October | 2025 | Negative Catallactics
7 posts published by duncan during October 2025| Negative Catallactics
7 posts published by duncan during October 2025| Negative Catallactics
Ok. Continuing the rambling chain of association from my previous post – and giving myself, as I said there, permission to move at will between objective, subjective, and normative analytic frameworks – I want to briefly move down the analytic layers and think about how to interpret some specific action. I’m again here circling around […]| Negative Catallactics
Another “thinking out loud”, and probably quite embarrassing, post – so it goes. I want to revive again the three-way distinction I’ve used before on the blog, between objective, subjective, and normative approaches to analysing action. The objective perspective on action analyses human behaviour in the idiom of scientific description – behaviourism, or Neurath-style positivism, […]| Negative Catallactics
Ok – this is another “flailing around” post where it would be better if I’d read dozens more major works before sitting down to write it – but life is short. ‘Rationalism’ and ‘irrationalism’ each pretty clearly don’t mean just one thing. In this post I want to start to think about different things they […]| Negative Catallactics
Ok – yet another review post. I’ve been finding Huw Price’s distinction between subject naturalism and object naturalism useful, in thinking through my overall pragmatist commitments. Price’s subject naturalism is concerned to address what Frank Jackson calls “placement problems” – problems about the ontological status of things we want to regard as objective, but whose […]| Negative Catallactics
Ok. In this post, as usual, I’m going to start with some review, then I’m going to write a little about Crispin Wright, Charles Sanders Peirce, Thomas Nagel, and pragmatist accounts of truth. Review first. I’m currently thinking of my core project here as extending across three domains: metaethics, social epistemology, and institutional political economy. […]| Negative Catallactics
Another rambling, self-indulgent post, as usual just trying to get things slightly clearer in my own head. As I think I’ve said before on the blog, when I studied philosophy as an undergraduate I w…| Negative Catallactics
One of the themes on the blog, over the last few years, has been my effort to get straight on where, exactly, I differ from Brandom. I think I now have a reasonably clear list of those differ…| Negative Catallactics
Ok – my goal here, as I said in the last post, is to start thinking more seriously about coercion within a Brandomian apparatus – and I am ‘giving myself permission’ to flail around pre…| Negative Catallactics
I’ve just been rereading some pieces by Hilary Putnam that I haven’t looked at since I was an undergraduate. I remember finding Putnam quite interesting and compelling, back then, but also not really knowing what to do with various of his arguments. Now I’ve got a bit more reading and thinking under my belt, so […]| Negative Catallactics
Start again with Hume, and the two sides of Hume’s sceptical empiricism and sentimentalism. On the epistemological side, Hume starts with experience and concludes that there is no way to derive a strong concept of necessity from the association of ideas – this is Hume’s scepticism about modals. On the moral philosophical side, Hume starts […]| Negative Catallactics
Ok, continuing to only semi-coherently ‘post through it’, I want to write briefly about two different ways in which we aim to track norms – that is, try to figure out what norms are. These are: and This is, broadly, tracking norms as an ethical task, and tracking norms as a descriptive social-scientific task. (Obviously […]| Negative Catallactics
One more set of thoughts before I (hopefully) turn to other things. In Huw Price’s recent(ish) work he distinguishes between e- and i-representation. I-representation is ‘internal’ representation, and as far as I can tell it roughly corresponds to the formal concept of representation that Brandom develops in Making It Explicit – that is to say, […]| Negative Catallactics
Ok. I take it that the basic Brandomian inferentialist account has something like the following structure. [I am sure I am going to get a lot wrong here; I’m after the broad brush picture, which …| Negative Catallactics
So – this post is again really just repeating stuff I’ve already said – but it’s nevertheless also kicking off the project I described in my last post. Start with sanctions. As I …| Negative Catallactics
5 posts published by duncan during September 2025| Negative Catallactics
I’m going to try to be as brief as I can here, since so much of this post is just summary / recapitulation. I want to do three things in this post: first, give a tinker toy summary of one str…| Negative Catallactics
Ok. One of my countless ‘trying to get things straighter in my head, as I read’ posts. I’m trying to get to grips with metaethics. It’s early days yet! As I said a few posts ago, I find Mic…| Negative Catallactics
Ok. I’m not sure exactly how crackpot this is, but I’m going to propose a concept/framework: ‘regimes of incompatibility’. The post will come in two parts. I’ll start by outlining a cra…| Negative Catallactics
The more reading I do in philosophy, the more basic my views get – apologies for the incredibly rudimentary level of posting here. Still, it’s my approach and I’m sticking with it. In t…| Negative Catallactics
I just read Michael Smith’s The Moral Problem, which I thought was great. In particular, the book’s first chapter is, I think, the best “articulate the problem space by summarising the litera…| Negative Catallactics
Continuing to do basic reading in metaethics, since I’ve decided this is a subfield I ought to actually know something about. In this post I want to note a few comments that Michael Smith mak…| Negative Catallactics
[Another rambling ‘meta’ post about the blog’s overall project or orientation.] I just read Andrew Fisher’s ‘Metaethics: an introduction’. This is a very basic introductory overview text, but…| Negative Catallactics
As I said in this post, I’m belatedly recognising that a lot of what I’m trying to think about here is really metaethics, and therefore I need to actually do some reading in the subfield of metaeth…| Negative Catallactics
6 posts published by duncan during August 2025| Negative Catallactics
Ok – yet another bite at articulating the ways in which I now differ from Brandom. I think these go into several boxes. ~~ The first is a rejection of the Kantian concept of autonomy. …| Negative Catallactics
Ok. So in terms of my personal sense of the philosophical trajectory of the blog (and to repeat myself yet again): I came into this enterprise as some kind of Derridean, with the belief that …| Negative Catallactics
10 posts published by duncan during July 2025| Negative Catallactics
Just going over ideas I already covered a week ago, and trying to concretise the reading task slightly more – I want to talk about three philosophical (or more broadly theoretical) traditions…| Negative Catallactics
institutional political economy, social ontology, neopragmatism, critical theory| Negative Catallactics
I recently read Don Lavoie’s ‘Rivalry and central planning’ – an account of the ‘socialist calculation debate’ which I can’t recommend highly enough. Lavoie is a partisan – his go…| Negative Catallactics
