Two Dogmas of Rationalism

In this previously unpublished essay, Haugeland aims to “expose two covert ‘dogmas’—tendentious yet invisible assumptions—that underlie rationalist thought, both modern and contemporary.” The dogmas are “positivism,” the claim that the world is composed entirely of facts, and “cognitivism,” the claim that the mind is exhausted by the rational intellect. Haugeland argues that both of these dogmas force rationalism into a limited understanding of the mind and world. But the dogmas also prevent rationalism from recognizing the distinctively human capacities to disclose the truth in truly novel and unforeseen ways. Haugeland argues that the blinders of rationalism inevitably distort the profound importance of areas such as love, integrity, and commitment in the development of our social, romantic, and scientific practices. In addition to being a response to the work of the Pittsburgh School of Philosophy more broadly, it also offers a unique contribution to current debates concerning alethic modality.

Anonymity, Mineness, and Agent Specificity: Pragmatic Normativity and the Authentic Situation in Heidegger’s Being and Time

“California Heideggerianism,” as developed in the 1980‘s by Dreyfus, Haugeland, and Guignon, interprets Heidegger’s notion of the Anyone in Being and Time as a pattern of social normativity that establishes the contours of Dasein’s self-understanding and world. Specifically, the Anyone maintains a reservoir of “anonymous” or “generic” social roles, and individual cases of Dasein understand themselves by throwing themselves into one or several such social roles. Thus, the content of Dasein’s self-understanding is circumscribed by those possibilities of living on offer from Anyone. I argue that this reconstruction of the role of the Anyone is neither phenomenologically plausible nor exegetically required. To develop an alternative approach, I analyze the pragmatic normativity of those situations in which Dasein is called upon to deviate from everyday social norms. I draw upon Haugeland’s reconstruction of the phenomenon of conscience in Being and Time, which I argue can lead us to a conception of authentic self-understanding in which the content of self-understanding is neither some utterly novel and unprecedented form of originality nor provided by anonymous social norms. Rather, this owned content is the product of specifying impersonal possibilities of self-understanding that reside in the background culture in which one lives.

Recording and Representing, Analog and Digital

In “Representational Genera,” Haugeland built an account of representational kinds around the structures of their contents. Icons, which include pictures, images, graphs, and diagrams, differ from logical representations like linguistic expressions because iconic contents are essentially patterns of dependent and independent variables. Such structures are absent in language. Recording is a witless, replayable process that Haugeland deployed to calm worries about his content-wise account of representational genera. This paper elevates recording from the supporting role Haugeland gave it to star of the show. The main claim defended here is that some kinds of representation—pictures, images, graphs, diagrams—are modeled by recording processes, while others, like languages, are not. Extensionally, this distinction is close to Haugeland’s, but it is intensionally subtler, more plausible, and, as I hope to show, more useful. This approach abandons Haugeland’s goal of distinguishing representational kinds exclusively in terms of their contents, but there are many advantages to doing so.

Appendix: The Transcendental Deduction of the Categories

In this 16 page outline, Haugeland (with James Conant and John McDowell) offers a summary outline and interpretation of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction of the Categories from his (Kant’s) Critique of Pure Reason (B Edition). In addition to a careful exposition of a difficult text, this outline also provides helpful context for understanding the role of Kant in the contemporary philosophers of the Pittsburgh School.

Love and Death

This paper explicates and connects two of Haugeland’s most controversial philosophical claims: his puzzling claim that the characteristic form of intentionality and human understanding is love, and his revisionist interpretation of Heidegger’s account of “existential death” in Being and Time. The former claim responds to Haugeland’s implicit classification and telling criticisms of the predominant alternative conceptions of intentionality. Haugeland argues that these alternatives actually fit different phenomena (“ersatz” or “lapsed” intentionality) that fall short of even the most ordinary human comportments. The latter claim treats “death” as concerned not with human mortality, but with the objective accountability of entire domains of human activity and understanding. Heidegger thereby has a deeper, more adequate account of intentionality and understanding directly complementing Haugeland’s re-conception of intentionality as a form of love. This reading also brings Being and Time into closer critical engagement with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. This juxtaposition further illuminates Heidegger’s Kantian emphasis upon the finitude of human understanding, and brings out the political significance of Being and Time in constructively revealing ways despite Heidegger’s own later disastrous political involvement.

Constancy Mechanisms and the Normativity of Perception

In “Truth and Rule-Following,” John Haugeland criticizes a wide swath of competing accounts of perceptual representation on the grounds that they cannot make room for the possibility of perceptual states that are functionally right but factually wrong. In this paper, we spell out what we take Haugeland’s criticism to involve by showing how it applies equally well to an account of perceptual representation that was published after Haugeland’s death: namely, the account of perceptual representation offered in Tyler Burge’s Origins of Objectivity (2010).

Truth, Objectivity, and Emotional Caring: Filling In the Gaps of Haugeland’s Existentialist Ontology

In a remarkable series of papers, Haugeland lays out what is both a striking interpretation of Heidegger and a compelling account of objectivity and truth. Central to his account is a notion of existential commitment, which insists on the independence of the phenomena from our understanding. This requires the potential for us to change or give up on our understanding of the world in the face of apparently impossible phenomena. Although Haugeland never gives a clear account of existential commitment, he claims that it is fundamentally an individual matter. This, I argue, is a mistake that fails to make sense of the public, shared nature of the objective world. Instead, I offer an initial account of existential commitment as one we undertake jointly, and I analyze it (and the corresponding responsibility) in terms of interpersonal rational patterns of reactive attitudes: emotions like resentment, gratitude, indignation, approbation, guilt, and trust. The upshot is that our existential commitment is not only to a shared, objective world but also to each other such that our ability individually to take responsibility for our understanding of the world is intelligible only in terms of others' being able to hold us responsible for it.

Ostension and Assertion

I draw on Haugeland and a Haugelandian reading of Heidegger to give an ostensive theory of assertion: to assert the truth of a claim is to engage in a kind of ostensive act. Crucially, ostensive acts are first and foremost social acts; hence truth-talk has its first and most natural home in communicative interactions. Telling myself that something is true makes sense only derivatively, if at all. Like other deflationists, I argue that truth-talk serves only a formal semantic function. But unlike traditional deflationists, I try to show that the pragmatics of truth-claiming is rich and multi-faceted, and that to understand it we need to explore the nature and variety of ostensive acts. I argue that the metaphysics and semantics of truth are deflationary, while the pragmatic structure of assertion is substantive and philosophically revealing. Understanding the pragmatics of truth-claims dissolves some of the worries that make more metaphysically and semantically robust truth theories tempting. Haugeland gives us most of the materials for an ostensive theory of assertion, but he is hampered by a thin understanding of the role of social interaction and communication.

Competence over Being as Existing: The Indispensability of Haugeland’s Heidegger

The paper explains why Haugeland’s interpretation of Heidegger is indispensable for understanding Heidegger’s work; why his Heideggerian account of commitment is indispensible for understanding what it is to be a self; and why this account of selfhood is indispensible to philosophy generally. The first indispensability concerns Haugeland’s insight that Heidegger advances beyond traditional metaphysics by showing how not just “essence” (essentia) but also “existence” (existentia) is meaningful. The second indispensability lies in Haugeland’s grasp of the methodological connection between Division I and Division II of Being and Time, which shows that what it is to be “I myself” is a function neither of consciousness nor self-consciousness, but depends on my taking responsibility for the normative force of the norms that enable entities to show up as they in truth are. Finally, this insight is indispensible to philosophy generally. Drawing on Joseph Rouse’s charge that Haugeland’s concept of “objectivity” involves a residual scientism and voluntarism, I offer a defense that brings Haugeland’s his account of existential death together with Heiedegger’s claim, in Being and Time, that science tries to grasp the occurrent in its basic unintelligibility, and his claim, in “What is Metaphysics?,” that science aims to give entities “the first and last word.”

“Two Dogmas of Rationalism”: A Second Encounter

I develop, at John’s request, some objections I raised to Haugeland’s “Two Dogmas” when Haugeland presented the paper at Georgetown University. First, I suggest that what he identifies as ‘positivism’ should be seen more as an epistemological rather than an ontological dogma; and second, I push to clarify what is important and unique about Haugeland’s account of alethic modality. The account seeks to explain modality by focusing on the pragmatics of modal discourse rather than its semantics. Haugeland concedes too much in giving this account, namely that it can only account for free-standing modal claims. I argue that this would be fatal to the account, were it true, but that it is not. I offer an outline of a way to provide a fuller account of modal discourse in Haugeland’s pragmatic terms, drawing analogy with similar “pragmatist semantics” accounts of negation and other idioms.