A Spirit of Trust -- Consciousness.

I’ve just finished reading the first part of Brandom’s “A Spirit of Trust,” which attempts to provide a plausible reading — better, rehabilitation — of Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” (PhG). The first part deals with Hegel’s section on Consciousness (which is the only section of PhG I had read prior to starting “A Spirit of Trust”).

Reading Brandom has put me into something of a heel-turn around modality. I was quite convinced before reading Brandom that modality was all bull, and that we should be good necessitarians of prope-Spinozistic flavors. But Brandom centers modal relations at the heart of his philosophy in a way both striking and unsettling.

In particular, Brandom reads Hegel’s “determinate negation” as a kind of modally robust exclusion, on which that A determinately negates B should be read as the incompossibility of A and B. He uses this modally robust exclusion to underwrite a modally robust notion of consequence:

Q is a consequence of P just in case everything materially incompatible with Q is materially incompatible with P.

For my part, I’m still not quite sure what this tells us about the analysis of counterfactual sentences, which is what any analysis of modality really needs to fund. Brandom is resolutely opposed to the possible-worlds picture of modality, but how are we to make sense of the truth value of a sentence like “had Napoleon conquered Europe, he would have become immortal” if not through possible-worlds?

That is, it is perfectly clear what would license us to assert or refute the sentence, as deontic activity (in particular, inferential activity) clearly has a modal structure. But it is not clear what would make the sentence true. On this matter, I know I am missing the point, as Brandom is also committed to the thesis that truth cannot be analyzed separately from inferential activity.

But, so far as I can tell, Brandom is equally committed to the thesis that reality really does have a modal structure, and that reality is determinate on the model of a (structured) totality of facts — “the world is the totality of facts, not of things.” And in that sense, what makes a sentence like “copper conducts electricity” true is that copper actually conducts electricity — that part of what it is to be copper is to stand in a relation of consequence with the conducting of electricity (maybe not essentially or constitutively so). What fact would fund a counterfactual? I’m tempted to appeal to the contrapositive, but I am sadly informed that the contrapositive is not valid in material inference.

I’ll close with one thing I think is rather interesting. I’ve always read “mediated” as “in between” — for example, Fregean senses mediate the word-world relationship because they stand in between propositions and truth-values. But Brandom understands “mediated” as “inferential” — while nevertheless maintaining the sense of “mediated” as in between. I suppose that the relationship here is simply that the antecedent of a valid inference stands in between the person inferring and the consequent inferred. But as I begin Self-Consciousness, this funds an interesting gloss: An other (person) mediates the subject’s self-consciousness because the subject can only validly recognize themselves in virtue of the premise that the subject recognizes the other (person) — that is, a mediator as a mediating term.