The View from Within: Normativity and the Limits of Self-Criticism

Chapter 7. The Critical Stance

CHAPTER SEVEN The Critical Stance Brandom on the Rationality of Norm Making For those who concede both Normative Diversity and Comparative Irrealism , the problem of rationality boils down in the first instance to whether norms can be found normatively wanting by those they bind— not merely vague, incoherent, self-contradictory, or mutually inconsistent , but wrong, bad, inappropriate, or undesirable. Normative Diversity renders it a question crucial for those who insist, as Friedman does for science and McDowell does for all forms of normativity, that transitions between frameworks or schemes of values can be undertaken rationally. Comparative Irrealism, on the other hand, seems frustratingly to cast the question as unsolvable. For what is it to deem a normative outlook undesirable or wrong, if not in relation to a better, less problematic alternative? And yet Comparative Irrealism renders such comparisons meaningless. This, we have argued, explains perhaps why Friedman ends up significantly toning down the levels of normative diversity that exist between successive scientific frameworks, and why McDowell refrains from developing further his notion of normative criticism . Not all accept Normative Diversity, of course, but those who do cannot deny Comparative Irrealism. It follows, therefore, that if it is at all solvable, the problem of normative rationality must reduce further to that of being able to find noncomparative fault with one’s own norma194 tive outlook; to finding it problematic per se rather than relatively so in comparison to different and recognizably superior alternatives. In other words, normative rationality, if possible within the constraints of Normative Diversity and (consequently) Comparative Irrealism, consists in the ability to troubleshoot one’s normative outlook for the kind of problems that can motivate and justify the search for alternatives, as opposed to those that the recognized presence of an alternative calls forth retrospectively. But by what standards is this feat to be performed? In the light of what can one expose one’s own norms as normatively lacking,if not in the light of a better alternative? By what standard can one judge one’s standards , if not by comparison? (Except, of course, to be circularly judged favorably !) If to criticize one’s norms is to form an argument proving their faults, what could serve as its premises? What notion of normative failing is available to such an account,if the existence of external normative yardsticks is denied—both absolute and relative? Interpretivism allows for some measure of nonrelational normative criticism. From an interpretivist perspective, a scheme of values can be found normatively deficient but not in comparison to a different form of life, only in comparison to different schemes of values that purport to better make explicit one’s own form of life. This form of criticism clearly places the critique of norms in a genuinely normative context that transcends troubleshooting merely for consistency or clarity, in which normative choices are judged correct or incorrect, good or bad, proper or improper according to how they rank as plausible interpretations of the community’s“text.”But similar to the way our Brandomian doubter confines her self-criticism to understanding and applying the norms that bind her, interpretivism limits social criticism to the task of best explicating their community’s form of life. The community’s form of life, the interpretandum of its scheme of values, just like the norms that bind Brandomian doubters, remain, on these accounts, immune to criticism, and hence beyond the pale of rational reflection in the strong sense in which we use the term.They are modified over time,of course,at times even signi ficantly, but not as the result of subjection to rational scrutiny. Rationality (as critical reflection), these accounts imply, does not apply (because it cannot apply) to the normative outlooks to whose very normativity The Critical Stance 195 we owe our capacity for placing our beliefs and actions in the space of reasons—although Brandom makes a convincing case not only for the claim that it is “norms all the way down,” but that our rationality owes to this normative pervasiveness. Still, it is not and cannot be “rationality all the way down” (in the sense of critical reflection), his texts and the example of our Brandomian doubter imply, because one’s norms, even when made explicit, act as given entry moves into the game of giving and asking for reasons, to coin anew a Brandomian phrase—moves...