Pragmatism, Internalism, and the Authority of Claims

This paper develops and defends an internalist account of having authority for one’s claim. It begins with Robert Brandom’s pragmatist account of thinking which locates the root notion of reasoning in a primitive language game of asking for and giving reasons. The idea is that the authority of a claim can be spelled out pragmatically in terms of the social practice of undertaking commitments and attributing entitlements. It is argued that this account fails to acknowledge the role of the subject’s grasp of the higher-order concept of the evidence on which I base my claim. S claims that a person makes have authority for the one who makes them. What gives a claim its authority? How is the authority of a claim tied to the internal states of the one who makes it? How much does a person have to know about the authority of his or her claim in order to be fully justified in making that claim? This is the constellation of questions I will be considering in this paper. They are all epistemological questions centering mainly on the requirements for a claim’s having authority. My discussion of them will be couched within the current internalism/externalism debate that has been prominent in epistemology for the last decade. However, I want to approach these questions by a somewhat indirect path, by looking at a theory of cognition that was developed by Robert Brandom in a series of papers, and fully synthesized in the recent book, Making It Explicit.1 One of Brandom’s central concerns is: what is it to be in a cognitive state? Or, since his approach is avowedly “pragmatist”, the question should be put D. D. Cr aw f o rD i n Pa c i f i c Phi l o s o P hi c a l Qua r t er l y 78 (1997) 64 in terms of an external performance: what is it to make a cognitive claim? Brandom’s answer to this question, in a nutshell, and put in a way that stands in need of pragmatic elucidation, is that a person makes a cognitive claim only if she understands the significance of her claim. When the issue is put this way, it seems to fall squarely within the domain of the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. And indeed, much of Brandom’s discussion has to do with elucidating the character of significant thought, of laying bare the necessary components of making a cognitive claim. But there is a further dimension of this account that chimes with the concerns of cognitivists, and that is the attempt to construct a model of the development of thought, to trace the way in which humans have passed from primitive forms of thinking and reasoning to fully-fledged thinking and reasoning. In fact, Brandom combines these two projects—the analytical and historical—into one: we can discern the essential elements of our higher cognitive activities in the humbler conducts and engagements of our remote cognitive ancestors. Brandom’s proposed pragmatic account of what is involved when a subject grasps the significance of her claim is fraught with meaning for the sorts of questions about the authority of claims that we raised at the outset. For as we shall see, the pragmatic view ties the notion of making a claim and grasping its significance to the social practice of asking for and giving reasons for one’s claim. Thus the concept of cognitivity that is articulated in this account is linked with the concept of justification by means of the explicative idea of having and giving reasons. I wish to explore this idea that we should understand the authority of a claim (for a subject) in terms of the subject’s ability to play the “game” of asking for and giving reasons. And I will further consider how far this account of authority can accommodate an internalist theory of justification.