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One of the most surprisingly prominent themes in Robert Brandom’s A Spirit of Trustis the role of genealogical explanations. Brandom sees genealogies or ‘debunking arguments’ as significant because of their ability to deprive our discursive acts (claims and actions) of the normative status they require to be genuinely discursive or conceptual. His solution to the problem of genealogy is to offer rationalizing reconstructions of others’ discursive acts, which credit them with normative status. He calls this “forgiveness” (a notion similar to Davidson’s “charity”). In this paper, I provide some additional conceptual resources to explicate Brandom’s notions of genealogy and forgiveness. These resources allow me to discriminate between two alternate and seemingly incompatible ways of responding to genealogies. One way depends on rationalizing explanations that still attempt to attribute commitments to their subjects, the other avoids making such attributions in favor of explaining commitments only in terms of norms accepted by the rationalizer. I argue that Brandom’s work sometimes promotes the latter response to genealogy but that this tendency should be eliminated from the account.

Abstract:Readers of Hegel are frequently impressed by his seemingly idiosyncratic use of the term "the concept" (der Begriff) throughout his works. A recent wave of interpreters have held to a "conceptual realist" view, according to which Hegel uses this term to refer either to the monistic structure of reality or to indwelling essences of natural entities. In this essay, the author offers a way to avoid these conceptions of Hegel's conceptual realism by explaining his view of the "isomorphism" between concepts and the world. The isomorphism recommended, however, is metaphysically deflationary, for Hegel's conception of conceptual form creates a conceptually internal standard for the adequacy of concepts; it depends on his view of the negative relations between concepts and the objects they represent. This standard of conceptual adequacy is also "graduated" in that it allows for a lack of fit between concept and world. Nevertheless, the possibility for a "maximally isomorphic" fit between concept and world obtains through the teleological realization of concepts, which marks especially the world of human culture (law, art, religion, and so on). The author contends that some of the most seemingly exaggerated claims Hegel makes about the concept can be understood when we consider the significance Hegel ascribes to human making, which offers the best cases of maximally isomorphic concepts. But the framework here provides an interpretive key for the way Hegel sees concepts imperfectly realized in the natural world as well.