hegel, philosophy, and music 113inadequacy, but if the statement of the suspicion just adverts to forms
of articulation which show something that verbal language cannot, this
objection need not hold. Cavell’s comment that in aesthetic judgement
the giving of reasons will often end in the situation where ‘if you do
not see something,withoutexplanation, then there is nothing further
to discuss’ (Cavell 1976 : 93 ) points to the kind of phenomena I mean.
InMaking it ExplicitBrandom talks of ‘a picture of thought and
of the world that thought is about asequally, and in the favoured
casesidentically, conceptually articulated’ (Brandom 1994 : 622 ). While
detailing worries about what he terms Brandom’s ‘conceptual realism’
(Brandom generally rejects other forms of realism), Habermas talks
of ‘a remarkably objectivistic understanding of discursive behaviour in
Brandom’s conception’ (Habermas 1999 : 170 ). The Hegelian element
in this which Habermas finds dubious is the following: ‘The place of
the “exertion of the concept”, which would otherwise be a question
of a constructively proceeding communicative community, is taken by
the “movement of the concept”, which takes place via discourses which
are mediated by experience, but over the heads of the participants in
discourse’ (ibid.: 172 ). Instead of the contingency of the world being
intersubjectively negotiated in terms of a multiplicity of communicative
and expressive practices, via which we come to understandings with
each other whose priority depends on the context and needs and aims
of those engaging in those practices, ‘Allcommunicative practices –
including those, like expressive, aesthetic, ethical, moral, or juridical
discourses that do not relate to the establishing of facts – are supposed
to be analysed on the basis of assertions’ (ibid.: 179 ). The expressive
dimensions of communication therefore may not have justice done to
them in Brandom’s Hegelianism. This is because of the assumption
that the order of the world is inherently conceptual, which is based
on the idea of concepts as ‘inferential roles of expressions’ (Brandom
1994 : 622 ) that express facts.^3 The core difficulty becomes apparent in
relation to the following distinction.
Brandom distinguishes between ‘texts, which we caninterpret(in
scorekeeping terms) ortranslateas expressingclaims,onthe one hand,
andthings, which we candescribeorexplainby using claims, but do
not take to be expressing claims, on the other’ (Brandom 1997 : 203 ),
3 Habermas reminds us that this brings Brandom close to the Wittgenstein of theTractatus,
although Brandom replaces Wittgenstein’s ‘transcendental linguistic idealism’ with an
‘objectivelinguistic idealism’, in which ‘the objectivity of the world is not testified to by
contingencies which we experience through effects on our senses and in practical activity,
but by the discursive resistance of stubborn objections’ (Habermas 1999 : 169 ).