Determinate Negation

In my scouring of the internet for help understanding Hegel, I found 3 video lectures by Robert Brandom from LMU Munich (in English, of course)*.

They provide an overview of his recent work reading Kant and Hegel and thinking about the problems of metaphysical and semantic realism and idealism.  The basic difficulty of providing a union of conceptual thinking (thinking in terms of objects, classes, entities, and rational relations between them) and reality as we experience it.

Kant set up a view of this that the reason came fitted with 'synthetic judgments' - prejudices that make us see causality in some constant conjunction of phenomena, that may help us survive in the world bnut which can't themselves be grounded in reason or perceived directly in experience (see Hume on Causality). Their rationality is 'transcendental', which I would describe (probably wrongly), as meaning that they are justified as the condition of the possibility of rationality.  Kant thought that perception grasped 'the object' for consciousness through an act of (synthetic) judgement, but that the object for itself remained ineffable, unknowable.

People said, well how do you know there's such a thing as the thing in itself then? But maybe they didn't say it to Kant, out of respect.**  Robert Brandom diagnoses this as a gap in the intelligibility of the world, and explains that Hegel's project was to attempt to give an account with no gap.

Hegel argues that the mode of definition of the object is by what he calls 'determinate negation.' An object is white (and NOT black, red or any other colour). The 'IS' is Kant's synthetic judgement, but in Hegel the appearance is the appearance of a super-sensible object which becomes understandable as more and more experiences mean you can perhaps synthesise a law (law is the truth of appearances in Hegel).

As Brandom explains it, objects define themselves by means of determinate negation, and consciousness of the object characterises the object by determinate negation, and consciousness is engaged continually in reconciling its conceptual contents by judgements with the goal of eliminating material incompatibility and fitting the right scheme of determinate negations over the understood world. Although its impossible for the objects to hold materially incompatible properties, a subject (person) can hold materially incompatible beliefs or positions.  But although they can, we hold that they shouldn't.  You can't be in two places at once, we say to the double booked person.  You must resolve that incompatibility.  If you see a straight stick appear bent under water, you have to come up with a theory of how water bends appearances, or sticks. You can't believe the same stick is both straight and bent.  Determinate negation implicitly (though minimally) puts concepts and objects into the kind of holistic structure Heidegger calls a world. Square is NOT round, triangular, pentagonal etc.

Brandom also draws out the parallel with Shannon information theory, in which the information provided by a bit depends on what it negates.  If a thousand possible worlds would have had it be zero, and it is one (and NOT zero), then it is very informative - but you measure it by that negation.

I've made this much less clear than I should. I don't understand it well enough to do a much better job even if I took my time.

Itunes:

Review of his latest book - Being Human


* There is no reason for them to be released as video - the image of a luxuriantly bearded Robert Brandom is itself a luxury in this world of scarcity.  Audio-only would have been fine, LMU.

** Did you know he first hypothesized the accretion disk formation of the solar system?