Of Whales and Pendulums: A Reply to Brandom

I will eschew the customary precis as Bob Brandom has already provided a deft presentation of many key facets of my book. Instead, let me mark out several of my baseline philosophical motivations, as these can become obscured within the book's " baggy " expanses. In truth, there are several familiar White Whales that I pursue doggedly throughout, but my readers can easily lose track of my long range ambitions while trudging through the book's equivalents of Melville's descriptions of how blubber is rendered. Years ago, following the lead of Hilary Putnam's early work, I became convinced that we could learn much about human conceptual behavior if we examine how macroscopic terminology successfully adapts itself to real world complexity within the annals of scientific history. But Putnam himself quickly forged a doctrinal partnership with Saul Kripke's contemporaneous views on quantified modal logic. The latter had been seeking a story of language that could justify the logical behaviors predicted within a certain formalism and it proved very convenient for these purposes to assume that the references of many predicates neatly attach themselves to well-behaved " natural kind " properties through initial baptismal acts without need of descriptive intermediaries in-2-Russell's fashion. But it became increasingly obvious to me that Putnam's marriage of convenience with Kripke's project was ill-advised, because (1) the alliance anticipates that language will evolve along rigid and improbably tidy developmental pathways where logical concerns improperly dominate non-logical inferential issues (2) it appeals to hypothetical processes of " tuning to natural kind properties " that cannot operate so simply at the macroscopic level. Let me outline, in starker form than I did in the book, some basic mathematical reasons why this is so. In dealing with any physical system S of macroscopic size, there is a clear need to reduce the huge number of descriptive variables needed to characterize S fully at a microscopic level. There are many different strategies that can be attempted here. Suppose that S's full behavior requires the huge variable set A , B quantities adjust only in some imperceptible and 2 n 1 m slowly varying manner relative to the " faster " A variables. Sometimes we can reduce our descriptive set to more manageable proportions by " freezing " the B's into ersatz constancy. In the sequel we simply ignore the B's and work with the A's alone. But when we do this, subtle …