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Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegels Idealism

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IIIIIIIVSome Pragmatist Themes in Hegel’s Idealism: Negotiation and Administration in Hegel’s Account of the Structure andContent of Conceptual NormsThis paper could equally well have been titled ‘Some Idealist Themes in Hegel’s Pragmatism’. Both idealism and pragmatism are capacious concepts, encompassing many distinguishable theses. I will focus on one pragmatist thesis and one idealist thesis (though we will come within sight of some others). The pragmatist thesis (what I will call ‘the semantic pragmatist thesis’) is that the use of concepts determines their content, that is, that concepts can have no content apart from that conferred on them by their use. The idealist thesis is that the structure and unity of the concept is the same as the structure and unity of the self. The semantic pragmatist thesis is a commonplace of our Wittgensteinean philosophical world. The idealist thesis is, to say the least, not. I don’t believe there is any serious contemporary semantic thinker who is pursuing the thought that concepts might best be understood by modeling them on selves. Indeed, from the point of view of contemporary semantics it is hard to know even what one could mean bysuch a thought what relatively unproblematic features of selves are supposed to illuminate what relatively problematic features of concepts? Why should we think that understanding something about, say, personal identity would help us understand issues concerning the identity and individuation of concepts? From a contemporary point of view, the idealist semantic thesis is bound to appear initially as something between unpromising and crazy.301My interpretive claim here will be that the idealist thesis is Hegel’s way of making the pragmatist thesis workable, in the context of several other commitments and insights. My philosophical claim here will be that we actually have a lot to learn from this strategy about contemporary semantic issues that we by no means see our way to the bottom of otherwise. In the space of this essay, I cannot properly justify the first claim textually, nor the second argumentatively. I will confine myself of necessity to sketching the outlines and motivations for the complex, sophisticated, and interesting view on the topic I find Hegel putting forward. IThe topic to which that view is addressed is the nature and origins of the determinate contents of empirical conceptual norms. Of course Hegel talks about lots of other things. This is merely the strand in his thought I’m going to pursue here. But it mayseem perverse to identify this as so much as one of Hegel’s concerns. After all, what he spends most of his pages talking about (in both of the books he published during his lifetime, the Phenomenology and the Science of Logic) is the pure, logical, or formal concepts (the pure form-determinations of the Concept), that are the successors in his scheme to Kant’s categories: concepts such as particularity, universality, and individuality and the distinction between what things are in themselves and what they arefor consciousness or for another. But one of the overarching methodological commitments that guides my reading of Hegel is that the point of developing an adequateunderstanding of these categorical concepts is so that they can then be used to make explicit how ordinary empirical concepts work. I would say the same thing about Kant. And I think that one of the things that makes these philosophers hard to understand is that302they devote relatively too much time to developing and motivating their (in the transcendental sense) logical apparatus, and relatively too little time to applying it to the use of ground-level concepts. In both cases I think one does well to keep one’s eye at all times on the significance of what is being said about pure concepts for our understanding of the use of ordinary empirical concepts. Again, Hegel’s idealist thesis is directed in the first instance towards what he calls the Concept: the holistic inferential system of determinate concepts and commitments articulated by means of those concepts. But we will see that the abstract structural claim embodied in the idealist thesis holds of both the system and its elements—and holds of the elements in part because it holds of the system, and vice versa. As I read him, Hegel thinks that Kant has been insufficiently critical regarding two important, intimately related issues. First, he has not inquired deeply enough into theconditions of the possibility of the determinateness of the rules that specify the contents of ordinary empirical concepts. Second, Kant is virtually silent on the issue of their origins. He has not presented a developed account of how those determinate empirical concepts become available to knowers and agents in the first place. Kant takes over from Leibniz the rationalist understanding of knowledge and action as consisting in the application of concepts. Awareness, Leibniz’s ‘apperception’, whether theoretical or practical, consists in classifying particulars by universals—that is, for Kant, bringing them under rules. Hegel inherits from Kant a fundamental philosophical commitment (I’m prepared to say ‘insight’): a commitment to the normative character of concepts. One of Kant’s most basic and important ideas is that what distinguishes judgements and actions from 303the responses of merely natural creatures is that they are things we are in a distinctive way responsible for. They are undertakings of commitments that are subject to a certain kind of normative assessment, as correct or incorrect. The norms1 that determine what counts as correct or incorrect, he calls ‘concepts’. So the genus of which both judgement and action are species is understood as the activity of applying concepts: producing acts the correctness or incorrectness of which is determined by the rule or norm by which one has implicitly bound oneself in performing that act. By taking this line, Kant initiates a shift in attention from ontological questions (understanding the difference between two sorts of fact: physical facts and mental facts) to deontological ones (understanding the difference between facts and norms, or between description and prescription). This moveentailed a corresponding shift from Cartesian certainty to Kantian necessity. This is the shift from concern with our grip on a concept (is it clear? is it distinct?) to concern with


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