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

Chapter 9. Science Revisited

CHAPTER NINE Science Revisited Taking Stock Rationality’s high point, that at which firm normative commitment is made to yield to self-critical review, is a moment of profound personal reckoning, yet one that is possible, we have argued, only within a social environment of keen, trusted normative criticism. Normative selfcriticism becomes a philosophically articulable option only when a critically motivated version of Brandom’s interpersonal deontic interrogation and score keeping is allowed to bear on a Frankfurtian normative dialogue of self (or some similarly hierarchical equivalent). This dependency of self-criticism on a public domain of critical exchange is in keeping with the present study’s general bias toward such approaches Brandom dubs “linguistic pragmatism” that see the private realm of discursive commitment as both grounded in and explained by the public realm of discursive practice.1 However, while it certainly preserves the linguistic pragmatist ’s order of explanation, the specific dependency of private on public argued for in the previous chapter has little to do with grounding. Normative self-criticism is made possible, is enabled, but is not determined by or grounded in the trusted normative criticism leveled by others. It is a dependency that sits comfortably with such collectivist approaches to the sources of norms and of meaning (interpretivist, or other), but by no means does it entail, or is it entailed by, them. (One is entitled to both, yet 272 committed to neither, as Brandom might put it.) For ours is an account not of the sources of norms or normative commitment but of the sources of their undermining. This is why what we propose is capable of mediating between and interfacing with the pictures painted by Brandom and Frankfurt—supplementing both while jarring with neither. The resulting amalgamation of (supplemented versions of) Brandomian discourse, Walzerian social criticism, and Frankfurtian personal identity enables us to extend the reach of critical self-reflection to our firmest normative commitments in a manner that surpasses the limitations imposed on such an extension by each of these positions when considered alone. Brandom’s picture of discursive commitment, even when extended to normativity in general and interpreted as self-critically motivated , still proves incapable of extending normative self-criticism beyond deliberating the proper application of given norms. His attempt in later work to account for the rationality of norm determination is, we have seen, of little help in this respect, for it focuses entirely on how normative choices already made are rationalized by a retrospective appeal to history while remaining wholly unconcerned with the rationality of endorsing or dispensing with normative commitment. Rational reconstruction serves Brandom to make explicit and lend normative weight to existing normative dispositions and inclinations (the way common law judges justify their verdicts by selecting and reinterpreting former rulings as precedential )2 but not to adjudicate between candidate norms,or to question given ones. Of itself, Brandom’s insightful account of rational agency makes no room for and shows no interest in the very question of rationally changing or modifying normative commitment. Walzer, by contrast, makes normative criticism central both to his interpretivist project in ethics and his account of social and political reform. But two difficulties mar his position as it stands. First, as with Brandom’s expressivism,3 Walzer’s interpretivism limits normative criticism to assessments of how a given array of normative practices is understood and articulated. Its corrective scope, we have argued, is, therefore, limited, as in Brandom, to normative attitude, and remains powerless with regard to normative status—to use the latter’s terminology. But Walzer’s account of social criticism seems oblivious to the constraint.Unlike the ideal study partner’s tame and intimate reproach described in Avot de-Rabbi Nathan, Science Revisited 273 the fervent, Amos-like rebuke of Walzer’s many examples of social criticism purports to hit far deeper than his interpretivism proves capable of supporting.Put somewhat schematically,Walzer argues that deeply transformative social criticism can be effective when leveled by connected critics whose efforts are understood as interpretive. Needless to say, we share his belief in the effectiveness of such criticism, and have argued for a related notion of connectedness (one that makes room for unconnected yet trusted critics) as well as for a similar (if more Brandomian) form of interpretivism. It is not the ingredients of his argument we find unacceptable but the argument itself. The combination of connectedness and interpretivism...