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

Part 3. Normative Self-Criticism

PART III Normative Self-Criticism Introduction The key to moving forward requires going a crucial step beyond both Brandom and Walzer. In later work, as we show at the outset of chapter 7, Brandom addresses the problem of norm determination but nowhere raises the question central to our concerns here of normative modification or replacement. He offers interesting accounts of the way, analogous to a common-law judge, precedent is rendered normatively binding by individuals and how normativity is conferred by reciprocal group recognition. But he shows no interest in accounting for the critical processes of norm reconsideration and revision, except for the uninteresting (and as we shall argue, underdeveloped) case of troubleshooting for incompatibility. Walzer’s work on social criticism, by contrast, focuses centrally on processes of normative realignment as the result of criticism. But he gives no account at all of its transformative impact. In order to get a better grip on the potentially rational, compelling effect of normative criticism, we need to take a much closer look, first, at criticism in general and normative criticism in particular and the precise nature of their transformative purport; and second, at the nature of the binding hold of personal normative conviction such criticism aspires to dislodge. Both are needed in order to assess the possibility of the former rationally transforming the latter. This is our aim in what follows. Following a brief analysis of Brandom’s later work, the second, and main part, of chapter 7 presents a relatively detailed phenomenology of criticizing as an addressed speech-act, with special emphasis on normative criticism. Building on Harry Frankfurt’s well-known work on normativity and personal identity, the first part of chapter 8 then presents an account of personal normative commitment. Our solution to the problem this study set out to solve, of accounting for the possibility of rational normative revision, is achieved by looking closely at the dynamics of intrasubjective deliberation when exposed to the keen yet trusted normative criticism of others—a possibility that has formerly not been explored in the literature. Such criticism is powerless to convince, we argue, but is capable, nonetheless, of destabilizing commitment to the norms it questions sufficiently to motivate rational reconsideration. 192 Normative Self-Criticism By way of concluding this study, chapter 9 takes a second look at the rationality of scientific framework transitions in the light of the findings of chapter 8. Building on and away from Friedman’s Dynamics of Reason by substantially extending Peter Galison’s suggestive notion of the scientific trading zone, we show in brief outline how these transitions should be studied from the point of view of the ambivalated yet creative individuals who set them in motion. Introduction 193 ...