Tiisala, PFSR - Chapter 5 and conclusion

Notes for CGC March 11, 2025

1. Can archaelogical critique actually give us a history of the present (or some present region of practices)? How can we do critique from our standpoint through archaeology? And, then, what is left for genealogy to do?

2. How does inferentialism present an alternative to social engineering? (Haslanger)

3. Can we identify conditions under which a space of reasons is devoid of power vs a space of reasons where power operates covertly?

4. Disclosing (archaeology) vs depriving (genealogy) formation? (101)

5. Is there any place for institutional/structural critique in this account of critique?

6. Rational control---goal? Is it possible?

Discussion:

Rational control as the aim of the critique, rational material as the content of critique. One does not imply the other. Does T have an overly strong conception of rational control?  

Is the broader notion of the conceptual still theoretical in some Brandomian sense after all? 

The challenge is the elements of practice that are not reducible to language. 

There is no account of pouvoir, but we do need that for elements of practice that are not conceptual. 

 

Tuomo Tiisala’s Power and Freedom in the Space of Reasons – Chapter 4

Is there a difference between critique (methodological reflexiveness, form of explicitation – project of semantic self-consciousness) and the object of critique (savoir as thing submitted for critique).

How can one be against power without providing a justification with respect to its legitimate/illegitimate uses of power? (p. 80)

Does his account of power bring us back to a repressive and/or unitary model of power? (p. 81)

Is Tiisala’s account of critique a depoliticization of critique? (p. 86)

Are there analytic-objective truths and, if so, how are they related to savoir? (p. 93)

How is truth different for Brandom vis-à-vis Tiisala’s Foucault? (p. 93)

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There is a question of how to understand the function of being against power if there is not possibility of questioning the legitimacy in some way of power (which Tiisala seems committed to).

Tiisala has the idea that power operates by masking itself but that the diagnostic act is an unmasking of power that tends to destabilize its stability that relies on its regular unmasked operation.

His argument is dependent on the idea of freedom that is non-political. A freedom that is structurally necessary. It is functionally “against” power, not normatively.

There seems to be an implication that power always constrains freedom, which seems plausible for sovereign power and potentially for discipline but… for governmentality or biopolitics? Or any other modality of power we want to study? 

A constraint on existential freedom, in that sense, is not bad (only on ethical/political freedom).

Important passage: “What makes this passage particularly interesting is the functional definition of power as anything that makes the scope of human freedom seem narrower than it really is.” (p. 81). This highlights the notion of freedom as something that is there and then constrained by power. Power is in that sense anything that makes freedom “seem” or “appear” narrower. There seems to be an “unbounded freedom” presupposed – but, if so, how can it be narrow or not? How could it be measured?

Ch. 3 (cont.)

We began with questions from last week as well as some additional questions: 1. TT p. 67: Discursive/non-discursive 2. D/R p. 82: D/R on Heidegger/Wittgenstein 3. D/R p. 83/83/84: On phenomenology (why parallel to Husserl); is MF bracketing? 4. D/R p. 79: How does being inside the discursive practices give D/R the grounding they want vs. being outside the discursive practices? [Hermeneutics and being inside discursive practice.] 5. TT p. 58: Can we break savoir into different components? 6. TT p. 55: Is it the case that we can only fully understand power and practices of the self against the background savoir? Conversation ensued… Q2/Q3: —Recognition of TT need to respond to D/R critique of Foucault. D/R’s reading of Wittgenstein is informed by Kripke (skeptical relativist reading of LW). Still holds a distinction between semantic and pragmatic. —Regulaism: Chomsky/Levi-Strauss —Regularist: Wittgenstein {Regulism/Regularism—Structuralism/Hermeneutics} —Do nondiscursive practices do more than explain discursive practices? —Foucault is committed to nondiscursive conceptual practices—is Foucault interested in this beyond the explanatory power it offers? —Do discursive practices vs. nondiscursive practices take explanatory priority for Foucault? Or for Foucault? Does Tiisala read the nondiscursive practices as savoir? Is this how Foucault reads it?

Power and Freedom in the Space of Reasons – Ch. 3 Keeping it Implicit

Questions

1. What does Tiisala mean by “discursive”? (p. 66) What is the Kantian aspect of the discursive, especially in relation to Dreyfus vs. McDowell? (p. 66)

2. Are there subjects in Foucault’s archeology? (see p. 62)

3. Why does Tiisala’s account rely on normative forces being operative in a normative statement? What do we lose in claiming that discursive practices can only be understood as descriptions of the regularities? Is there a difference between the normatively ambitious and the descriptively normative? (p. 62) 

4. How are nondiscursive concepts compatible with inferentialism? (Can Brandom and McDowell be brought together?) (p. 66)

5. Why is the “ethical function” tied to autonomy as a Kantian notion? (p. 69)

6. Does Tiisala’s vindication of Foucault actually capture Foucault, the man? Can we unify Foucault’s intellectual development in this way?

7. Can we go more into the Dreyfus-Rabinow critique? (pp. 61-62)

        Discussion 

• Ethical reading of Kant in archeology in Foucault – working on oneself, finding oneself in history, and gaining autonomy through the recognition of the historical conditions of the making of the self 

    o Disagreement with Dreyfus and Rabinow involves this

    o Tiisala is developing a pragmatic ethical register 

• [Q7] D&R – There regularities which regulate themselves (p. 57)

    o “Causal power of the discursive” (p. 58)

    o The charge of structuralism 

    o Foucault claims the regularities are both efficacious and implicit – pragmatism helps this 

    o D&R Critique: Foucault wants both normative and descriptive – he’s a structuralist where they are           heavily divided 

         Efficacious = rules as representations which provide normative checks

         BUT Implicit = they are not represented/accessible within the mind 

    o D&R Critique: Foucault cannot provide efficacious account of rules since Chomsky and Levi-Strauss     have rendered it ahistorical 

    o Response by Foucault/Tiisala – practice and language already entangled in pragmatism 

         Brandom – neither intellectualist regulism nor nonnormative regularism 

    o Issue is now why does Foucault turn to genealogy?

    o Causal efficacy = normative force (prescriptive operative forces) rather than regularist description (see         D-R p. 81)

    o Idealist regulism vs. descriptive regularism – D-R say Foucault falls into descriptivist regularism and         then needs genealogy to accomodate

    o Dreyfus and Rabinow overlook pragmatist conception of rules 

    o Tiisala agrees with D-R but doesn’t think it’s a problem in Foucault 

    o Implicit + Efficacious Rules = Solution

• [Q1] 

    o Broad sense of discursive – conceptual vs. nonconceptual; 

    o Narrow sense of discursive – theoretical vs. practical

    o Conceptual vs. Nonconceptual 

         In Conceptual – linguistic vs. nonlinguistic conceptual action

         Ex. of nonlinguistic conceptual – foxtrot steps, pitcher strike, left-handed writing punished (?)

         Job of archeology is to make explicit nonlinguistic conceptual action

Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge, Part II, Ch. 2 and 5.

Questions:

1. P. 34: “I have been careful...” --> What are the unities being disposed with and why?

2. P. 41: If F refuses inferences as an axis, but Tiisala uses Foucault to endorse inferentialism, how do we make sense of them?

3. P. 42: Foucault says that he does not know where his inquiry will take us. How do we make sense of this? Does he write as he goes along the inquiry? What does it say about the way he writes his books?

4. P. 68, 69: What is normativity for itself? What does F mean when he claims that rules of discursive formations don’t happen in individual consciousness but in discourse itself, anonymously?

5. P. 69: Are there different understandings of unity that Focault is deploying?

6. P. .34: What is the concealment of unity?

7. P. 38: Third hypothesis: “Might it not be possible to establish groups of statements.” How does F’s conclusion diverge from the 3rd hypothesis on transcendental grammar?

8. How do these terms work together? Concepts, enunciative function, discursive formation, and statement?

9. Are discursive statements necessarily hegemonic for Foucault? And given that they operate under a priori rule, how are we do deal with the critically

10. The relationship between discourse/archaeology, practice/genealogy in F and discursive practice in Tiisala; what is it? F sometimes also uses discursive practice.

Discussion:

1. F argues against historians presupposing a transcendental historical consciousness. The unity is also the story that we are telling. Both the unity of the subject and the unity of the object is presupposed.

2. In chapter 2, he talks about four different kinds of unities: objects, enunciative modalities, form/concepts, strategies. According to F, you cannot do history based on the idea of the unity of a concept. Enunciations are the particulars of which discursive formation would be the general system (meta-level).

3. Does F’s ‘enunciative affect’ relate to Brandom’s (or any other form) of inferentialism? It does not seem to so clear, although there is some reason to believe that they are not.

4. Systems of dispersions are related to field of strategic possibilites. But what gets dispersed? Unclear. But note that what gets dispersed also has some regularity. 

Tiisala, PFSR, Chapter 2

 “Tiisala Chapter 2 Replacing the Sovereign Subject with savoir”

 

Questions:

1.    How is the notion of savoir (as explained by Tiisala) related to dispositif, another concept concerned with the limits of intelligibility, but perhaps more robust? Especially if dispositif encompasses and expands savoir and archeology? What about these new concepts that challenge the primacy of “savoir” as a guiding thread?

2.    2.2 Sentence on p. 39: “In a sense, the connection is plain to see: since concepts on Foucault’s account are constituted by rules of savoir, individuals must become concept-users by learning these rules.” Is this really plain to see? What is the connection?

3.    How do we get from the division between the true and the false to the claim about autonomy in 2.5? What are the steps that get us from the first to the second?

4.    P. 41, About discursive practices: What is the distinction between discursive and non-discursive social practices with respect to savoir for Tiisala?

5.    What does savoir mean?

6.    Why does Tiisala emphasize the Anglo-American influence on Foucault’s conception of language as opposed to another “preconceptual” treatment of language, like French phenomenology’s?

7.    Is the account of non-discursive action neutral in Brandom?

 

2. “Replacing the Sovereign Subject with savoir”

·  Connaissance (surface knowledge), while savoir would be depth knowledge (unstated presuppositions), the things needed for science or scientific fields to stabilize their inquiry and truth claims.

·   

 

2.1 Foucault’s rejection of the Sovereign Subject

·  Some confusion about the claim that the practice of critique doesn’t require an account of linguistic training. Here, it seems that Tiisala is endorsing his own view about dispositional understanding.

·  It is unclear, for one reader, where Tiisala is making a hermeneutical claim about Foucault’s view or account, and Tiisala’s own, which could be why the above is ambiguous.

·  Tiisala is writing on Foucault at a time when Foucault’s reception in North America is laden in a history that has tended to neglect Foucault’s engagement with Anglo-American philosophers like Austen and pragmatists. Aside from Arnold Davidson’s small nuggets of this influence or engagement, Foucault’s reception in the U.S., in an academic geography invested in a continental/analytic divide, has tended to position Foucault’s philosophy beside someone like Derrida. Yet, there is another, more complex lineage one could draw, at least sociologically, by tracing Foucault’s readings of Wittgenstein, Straussen, etc.

·  In reference to the final sentence of this section, to what extent does conceptual competence have to be transcendental of the content of discursive practices?

·  Perhaps, Foucault acknowledges that the problem of a transcendental operator, a “conceptual competence of conceptual competence” is a real philosophical limit that he doesn’t give a universal account of, since any account of conceptual competence as such is going to lead to the regress problem. 

 

2.2 Foucault’s inferentialism

·  Page 31, first paragraph. How do connect the following: concepts, concept-users, rules of savoir.

·  Individuals become concept-users (iff) they learn rules of savoir because concepts are constituted by rules of savoir.

·  Maybe Tiisala just wants to say that concept use is behavior that follows the rules of savoir.

 

/There are a couple of issues to flag when it comes to the discursive and non-discursive question. One set of worries is that there is a reductivism to focusing on discursive practices. Another worry is that we can’t trace the transformations in discursive without an account of the non-discursive. This is also a question about archaeology as a method, which does not seem to adequately track discursive transformations.

 

/Trying to sum up what we are understanding so far: What the critiques have been missing is a pragmatist conception of rules, which Foucault already has, and archaeology can be vindicated.

 

2.4 Archaeology and genealogy of savoir

·  Tiisala seems to want to suggest that we can study techniques of power in terms conceptual operations of power (savoir), which is different from a reading that suggests that genealogy studies the non-conceptual techniques of power, like assemblages, strategies, etc., i.e. thinks linked to the non-discursive. This is the question of why savoir, and dispositif.

 

Tiisala, PFSR, Chapter 1

Winter CGC Meetings - Week 1 - Tiisala, Chapter 1

We began, as per usual, with questions:

1) Relation between regress of rules and structural necessity (p. 20).  Endorsing or describing?

2) What is the normative attitude exhibited in (expressed by?) dispositional understanding (p. 20), i.e. that which corresponds to the normative attitude of endorsemenent exhibited in representational understanding.

3) The account of semantic self-consciousness (SSC) on pages 20-25. How should we understand this to work such that we can give a philosophically robust account of it?

• 3a) SSC enables concept-users to assess and revise concepts (p. 20).  How can we understand the revision of concepts without situating it within the revision of practices?  Do we revise practices in the course of revising practices?
• 3b) When a concept is defective (p. 25), how does an account of SSC explicate or consider the occurence of attachment to defective concepts?  Is the idea that SSC is a sufficient condition for rectification?  Or is it merely necessary?
• 3c) What are conditions of possibility of SSC? Does TT acknowledgment feasibility constraints? Does TT acknowledge constraints in terms of kinds of persons?
• 3d) Re: (3c): How can we model SSC such that it does not violate any important feasibility or kinds-of-persons constraints?
  

4) Sociality -- Tiisala's Brandomian social ontology.

• 4a) Sociality in the form of I-thou versus in the form of I-we (p. 15).
• 4b) Sociality in the form of you-we sociality (p. 17).
  

Discussion ensued:

Section 1.1: Problem of structural heteronomy.

• Understanding (SSC) comes first, then assessment second, then the possibility of rational control (or the possibility of changing concepts in the world).
  

 Section 1.2: Regress of rules argument

• "Understanding, in its basic form, conforms to standards of correctness neither intentionally nor accidentally" (11).
• Understanding is non-intentional (implicit, or "behind our backs") but also non-accidental.  This is dispositional understanding.
  
• We can then make the understanding something we are intentional about (explicit).
  

Section 1.3: I-thou, I-we, you-we

• You-we sociality is fundamental.  I.e., training is fundamental for understanding.

Section 1.4: from Training to Pattern-Governed Behavior

• "One can also conform to a rule because of the rule, thus non-accidentally, without knowing the rule" (18).
  
• "The goal of linguistic training is to produce pattern-governed linguistic behavior" (18).
• This is necessarily social (19), because of §1.3.

Section 1.5: SSC and conceptual control (CC)

• TT on SSC and CC:
• "Rational control over concepts" (20).
  
• Concepts can become objects of thinking as representations (20).
• "Enables concept-users to assess and revise the concepts they use" (20).
• SSC as sufficient as CC: how would this work?
  
• Assertions are speech acts.
• Understanding is essentially assertional.
• SSC means we know how our concepts are connected to each other.
  
• So the account must be that SSC is necessary (but not sufficient) for CC.
• So how does it fare as an account of SSC as necessary for CC?
• What do we have to assume about CC for the 'necessity interpretation of SSC (for CC)' to make sense?
• Is CC something that I can do by myself (wrt my own concepts) or is it something that must be essentially social?
  

 

Further Discussion Points:

Re: (2): Is it acknowledgment?

Re: (3b): Attachment to concepts needs explication.  Subjectivation.

Re: (4): TT's arg. is that you-we is fundamental for I-we and I-thou social relations.