Norms and Habits: Brandom on the Sociality of Action

Abstract

In this paper I argue against Brandom's two‐ply theory of action. For Brandom, action is the result of an agent acknowledging a practical commitment and then causally responding to that commitment by acting. Action is social because the content of the commitment upon which one acts is socially conferred in the game of giving and asking for reasons. On my proposal, instead of seeing action as the coupling of a rational capacity to acknowledge commitments and a non‐rational capacity to reliably respond to these commitments, we should see action as the coupling, or potential coupling, of a capacity to reason practically and a capacity to act on habits and bodily skills. In putting forward this alternative model of action, I aim to replace Brandom's rationalist brand of Pragmatism with a more classical kind, one that will let us see action as social not only at the level of reasons but also at the level of bodily habits and skills.

Response to ‘Somatic Intentionality Bifurcated: A Sellarisan Response to Sachs’s Merleau-Pontyan Account of Intentionality’

“…I do not think it does, because I accept the Brandomian point that inferential contents are instituted in various kinds of social practice, and elsewhere (Sachs, 2014b) I insist on it. The key distinction, as drawn by Levine (2010), lies between norms on the one hand and habits on the other as two different kinds of practical involvement in the world. This distinction does not entail that our rational capacities are fully actualized in disengaged contemplation, but only INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES that the practical involvement of rational norms is different from the practical involvement of bodily habits.…”

Social Practices and Embubblement

“…Steven Levine [10] points out the limits of the Brandomian model to grasp the nature of human behavior in the social context and proposes to start from a deep analysis of the notion of "habit" as proposed by Bordieu. However, we can look at a more powerful account based on the Aristotelian study on the dimensions of habitual behavior.…”

Varieties of political rhetorical reasoning: norm types, scorekeepers, and political projects

“…Thus, the widely used definition of norms in IR as collective expectations for proper behavior for a given identity is only a useful first step for further investigating the guidance function of norms. Crucially, recent studies of norms points to how norms are not free-standing statuses but are instituted by practical attitudes ‘whereby agents take or treat these normative proprieties as committing and entitling other agents and themselves to further beliefs and actions’ (Levine 2015, 252; also see Brennan et al . 2013, 28–39).…”

“…Drawing on recent advancements in pragmatic philosophy, I theorize the link between political rhetoric, norms, and how it affects foreign military intervention projects via actors' reasoning with audiences (Brandom 1994(Brandom , 1998Levine 2015;Tindale 2018). I call this process rhetorical reasoning where political actors deploying rhetoric draw upon norms that underwrite interactions to make claims about the purpose of a political project and the audiences evaluate the reasoning by making a series of inferences in line with the norms of reasoning.…”