts. He writes: "The representation of an objective principle, insofar as it is necessitating for a will, is called a command (of reason), and the formula of the command is called an imperative. All imperatives are expressed by an ought . . . they say that to do or to omit something would be good." 35 The representation of a principle would normally take the form of an ought-claim, but he calls this representation a command, Yet he immediately claims that 'all imperatives are expressed by an ought', which of course they are not. Some authors, such as Foot, have simply concluded that Kant misused the term `imperative' and was actually interested in deontic claims, or prescriptives. 34 It seems more likely to us that Kant had both cognitiv37. Most famously, though certainly not most recently, see Hegel's critique of Kant in Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). There has been a recent move to read Kantian morality as more contextually sensitive than this, but our interest here is not in the details of Kant's account but in the basic idea of a categorical imperative. 38. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 4:413. 39.

of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (New

Foot, "Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives." This reading was convenient

for Foot, as it biased the text in favor of her cognitivist, externalist account of moral judgments.

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ist and prescriptivist intuitions and had not clearly worked out the difference between prescriptive and imperative claims. In any case, if there are any moral judgments that make an unconditional claim on us simply in virtue of our rationality as we will assume for purposes of argument for the rest of this section—then we can easily talk about either type of speech act: a prescriptive that states what we ought (unconditionally) to do, or a corresponding alethic imperative that (unconditionally) commands us to do it. Although they may be of special importance to moral philosophy', such Kantian alethic imperatives would not have a particularly unusual pragmatic structure for our purposes. Kant is clear that we can be bound by categorical imperatives only autonomously rather than heteronymously; famously, I must give myself the moral law in order for its claim to be legitimate. Although Kant thinks that we are to act as if we were willing our action as a universal law for everyone to follow, it is not this act of willing on our part that will bind others, but only their own autonomous subjection to the law. This means that the alethic imperative corresponding to the categorical prescriptive, for Kant, must be issued by each of us to our self. Each of us can command, "Let me obey the moral law," and this command will bind only its speaker. Such an imperative—like any other—will have an agent-relative input and an agent-relative output, and will belong in box 4 of our grid. And if someone else undertakes to hold me to my Kantian duty through an ale thic imperative or other such alethic second-person address, her speech act will likewise belong in box 4, along with all other holdings. Our pragmatic interest is instead in the prescriptive form of the 'categorical imperative'—henceforth CI—and we will restrict our attention to it. Kant notoriously defines Cl several times over, but his primary and most general formulation is that the Cl "would be that which represented an action as objectively necessary of itself, without reference to another end." 4° The universally binding force of the CI comes from the fact that it presents an unconditional ought, which is in no way indexed to a particular agent. Thus Kant builds the agent-neutrality of its output into its very definition. What is special about CIs is not the universality of their extensional scope, but the agent-neutrality of their binding force. A true prescriptive that applies to all of us because of its content, such as `we all ought to try to minimize our use of fossil fuels', does not count as —

40. Kant, Groundwork, 4:414.

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a CI, for Kant; it binds each one of us only because of conditional facts about our supply of fossil fuels and the bad effects of burning them that happen to have a similar normative significance for all of us. Hence this is a thoroughly hypothetical imperative regardless of its scope. Indeed Kant is famously critical of those who try to ground CI in extensionally universal but ultimately contingent features of agents. He writes: "There is . . . only a single categorical imperative and it is this: act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law." 41 Since we are not, in fact, willing for anyone but ourselves here, Kant's point is not that the output of CI is universal in its extensional scope, but rather that there is nothing in the maxim that marks its force as in any way specific to us and our normative position." In CI, the universality of its scope is in fact a product of its structural agent-neutrality, rather than the reverse. The output of the categorical imperative is thus genuinely different from the prescriptives we have considered in the rest of this chapter. Whereas normal prescriptives have agent-relative practical import for those whose commitments they identify, the categorical imperative has this practical import for everyone, not merely as a matter of fact, but specifically because this import is independent of any specific features of the agent. The categorical imperative speaks to each of us and calls upon us to act merely as inhabitants of the space of reasons, or as members of the most generalized possible 'we', rather than as individuals with a specific normative place in the space of reasons. (Indeed, to the extent that it speaks to us as specific, differentiated individuals, it does not function categorically) It thus has agent-neutral instead of agent-relative outputs. At the same time, like all prescriptives, the categorical imperative has an agent-neutral input. Not only is it a truth-claim, but its grounding is supposed to be in reason itself, again specifically independent of any particular features of the speaking agent. We are each a subject of the 41. Ibid., 4:421. 42. It might, in some cases, be unclear whether the universality of a prescriptive is grounded in its structural agent-neutrality or merely in its extensional scope. Colleen Fulton (in private correspondence) suggested the example of the Christian call to repent [or our sins. Surely this call is meant to be universal in its output. Is the idea that being a sinner who ought to repent is a transcendental condition for being a finite agent in the first place, or is it that as a matter of fact, everyone happens to be a sinner? In the first case, the claim that we are sinners who ought to repent is a Cl with an agent-neutral output, but in the second it is a normal pre. seriptive with an agent-relative output. Which meaning is intended by Christian dogma is an interesting theological question lying far beyond our expertise.

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Prescriptives and the Metaphysics of Ought-Claims

and - Lo

moral law, but also, "every rational being ... must regard himself as giving universal law."'" Hence the categorical imperative is agent-neutral in both its input and its output, and—like declaratives, but unlike normal prescriptives—it belongs in box 1. And yet it is not just a declarative with a special subject matter. For its agent-neutrality in no way compromises its practical import. As with all prescriptives, first-personal recognition of the legitimacy of the categorical imperative reveals our commitments and thereby calls upon us to act, and not just to entertain a belief in its truth. The only difference here is that all of us, merely qua inhabitants of the space of reasons, have a first-personal relationship to the claim it makes. Kant is clear that the import of a CI is practical rather than theoretical: the representation of the moral law determines the will to act, as he puts it. 44 In recognizing the legitimacy of the categorical imperative, we recognize that it binds our actions. This is what Kant tries to underscore by claiming that a CI commands, even though we have seen that, strictly speaking, the moral law is not the same as an imperatival command to follow that law. Yet the categorical imperative calls us to act, not on the basis of our particular situation and ends, but simply as an unmarked rational will. Since the output of a CI is both practical and agent-neutral, it will also, unlike the output of a declarative, he universal in practice and not just in the ideal. We saw earlier that one difference between practical and epistemic commitments is that you need not be in a position to recognize your practical commitment in order to really have it: if you are committed to paying $3,000 in taxes, say, your ignorance of this fact does not detract from your commitment, whereas you can be ignorant of the fact that mitosis is a form of reproduction and genuinely not be committed to that fact either, even though, ideally, you would be, If there exists such a thing as a categorical imperative that captures practical commitments that we have merely in virtue of being rational agents, then these commitments, unlike their epistemic counterparts, are not only agent-neutral but also universal. Thus, although this chapter has been devoted primarily to understanding the box-3 function of (most) prescriptives, we end with the in43. Groundwork, 4:443. 44. ibid., 4:427 and throughout.

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teresting conclusion that if there can be unconditional prescriptives that impute contentful practical commitments, then declaratives are not the only inhabitants of box 1. Although we have not offered an argument for the existence of legitimate prescriptives of this sort, their prima facie coherence as a pragmatic category gives us good evidence that we should not take the declarative as the essential or definitional instance of a speech act with an agent-neutral input and output. One might have thought that such thoroughgoing agent-neutrality was the special purview of the declaratives, but we now to have reason to be suspicious of even this claim to their primacy or uniqueness. The current state of development or our typology is indicated in Figure 7.

Input --,Agent-neutral

Agent-relative

1 Neutral input Neutral output

2 Relative input Neutral output

Output 1'

1

Agent-neutral

Declaratives Categorical Imperatives

3

Neutral input Relative output Agent-retative

Figure 7

Prescriptives

Kantian judgments of taste, baptisms, some recognitives, i.e. observatives

4 Relative input Relative output Imperatives (promises, invitations, reproaches...), ostensions

Vocatives and Acknowledgments

degger, and Austin, however, many authors assign philosophical importance to the fact that language is essentially personal: it does not merely involve the abstract movement of information, but is always spoken by this or that concrete, embodied, context-bound person, to a particular Over th audience. the course of this work we have seen several senses in which language can he 'personal'. It may be agent-relative in its input, its output, or both. Furthermore, agent-relative inputs and outputs may or ay not be agent-specific; some agent-relative statuses are distinctively indexed to particular concrete individuals, while others attach to whover fills a certain slot or description. And some agent-relative statuses Aire singular (only one person can have them), whereas others can be held by several agents at once. A status that is both singular and specific is individuating; it essentially attaches to one and only one concrete agent. Finally, and most relevantly, some discursive claims are inherently oiced: they must be understood not just as entitled for or targeting this r that agent, but as from me or for you. For instance, we saw in Chapters 2 and 3 that observational episodes, and the observative speech acts that express them, are not only ent-relative and singular, but in each case mine. Their origination in a rst-personal perspective is ineliminably built into the kind of speech t that they are. In focusing on vocatives and acknowledgments in is chapter, we will be examining speech acts that are not only agentlative in both their input and their output (and hence belong in box 4 four grid), but also inherently second-personal: they are in each case dited at you. They not only pick out a concrete target audience, but inerently address themselves to that audience. This indexing of speech is to first and second persons cannot be reduced to semantic or strucral features of these acts that could be third-personally available; such eech acts must he irreducibly heard and owned as mine and as yours— d such hearing and owning can make sense only from particular points view that are actually taken up by living, embodied subjects who are pable of making and being bound by claims. A vocative is the purest form of an address in which one person calls ut to another. The second-personal structure of the vocative seems ear even though there may be no second-person pronoun used in the il. This second-personality does not reside in the surface grammar of

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Vocatives, Acknowledgments, and the Pragmatics of Recognition

Vocative speech acts—that is, second-personal speech acts that hail or call (such as "Yo, Emma!" or "Hi, Eli!")—form a distinct pragmatic category of utterances. They are not declaratives, prescriptives, or any other kind of truth-claim, for they have no truth-value. Nor do they seem to function straightforwardly as interrogatives, imperatives, or any of the other types of speech act that form the traditional canon of pragmatic analysis. Sentences in the vocative mood were recognized by the ancient classical languages as forming a distinct grammatical category, with its. own declension. But contemporary philosophers of language and linguists have given vocatives next to no attention; the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of the hail are all more or less uncharted territory. Some Continental philosophers, most notably Buher and Levinas, have given second-personal encounters special philosophical pride of place, but here too second-personal and vocatival discourse has received little rigorous attention.' In this chapter we will tease out the pragmatic structure of vocatives. We began this book by pointing out that philosophers of language have tended to focus on impersonal, declarative speech that reports on public facts as the paradigm of language. In the wake of influential twentieth-century philosophers as diverse as Dewey, Wittgenstein., Heii. An important exception—and an important inspiration for our analysis of vocatives and acknowledgments in this chapter and the next—is Louis Althusser's discussion of interpella• don in "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy (Lon don: New Left Books, 1971)134

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'Ye and lor

the hail, but in its pragmatic structure. As Hagi Kenaan puts it, such speech acts have a specific 'directionality': they are essentially from me to you. 2 Oddly, although both Kenaan and Stephen Darwall have argued at length for the fundamental importance of second-personal speech acts in general, and addresses in particular, neither of them discusses vocatives per se, but rather they look for cases in which more philosophically familiar forms of speech such as declaratives and imperatives function as addresses. Both Kenaan and Darwall conflate the addressing function of certain speech acts with the generic fact that any speech act at all, including an impersonal declarative, can be addressed to a particular other person in the course of communication. This conflation makes it difficult for them to clearly and consistently demarcate those speech acts that count as second-personal in the sense that is important to them. For of course even a thoroughly agent-neutral declarative is always uttered by someone in particular, and usually uttered to someone in particular, for the purpose of informing or otherwise affecting that person; such perlocutionary effects, however, do not transform a perfectly decent impersonal declarative into a second-personal speech act. By focusing directly on the vocative, or the pure form of the address, we will be able to isolate and examine the pragmatic structure of the second-personal address more effectively. In the next chapter we will argue that, in fact, vocatives play an essential role in discourse; indeed, we claim that all meaningful, functional speech acts contain what we call a transcendental vocative—that is, they each have a vocative function, in addition to whatever other functions they might have, and this vocative function is a condition for the possibility of their being genuine speech acts at all. We will argue that the vocative is not only an example of the second-personal address, but the essence of its pragmatic form, and furthermore that all speech acts have a second-personal address built into their function. But before we get to that argument, which is one of the most important punch lines of this hook, we need to devote some detailed attention to regular, everyday vocatives and the acknowledgments they call for. 2. Hagi Kenaan, The Present Personal: Philosophy and the Hidden Face of Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

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6.1 Two Kinds of Recognitives Remember that a recognitive is a speech act that serves to express recognition of something that makes itself present to the receptive faculties of the speaker. We argued in Chapter 2 that an observative speech act such as "Lo, a rabbit!" does not merely make the declarative claim that a rabbit is present, nor that I see a rabbit. Rather, it serves a special recognitive function: it marks or expresses my detection of a rabbit. It is the recognizing, and not just what is recognized or who is recognizing, that is given expression in such a claim, and since what is expressed is the indexed recognition itself, this entitlement is not generalizable, even in the ideal. While others may well see the same thing as I do, and so while my entitlement to such a speech act may well not be unique, it is still the case that this reception and recognition are unshareably and specifically mine.' Hence the entitlement that grounds my speech act is agent-relative and individuating. Since recognitives by definition ex-press such recognitions, they have necessarily agent-relative inputs. In natural language we speak of 'recognizing' many kinds of things: we can recognize objects, facts, persons, nations, rights, and claims, to name just a few. But there is an important difference between the way that I use speech to recognize a state of affairs (that there is a rabbit in the bush, perhaps), and the way that I recognize a person by calling upon her in a meeting, While we might be tempted to interpret the first type of recognition as a mere passive noting, notice that both types f recognitive speech acts change the normative status of others in the discursive community, as well as making demands upon those others. When I call out "A rabbit?" my utterance embeds a demand that others cept that there is a rabbit present and that I saw it, use these beliefs appropriatel y in inference, and so on. Such a recognitive has an agentneutral output; I have secured public knowledge, even though my entitlement, to the speech act is agent-relative. (If I utter "Lo, a rabbit!" my tterance also has the agent-relative output of ostending the rabbit— t is, calling upon others around me to direct their attention so that ey too will recognize the rabbit in a certain way.) On the other hand, .11

3. This leaves open whether the agent, the T, that recognizes might be sometimes also a or a group agent.

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To!' and 'La!'

when I recognize you as a speaker in a meeting, or when the provost at a university commencement ceremony recognizes the graduating class of 2008, the output of such a recognitive speech act is agent-relative: the recognition makes special demands upon and grants special entitlements to the one(s) recognized that are not shared even in the ideal. In recognizing you, I call upon you to speak; in recognizing a graduating class, the provost calls upon the members of that class to assume the duties and entitlements that attach to their degree (and, as collateral. I and the provost call upon others to recognize these normative claims). Hence all recognitives are agent-relative in their input, but some have agent-relative outputs and others have agent-neutral outputs; some recognitives belong in box 2 of our grid and others in box 4.

6.2 Vocatives Vocatives are hails. To utter a vocative is to call another person—in calling out "Hello, Eli!" I recognize the fact that that person there is Eli, and I do so by calling upon him to recognize that he has been properly recognized. Vocatives are thus recognitives with agent-relative outputs, and their pragmatic structure is rather complex. You cannot hail someone unless you recognize that he is there to be hailed, and part of what your hail expresses is this very recognition (where this recognition certainly need not involve direct perception—you can hail over the Internet, etc.). The vocatival demand that the one called appropriately acknowledge the call is not a separate pragmatic component of the hail over and above its recognitive function. Rather, it is how it carries out that recognitive function. This is why "Lo! Richard" is a very different speech act from "Yo! Richard"; both recognize Richard, but the first makes a claim with an agent-neutral output—it recognizes the publicly available, shared fact of Richard's presence (and would be quite odd if directed at Richard)— whereas the second, in calling for a response specifically from Richard, has an agent-relative (and agent-specific) output. Many speech acts function to call upon an audience to recognize and respond appropriately to that speech act—indeed, we will soon argue that all of them do. Vocatives, however, in their pure form, isolate this function and elevate it to their central point; they recognize a person specifically in calling forth an appropriate recognition back from him that this recognition was itself appropriate and received. In the language

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of Chapter 5, vocatives serve a constative function: in recognizing another, they hold that other to responding appropriately to that recognition. When I call out "Hello, Eli!" 1 hold Eli to saying "Hey, how's it going!" back, or something of the sort, but of course my hail created rather than reflected this - duty" of Eli's; he could have had no prior duty to respond to a recognition that hadn't happened yet. (In Chapter 8 we will show that vocatives serve an alethic function as well.) Consider two cases of hailing: a teacher calls out my name during roll call in a class; a colleague greets me as she passes in the hall. The teacher and the colleague are discursively registering their recognition of who I am. However, these are not merely observative utterances, but rather they call for a response from me. In turn, my recognition that it is really 1 to whom my colleague is speaking is not just a matter of my recognizing the descriptive content of his claim; it is part and parcel of my recognition that I am the one who is being called upon to respond and uphold the norms of greeting behavior. The point is that my recognition of the hail and my recognition of the normative demand it makes on me to act so as to acknowledge the correctness of its recognition of me are one and the same thing. Recognizing the hail involves recognizing not just its presence but its target, its source, and its binding force, which is inseparable from taking it as really aimed at me—as making a real claim on me in virtue of having correctly identified me. This demand is not just a social nicety added to the discursive recognition, but part of the performative function of the call itself. The vocative hail can be a visceral, even an uncomfortable experience when it succeeds in grabbing its target. When the moderator of a panel asks, "Does anyone have any questions?"; when the leader of a support group asks, "Who would like to share their experiences with the group?"; or when a buddy I wasn't expecting to run into calls out "Hey, Mark!" across the strip club,+ the feeling that it is really I who ought to respond to the hail may become a tangible weight. We have pointed out that vocatives are agent-relative in their output: they are intrinsically directed at an individual whom they identify or recognize. They are also agent-relative in their input. This is so, not only in virtue of their recognitive character, but also because they can only be entitled insofar as their speaker has the proper authority to legitimately make such a demand on the one she is hailing—and this authority, 4. As an anonymous referee was concerned might happen.

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`Yol' and `Lo!'

though it may be widely distributed, is always individually owned. The right to hail someone (in a particular fashion, in a particular circumstance) is not a publicly available entitlement but one that attaches to the normative position of the hailer as she is particularly situated within a structure of authority and normative relationships. Different people have the right to call one another in different ways and in different situations, and to call one another different things. A doctor's patients may only be able to appropriately call her by her title and last name, whereas her friends can call her by her first name, and her parents can call her by an endearing albeit undignified nickname. Those same friends, patients, and parents cannot call her at all when she is in the middle of surgery or a public lecture, except perhaps in an emergency, which changes the normative structure of entitlements yet again. We can also have differential commitments to hail in various contexts: shopkeepers often ought to greet incoming customers, for instance. It may seem that a minimal hail—calling "hello" to someone as she passes by, for instance—requires no special authority or entitlements. But this is just because it requires an authority weak enough that almost everyone has it. It is easy to imagine a society so inegalitarian that even such minimal hails are not acceptable or acknowledged between certain kinds of people—perhaps hardly anyone can hail the king in even this minimal way, or perhaps men may not hail women in public. Indeed, all cultures have elaborate rules and rituals that constrain who can he hailed by whom and how and when, and the 'neutral' hail is an illusion sustainable only in a relatively lax and ritualistically flexible society such as ours.' Because hailing someone always makes a demand upon her, asking for something in return, entitlement to a hail is never simply an agent-neutral given. It is essential to the functioning of vocatives that they establish a norS. Notice that in the case of both imperatives and vocatives the normative structure of social ethics plays a large role in constituting discursive entitlements to speak. In such cases, the internal norms of discursive pragmatics are particularly intertwined with larger social normative structure governing discourse, and thus the two levels of normativity we distinguished in Chapter 1 are heavily interdependent. This does not mean that the distinction has been confused or undermined. If one issues an imperative or a vocative without the proper discursive entitlement, however constituted by social ethics this entitlement is, then the resulting speech act will not merely be rude or socially inappropriate; it will be a pragmatic misfire without appropriate performative force. Conversely, a vocative or an imperative can be rude and yet effective, because the norms governing these two layers of normativity are inextricably intertwined and mutually constitutive, with fuzzy boundaries between them, but still distinct.

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native relationship between caller and called and engage the one called in this relationship. This establishment and engagement places claims and burdens upon the one called, in part by demanding acknowledgment of this very establishment and engagement—the vocative does much more than note someone's presence. It calls for a response and hence draws the one called into a direct and agent-relative normative relationship with the caller. The right to call others into such normative irelationships is differentially distributed. It is against the background of the normative relationships that are already established that we sometimes, but not always, earn the right to engage others in new relationships through speaking to them' This is why vocatives can so easily be received as abusive, burdensome, or obtrusive: consider, for instance, how a man's hailing of a woman he doesn't know in a bar, or a homeless person's attempt to hail tile as I pass on the street, can he received as an uncomfortable or onerous demand for a response. Learning the theoretical fact that a homeless rson needs money and wants you to give it to him is very different, in terms of its practical normative burden, from being called upon by that homeless person to give money. For example, it is only in response to e latter that our not giving money counts as a refusal. The homeless rson's call to you to give money, regardless of whether you do so, eshlishes a new normative relationship between you within which inacon is transformed in to refusal, which is itself a second-personal, transive action: I refuse you.' In order to have standing as a person with normative commitments d entitlements in a community, others in that community must be Isle to recognize us as such and hold us responsible for that normative nding, and this in turn requires that we be hailable—an appropriate 6. James Bohman, in 'The Importance of the Second Person: Interpretation, Practical Knowle, and Normative Attitudes," in Hans H. '