Cognition, recognition, and the “game of interchange of arguments”

Abstract

This article examines the key provisions of philosophical concept of the American pragmatist, representative of Pittsburgh School Robert Brandom, described in the commentaries to Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” (published in separate volume in 2019). It is demonstrated that rational reconstruction of Hegel's philosophy's conducted by Brandom was intended to revive the legacy of the classic, taking into account peculiarities and trends of development of the modern analytical philosophy. The specificity of Hegelian approach towards the analysis of experience of human consciousness, Brandom traces in “hypostasization of the conceptual” and gradual separation from all kinds of idealistic antirealist doctrines that contrapose being-for-consciousness-in-itself to being of things and “disengage” the subject of cognition from objects of the world. Brandom claims that reality itself, things in themselves, is conceptually articulated, and thus cognizable. The author reveals the theoretical-methodological difference between Hegel's interpretation of normativity (“recognitive model”) and Kant's subjectivist approach: according to Kant, institutionalization of the normative status is exhausted by the gesture of accepting such as an autonomous subject; in Hegel’s opinion, the essential condition for founding the status is, as interpreted by Brandom, socio-communicative mediation (“assignment” of status to the subject by his interlocutors, as well as recognition of his assertions by interagents and audience). The article reviews Brandom's arguments against the reduction of Hegelian master – slave dialectic to the inner conflict of individual self-consciousness (position of J. McDowell). The conclusion is made that “re-description” of Hegel conducted by the American philosopher is of radically anachronistic nature, and sheds light on the views of author of the commentaries (primarily his semantic pragmatism and holism), but not on the content of work he provides commentaries to.