Ways of Unworlding: Against Aesthetic Inferentialism

I consider and support two claims about aesthetic experience: 1) that it involves encounters with a reality that is not conceptualized via such encounters; 2) that it can generate ruptures in established norms or in the production of shared worlds. This thesis is developed in the teeth of contemporary rationalist inhumanisms that draw on Nelson Goodman’s cognitivist aesthetics and his irrealist account of ‘worldmaking’ to translate the logical insights of inferentialism (or conceptual role semantics) into an aesthetics oriented towards concept-laden practices and their revision through the techniques of experimental art. I employ Derrida’s iterability argument to show that inferentialism presupposes a realist metaphysics that treats repetition and event individuation as independent of constitutive rules, conceptual schemes or ‘world versions’; indicating one way in which aesthetic material remains outside of, even recalcitrant to, the conceptual order. The aesthetic implications of this metaphysics of undecidable events are further explored by considering Jean-Pierre Caron’s recent discussion of Henry Flynt’s idea of ‘constitutive dissociations’ and, finally, the concept as, ambivalently, victim or suicide in the experimental horror of Gary Shipley’s novel Warewolff! and my own Snuff Memories.

Representing Reasons

This chapter assesses the worry that desire-as-belief raises the bar too high for desiring since it excludes many animals from having desires. In response, the chapter first sketches a general theory of how normative beliefs get their contents: a version of conceptual role semantics according to which the content of a given normative belief is determined by the inputs and outputs to that state. Then, with this theory in hand, the chapter argues that animals count as borderline cases of creatures with desires, since they are borderline cases of creatures with reasons beliefs. This conclusion has some intuitive appeal, and remaining resistance may be undercut by appeal to the distinction between desires and likings, and by appeal to the fact that “wants” is sometimes used merely to mean “needs”.

Getting a Moral Thing into a Thought

Non-naturalism is the view that normative properties are response-independent, irreducible to natural properties, and causally inefficacious. An underexplored question for non-naturalism concerns the metasemantics of normative terms. Ideally, the non-naturalist could remain ecumenical, but it appears they cannot. Call this challenge the metasemantic challenge. This chapter suggests that non-naturalists endorse an epistemic account of reference determination of the sort recently defended by Imogen Dickie, with some modifications. An important implication of this account is that, if correct, a fully fleshed out moral epistemology will simultaneously rebut metasemantic objections to non-naturalism. Thus, both the metasemantic and the more widely discussed epistemological challenges in effect amount to one. Before setting out the positive view, the chapter considers why all of the traditional metasemantic theories cause trouble for the non-naturalist. This includes discussions of teleosemantics, conceptual role semantics, as well as Schroeter and Schroeter’s “connectedness” model.

Semantics, conceptual role

According to conceptual role semantics (CRS), the meaning of a representation is the role of that representation in the cognitive life of the agent, for example, in perception, thought and decision-making. It is an extension of the well-known ‘use’ theory of meaning, according to which the meaning of a word is its use in communication and, more generally, in social interaction. CRS supplements external use by including the role of a symbol inside a computer or a brain. The uses appealed to are not just actual, but also counterfactual: not only what effects a thought does have, but what effects it would have had if stimuli or other states had differed. Of course, so defined, the functional role of a thought includes all sorts of causes and effects that are non-semantic, for example, perhaps happy thoughts can bolster one’s immunity, promoting good health. Conceptual roles are functional roles minus such non-semantic causes and effects. The view has arisen separately in philosophy (where it is sometimes called ‘inferential’ or ‘functional’ role semantics) and in cognitive science (where it is sometimes called ‘procedural semantics’).

Conceptual Role Semantics

This article treats of a family of theories variously known also as “inferentialism,” “inferential/functional/cognitive/causal/computational role semantics,” “functionalism,” and “use-theory of meaning.” However, it will throughout use only “CRS,” short for “Conceptual Role Semantics,” to be understood in a suitably wide sense. This kind of theory has been propounded and discussed in very different theoretical contexts, including the philosophy of mathematics, formal logic, the philosophies of mind and language, and cognitive science. In the philosophies of mind and language, it has been discussed in rather disparate kinds of literature, ranging from discussions about later Wittgenstein to causal theories of mental content. It is a theory of linguistic meaning and/or mental content (depending on which is taken as basic), and holds that what an expression means (or what makes a given concept the concept it is), is determined by the expression’s (concept’s) psychological or inferential role. This role can be identified either in wholly descriptive (e.g., causal) terms or partly in normative terms, and concerns the expression’s or concept’s behavior in inferences. Inferences, in turn, can be understood either in the usual, narrow sense or as involving also perception and action. Examples of a CRS account of the meaning of the word “and” may be that it is determined by the inferences from “A and B” to both “A” and “B” and from the latter back to “A and B” (what determines the meaning of “and” will be either the correctness of these rules [normative CRS] or the fact that they are actually followed [non-normative CRS]). The concept of redness could similarly be taken as determined by transitions from certain perceptions to beliefs involving the concept, and from such beliefs to other beliefs. CRS is the most common approach to meaning in cognitive science and linguistics (with the notable exception of formal semantics). The main alternative is the view that meanings or concepts should be understood in terms of reference, satisfaction, and truth, but ecumenical views are common. CRS can be traced as far back as to the Associationism of the British Empiricists and to Kant, but more relevantly, to verificationism, the later Wittgenstein, Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, and Gerhard Gentzen (whose interests, however, were restricted to the logical constants). In post-Enlightenment, non-analytic philosophy, similar ideas have been expressed by Friedrich Hegel, Ferdinand de Saussure, and Martin Heidegger. This article, however, focuses exclusively on CRS in analytic philosophy from Ajdukiewicz and Gentzen and onward. The first example of a full attempt at a generalized CRS is typically thought to be found in the works of Wilfrid Sellars, published during the 1950s–1970s. Since then, new works defending some version of CRS, as well as discussions about them, have appeared regularly until the early 21st century. The most important defenders of CRS since Sellars include (in roughly chronological order) Gilbert Harman, Ned Block, Christopher Peacocke, Robert Brandom, and Paul Horwich, while its most influential critic is arguably Jerry Fodor.