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
I feel like I’m sort of running on fumes with these latest posts, but I still want to keep posting, for whatever reason, so. To review: Michael Smith distinguishes between two dimensions of metaethics – the objectivity of norms, and the practicality of norms. My orientation to the first of these two problems (the objectivity […]| Negative Catallactics
Alright. In this short post I want to draw a very simple distinction. I want to distinguish two different ways the broad project I’m engaged in here (let’s call it “psychodynamic social perspectivalism about normativity”) can be pursued – a formal and an informal approach. The formal approach would aspire to construct out of these […]| Negative Catallactics
In this post I just want to repeat a point I made last week – without some of the baggage of that post, and with a few additional remarks. I want to outline two basic social-perspectival dimensions of what we’re doing when we’re saying that something is true. First dimension: when we say that a […]| Negative Catallactics
In the last few posts I’ve given a broad brush articulation of the basic philosophical / metatheoretical framework I want to adopt, explore, endorse. In this post I just want to add one more piece to that framework. In Brandom’s framework, the two core normative statuses are “commitment” and “entitlement”. I want to swap out […]| 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 doesn’t excuse sloppiness, but maybe excuses sloppiness a bit.] The substance – the content – of a statement is to […]| 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
