2.1 CONCEPTS

One of the most important tools we have to understand language and its attendant norms is the concept. Thinking about things in terms of con­cepts helps us to talk more clearly about what words and sentences in a given language mean, as well as to say what it is that sentences or words uttered by different speakers, or in different languages, share. Consider the English word “snow” and the French word “neige.” We all agree that the two words mean the same thing, but philosophers have noticed that meaning is a complex notion made up of several aspects, and have introduced vocabulary to express these different facets. We can say, for instance, that “snow” and “neige” both refer to the same objects. When I say “snow,” or when a French speaker says “neige,” we are each speak­ing about the same thing. Reference, that is, is a relation that applies between words and objects. On the other hand, we can say that both words express the same concept. Other ways to put this would be to say that English and French speakers both conceptualize the same stuff (snow) in the same ways or that their sentences about snow have the same conceptual content.

Questions of reference and concept are not always so clear. Consider the following example, which will help us clarify what concepts are.

The right to subsistence means the right to the minimal benefits needed to live a decent life: things like food, clothing, and shelter. It’s simply obvious that such benefits are central to having rights - to what “rights” mean. In Chinese, the second character making up the word “quanli” which we translate as “rights,” is “li” which means “benefit.” (The first, “quan” means “power.”) Our rights simply are, in part, our legitimate benefits. And what could be more legitimate than the things needed for subsistence?

Mr. Smith answers her as follows:

I’m not sure how much stock I put in etymology. Lots of things go in briefcases other than legal briefs. I think we should look to current use to see what our words mean. Still, since - as you’ve explained it to me - “quanli” was explicitly coined as a neologism, perhaps its roots do have significance. In any event, the relation between “rights” and benefits is not something that I am comfort­able settling just as a matter of definition. The word “rights” is related to earlier European traditions about “ius,” which has con­notations of power but not of benefit. Some philosophers think that rights must be beneficial to people, but others have argued that while rights are typically beneficial, the notion of a protected choice comes closer to covering the essence of rights.

My main reason for rejecting your idea of a “right to subsistence” is not that I reject any connection between “right” and benefits, but rather that I believe rights to be conceptually linked to duties that others hold, and so-called positive rights like your “right to subsis­tence” have no clear duty-holders to back them up.

Ms. Wang’s response to this opens up other areas of disagreement:

I agree that there are important relations between rights and duties, but as I understand it, the central issue is that in order to enjoy rights, one must also shoulder duties. Certainly in most cases, at least, there are also duty-holders in the sense you specify, but I don’t understand your resistance to positive rights. Depending on the context, the duty-holders in such cases can be the state, the nation, or even all humanity. Do you deny that groups can have duties and rights?

I’m also concerned about your suggestion that rights to subsis­tence might conflict with other rights. I gather your idea is that in order to fulfill someone’s right to subsistence, someone else’s private property might have to be redistributed? I see that as no conflict at all: No one has a right to so much property that others are left without subsistence. Such benefits are simply not legitimate, and thus not rights at all. Rights, after all, aim at harmonizing people’s interests.

We will leave the discussion here and reflect on what the two have said. Ms. Wang and Mr. Smith are imaginary, but the words I have put into their mouths are not arbitrary. The ideas about the meaning of “quanli” and “rights” that they express have roots in many aspects of Chinese and American moral discourse, respectively.^[35] This is not to say that either of these discourses is univocal, uncontested, or static. As I will discuss later, these moral discourses themselves contain differences over the mean­ings of words, contestations over which meanings are most appropriate, and the continuous dynamism associated with any live moral discourse.

2.1.2 Pushes toward Holism

Let us consider, then, the dialogue between Wang and Smith. There appear to be large areas of overlap and agreement. Despite Wang’s puzzle over “rights,” for the most part they seem to be having little trouble communicating: Their statements seem quite responsive to one another. Still, there are substantial disagreements about what rights are. Some of the questions raised by the dialogue are

[A] Is it part of the concept of rights that rights are benefits?

[B] Is it part of the concept of rights that these benefits are legitimate?

[C] Does the concept of rights make sense only alongside duties?

[D] If so, are they duties shouldered by the rights-holder, or duties held by

others? Are these even the same sense of “duty”?

[E] Can rights conflict with one another? If not, is it part of the very concept of rights that they cannot, or is it a contingent fact about our world?

In order to answer these types of questions, we must get clear on what it means to be “part of the concept of rights.” These questions aim at establishing whether Wang and Smith are using a common concept, but disagree about some of its characteristics, or are using different concepts, in which case we may decide that “rights” is an inadequate translation for “quanli” - even if it does better than any other English word.

Before going further, it would be well to consider an objection that may arise at this point: Isn’t it obvious that they are talking about the same thing, but have political differences? Why should we be tempted to think that their differences are caused by their respective languages when we all know how deeply politics and self-interests inform debates such as this one (and here, no doubt, the objector has in mind actual exchanges between representatives of the Chinese and U.S.

That said, I am not going to pay much attention to the contexts of Wang and Smith, because they are imaginary. My goal at the moment is not to answer the questions raised above, but to think about what is at stake in answering these types of questions. A first approximation of an answer is that when one makes explicit what is, and what is not, part of one’s concepts, one is articulating norms for a community to which one belongs. That is, when Wang suggests that part of the concept of rights is that rights are benefits, she is saying that part of being a member of her community (which community she has in mind - Beijing University, China, the whole world, etc. - need not detain us for the moment) is to take it as given that rights include “legitimate benefits.” If this were not part of the concept, that would mean that community members could disagree about that particular aspect without ceasing to be community members.

We are rarely very explicit about these matters. It is also important to note that individuals’ roles in determining such things are more compli­cated than I have so far made it seem: Words are not the only things that influence community membership, and people who are by other stan­dards members of the same community may come to disagree, implicitly or explicitly, about how they should use their words. I will deal with such complexities below. Now let us return to Wang and Smith, and to the question of what they mean.

For Wang to decide whether Smith shares her concept of rights, she must strive to answer the kinds of questions listed above, and perhaps many more. In order to be sure what Smith’s words “People do not have a right to subsistence” mean - what concepts his words express - she has to consider their relation to large numbers of other words. What other sentences does he seem to hold true? What inferences involving rights does he endorse? It can seem that only if she has an interpretation that works for a substantial chunk of his vocabulary can she confidently inter­pret any of it.

This is the insight that has pushed many philosophers to conclude that conceptual meaning is holistic: it depends on a web of connections among many concepts. This is not yet to have said with any clarity or precision what holism is, but it may be enough to begin to see one of the main problems to which holist theories of meaning give rise. Suppose that the meanings of concepts are mutually determined by the relations they bear to one another, so that what I mean by “rights” depends on what I mean by “duty,” by “interest,” by “harmony,” and so on. What “duty” means, in turn, depends on its own web of related concepts; it is easy to see that one doesn’t have to go through very many steps before some superficially quite unrelated ideas will turn out to be implicated in one another’s meanings. This suggests, in turn, that even small differences in meaning will quickly ramify throughout an individual’s web of concepts. If I understand “harmony” differently from you, holism would seem to suggest that my concepts of rights, and thus of interest, and so on, will all differ from yours.

The reason that philosophers have seen this to be problematic is that most believe that successful communication involves coming to share something with another. I attempt to communicate my thought that snow is white to you by saying “Snow is white,” and I succeed if you come to understand that I believe that snow is white.^[36] However, given the plausible hypothesis that we all differ, at least slightly, from one another in at least some concepts, then if we adopt holism, it would seem that you can never come to understand my meaning. You will always understand what I say in terms at least slightly different from my own. “Snow” or “white” will mean something different to you than to me, so you will fail to come to share the meaning I intended. Communication is impossible.

One way that philosophers have tried to rescue holism is to say that communication is really about coming to share similar, rather than iden­tical, meanings and beliefs. A problem with this response is the difficulty of saying with any precision what counts as having “similar” beliefs [Fodor & Lepore 1992, pp. 17f.]. My strategy will instead be to rely on a different understanding of what communication is about. To see how this works, we will first have to examine more closely what conceptual content itself is, and how it emerges in linguistic practice.

2.1.3 A Shared Practice

Let’s begin with the connection between conceptual meaning and com­mitment. Suppose I tell you that “The earth is flat.” I have thereby expressed a whole range of commitments. I have committed myself to the earth’s being flat, to at least some planets being flat, to the earth’s not being spherical, and so on. I might not recognize all of the things to which I’ve committed myself; if I knew nothing of fifteenth-century history, for instance, I might not know that I was now committed to “Columbus was wrong.” We can tell that I have expressed these com­mitments, though, and also see how crucial they are to linguistic practice, if we consider the following scenario. You challenge me, saying, “Oh, you think some planets are flat?” I respond “No, but the earth is flat.” Puzzled, you respond “Isn’t the earth a planet?” “Sure it is,” say I. Were the conversation to continue on these lines - my seeming to accept com­mitments but to disavow many of their entailments - you’d probably give up trying to talk with me. I am not playing by the rules.

This is not to say that there is one inflexible set of rules defining what words mean. Meanings change over time, and the commitments that one person or group expresses with a given sentence may not entirely overlap with those of another. Still, unless we express a fairly stable set of com­mitments, our ability to make sense to one another - to communicate - will disappear. (If you are not convinced of this, look back at the previ­ous paragraph and consider how many commitments my statements were still honoring!) In this light, we can see concepts as relatively stable patterns of commitments that are appropriately held by speakers across a given community.^[37]

This centrality of commitment to linguistic practice is part of what has led Robert Brandom, a leading contemporary philosopher, to charac­terize conceptual content in terms of inferential structure. He asks what the difference is between a parrot’s being trained to make the noise “red” when shown a red object, on the one hand, and a person’s report­ing that an object is “red,” on the other. Brandom writes that “The parrot does not treat ‘That’s red’ as incompatible with ‘That’s green,’ nor as fol­lowing from ‘That’s scarlet’ and entailing ‘That’s colored.’ Insofar as the repeatable response is not, for the parrot, caught up in practical pro­prieties of inference and justification,... it is not a conceptual or cog­nitive matter at all.... Concepts are essentially inferentially articulated” [Brandom 1994, p. 89]. The parrot’s “That’s red” does not express any kind of commitment; a person’s report of “That’s red,” by contrast, commits him or her to the propriety of concluding, among other things, “That’s colored.”

It should be clear that this theory immediately commits one to holism about meaning, as sketched above. If conceptual content is determined by inferential structure, then what I mean by “That’s red” depends on what I mean by “That’s colored,” and so on. Brandom’s appealing account of conceptual content, that is, leads us headlong into difficulties about communication. Brandom recognizes that his account runs into problems, so long as communication is thought to be about coming to share common meanings, and so he proposes that “the paradigm of com­munication as joint possession of some common thing [be] relinquished in favor of - or modified in the direction of - a paradigm of communi­cation as a kind of cooperation in practice” [Brandom 1994, p. 485]. One of the central themes of Brandom’s understanding of language is em­phasizing its embeddedness in linguistic practice. Communication is possible because we are all able to engage in the shared practice of interpreting one another and ourselves.^[38]

How does this work? Brandom conceptualizes linguistic practice as a scorekeeping activity: We keep track of which commitments each par­ticipant in a conversation, including ourselves, has taken on.^[39] Some of these attributions of commitment are prompted by explicit perfor­mances, whether linguistic (I say “The sun is shining”) or practical (I pick up a Frisbee and step toward the door). Others depend on implicit infer­ential relations, for instance when I attribute to you the commitment that “It is not cloudy” after you’ve announced that the sun is shining. Some­times, when things are particularly complicated or vexed, we even make our scorekeeping explicit. For the most part, scorekeeping takes place informally or implicitly, though we are ready to make it explicit should confusion arise.

Already lurking in Brandom’s claim that inferential significance is rel­ative to an individual’s whole set of commitments is the idea that lin­guistic scorekeeping will be perspectival. If the same sentence can mean different things to you and me, it only makes sense that the commitments I attribute based on that sentence’s utterance will differ from those you attribute. For each participant in communicative practice, therefore, lin­guistic scorekeepers will have to keep “two sets of books” [Brandom 1994, p. 488]. In the simple case where only two people - Ms. A and Mr. B - are involved, that is, A must do her best to keep track of what com­mitments she believes follow from what B says and does, as well as what commitments B takes to follow from what he has said and done. And this is only the beginning: A also needs to keep score on her own com­mitments, both from her own and from B’s perspectives, and of course all this applies to B as well.

To make this more concrete, let us revisit Ms. Wang and Mr. Smith. Suppose that one December day, Smith says to Wang “Out on the street this morning I passed by a beggar. The poor fellow didn’t have a coat and really seemed to be suffering.” How does Wang interpret this? In her book for Smith, she marks down a new score, namely that Smith is committed to having seen a beggar who was suffering, and to the infer­ential consequences that follow from that and whatever other relevant commitments Smith has. Most of these inferential consequences also get noted down in the second book that Wang keeps on Smith, in which Wang records what actually (from her perspective) follows from Smith’s explicit commitments. In both of these books, for instance, she records the further commitment that Smith left his dorm room that morning, since (1) she presumes Smith would take this to follow from his being out on the street, and (2) she similarly takes it to follow from his state­ment. So long as she has no reason to suspect that Smith is deceiving her, in fact, she may well inherit both of these commitments (that there was a beggar on the street, and that Smith went out) from Smith.

So far, the score Wang records in each book is the same. As I men­tioned above, though, the books can diverge. For instance, what if Wang knew that students pretending to be beggars frequent the streets outside of Smith’s dorm. In this case, she’ll score her second book on Smith - the one that keeps track of what actually follows - differently from the first, perhaps recording only the commitment to having passed a person in rags asking for money. If she were to put the discrepancy between the two books into words, she might say “Smith believes he saw a beggar, but I know better.”

2.1.4 Objectivity

This example points to a crucial issue we must face, namely the status of objectivity in these various attributions. I have made Wang out to know something that Smith did not, namely that fake beggars frequent his environs. But couldn’t it still have been a beggar? Isn’t the only differ­ence between the two books the perspective of the scorekeeper? Nothing about the second book magically renders it “correct,” capturing the “actual” facts of the matter, right?

True enough, but the difference in perspective turns out to be critical, undergirding the very idea of objective truth. From your perspective or my perspective, there is nothing special about Wang’s perspective, even if it turns out that she is right, at least about the presence of a beggar that morning. From Wang’s perspective, though, her perspective is indeed special, for it is from her perspective that she thinks of how things actually are, as opposed to how others (or even herself) merely believe them to be. Or rather, it is in the context of comparing her perspective with that of another, as inevitably occurs in communication, that the difference between how someone takes things to be, and how they objec­tively are, first emerges.^[40] The difference between Wang and Smith over the presence of beggars is not merely subjective; Wang’s scorebooks do not simply record that “he’s committed to one thing and I’m com­mitted to another.” As Wang sees it, Smith’s inference from person in rags to beggar is wrong, not just different. Even if Wang turns out to be wrong about the beggar, the difference between something’s being held true, on one hand, and in fact being true, on the other, survives unscathed.

If objectivity emerges in the way Brandom claims, then it is essentially social, or as Brandom puts it, “Objectivity appears as a feature of the structure of discursive intersubjectivity” [Brandom 1994,p. 599]. It is only in the context of linguistic interrelations with one another that talk of objective truth becomes intelligible. Brandom stresses, though, that

traditionally intersubjectivity has been understood in the I-we way, which focuses on the contrast between the commitments of one indi­vidual and the commitments of the community (collectively), or those shared by all individuals (distributively). In the... account offered here, by contrast, intersubjectivity is understood in a per- spectival I-thou fashion, which focuses on the relation between commitments undertaken by a scorekeeper interpreting others and the commitments attributed by that scorekeeper to those others. [1994, p. 599]

The shared practice of discursive scorekeeping thus makes possible both communication and objectivity, though it does not guarantee that the former will be successful nor the latter ever be secured. The fact that each of us regularly takes our commitments to be rightly held, rather than just held, gives rise to the idea of objectivity. And, says Brandom, there is nothing more to objectivity than this type of “perspectival form”: “What is shared by all discursive perspectives is that there is a difference between what is objectively correct in the way of concept application and what is merely taken to be so, not what it is - the structure, not the content” [ibid., p. 600].

Brandom’s account of objectivity has two important corollaries which will be exploited in the balance of this book. First, notice that for all Brandom has said, practical commitments (like ethical or political norms) are as amenable to objectivity as any other commitments. This will certainly require further discussion, but on its face suggests that ethical and political disputes - even those between different countries or cultures - might have “objective” solutions. This need not mean that one morality will turn out to be the objectively best for all peoples in all times; the mere fact that we treat scientific concepts as objective does not mean that we are confident that we have at last discovered eternal truths about nature. As I discuss in more detail later, treating something objectively is perfectly compatible with subsequently discovering that we were wrong - or even that in certain circumstances, some things are better for some people than for others.

Second, since Brandom privileges no particular perspective on the “objectively correct,” his account is neutral between competing concep­tions of how we ought to best discover the way things are. This means both that parties to a dispute may need to articulate and defend their epistemological theories, and that no culture’s epistemological norms will enter a dispute with an advantage. Brandom’s approach meshes well with the approach I take when I turn, in the next chapter, to examining what we ought to do when faced with pluralism. The upshot is that Brandom’s account contains elements traditionally associated with both relativist and absolutist theories, and thus can lay the groundwork for a perspective occupying the middle ground between these two unpromis­ing extremes.

If the previous several paragraphs have been successful, then I will have convinced my readers that Brandom’s account of communicative practice (1) is a plausible theoretical reconstruction of what always goes on during communication, albeit usually in the background, and (2) suc­ceeds in resolving the problem that communication had seemed to pose for holist accounts of meaning. It is important to see, though, that this account does not magically guarantee that communication will always succeed. It is true that we are all, often without recognizing it, adept inter­preters who regularly handle potential obstacles - new words, nicknames, malapropisms - to successful communicative practice without slipping.^[41] Still, communication can break down, in contexts both pedestrian and bizarre. In the next section, I will explore the nature and ramifications of communicative failures, because such breakdowns will help us to understand the range of cases in which one’s concepts can be different from those of another.