Who or What Governs the “Game of Giving and Asking for Reasons”? Consequences of Theory-Choice in Brandom, Spivak, and Rorty

The article examines how the choice of what one takes to be the principle governing language influences theory-making down the road, in particular theories of personhood and emancipatory politics. I contrast Brandom’s rationalist account with Rorty’s meta-normative account and draw on Spivak’s analysis of why the subaltern “cannot speak” to highlight morally and politically relevant blind spots in Brandom’s theory. The line I follow is connected to what I frame as the necessity of normative commensuration in Brandom, contrasted with the possibility of normative rupture in Rorty. By this I mean that Brandom’s conception of semantic normativity lacks the resources to bridge normative gaps and therefore falls short of a key desideratum of many political and moral-ethical theories, namely, the capacity to extend recognition to voices that are not only excluded from the dominant discourse but are not even acknowledged as voices as such, even within potential counter-hegemonic games. In Brandom, personhood comes downstream from being rational, which renders the interpretation of expressions that are not continuous with his rationalist picture of language exceedingly difficult. By contrast, Rorty begins with the presumption of personhood and subsequently seeks to interpret a person’s utterances as serving rational ends, where “rational” is construed more broadly than in the perspectival-cognitive mode Brandom employs. I argue that this personhood-first orientation is essential for accommodating people’s sense that their own point of view matters, and that this requirement follows directly from how one understands language itself.