The Structure and Straits of Immanent Criticism

Abstract:

The interpretative strategy known as immanent criticism is a mainstay of contemporary continental philosophy. In this paper, I argue that immanent criticism is a species of self-defeating transcendental argument. I show how this philosophical approach responds to a skeptical worry concerning the intelligibility and justification of a practice or social setting by treating objects (of experience) as exemplifying specific conceptual frameworks. Having extrapolated the concepts, norms, or principles that make an object intelligible to us, the immanent critic then proceeds to evaluate the fit between the extrapolated conceptual scheme and the particular instance. Immanent critique fails, I argue, because this strategy entails epistemological realism, which runs counter to the immanent critic’s insistence that an object’s significance or intelligibility depends on some set of contingent and variable parameters (e.g. specific interests, intentions, or conceptual schemes). Immanent criticism implicitly treats the framing features of experience as necessarily anchored in their objects, unproblematically accessible, and hence as context invariant. This generates a problem for non-foundational or post-metaphysical philosophies that employ this critical strategy.

Key Words:

Immanent Critique, Epistemological Realism, Transcendental Argument, German Idealism, Continental Philosophy

Alexei Procyshyn PhD Candidate Department of Philosophy The New School for Social Research

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Few philosophical ideas ever gain total acceptance, but the concept of immanent criticism may

just be one of them. In continental philosophy at least, ‘immanent critique’ is ubiquitous.

Whether in social and political philosophy, aesthetics, or metaphysics, just to name a few

prominent areas, the practice of extrapolating the criteria of assessment from a given object and

then reflexively applying them has become the philosophical gesture par excellence. Ubiquity,

however, tends to produce complacency, for the precise meaning of ‘immanent critique’ seems

less obvious than its general acceptance might suggest. Consider the characterization of the term

in the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie: “Immanent critique can be understood, first, as a

principle of interpretation and understanding whereby historical epochs, cultures, literary texts,

etc., are assessed according to their ‘own criteria.’ It can also mean the examination of a theory’s

internal logical stringency and consistency but without challenging the theory’s basic

assumptions.”1 Availing itself of criteria ‘internal’ to its object, immanent criticism examines,

tests, or experiments upon the object’s formal features. This approach appears to be impartial,

objective, and immune to skeptical worries precisely because no extrinsic concerns have been

imported into our context of evaluation. Whatever problem or inconsistency we uncover is

somehow internal to the situated object and extrapolated framework, and emerges, as it were, on

its own terms. Many of us nod approvingly at this characterization, for this is what we, following

the German Idealist tradition, generally take philosophy to do.

Despite its widespread acceptance, however, I think there are good reasons for

dispensing with this philosophical strategy altogether – most pressingly, the fact that immanent

criticism gives rise to its own internal tension. The aim to develop thick descriptions and

diagnoses without importing any extrinsic foundational concerns leads immanent critics to do exactly

the opposite. Despite their intentions, immanent criticism actually puts greater pressure on the need

for a metaphysical foundation by fusing the epistemological problem concerning justification or

legitimation with an ontological concern for grounding.

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In what follows, I want to draw out these implicit commitments by fusing a few

horizons. I will show that immanent critique is a species of transcendental argument that aims to

ground a specific knowledge-claim or experience in a systematically integrated, autonomous, and

fundamental set of conditions to which we are ontologically committed but which remain

heterogeneous to the experience we derive them from. In this sense, transcendental arguments

respond to a traditional problem in epistemology concerning the structure of knowledge itself.

For they seek to extrapolate a type or kind from the concrete experience of a token.

Transcendental arguments therefore depend upon the existence of these kinds (with Williams, I

shall call this commitment epistemological realism) and on establishing the right sort of

relationship between type and token (immanence). What allows us to bring immanent criticism,

transcendental argumentation, and epistemological realism together, as I will show, is a specific

form of skepticism concerning justification, which precipitates a set of ‘success conditions’ for

justification that, in turn, entail a robust metaphysics.

So understood, ‘immanent critique’ presents us with something of a dilemma: unless we

accept the metaphysical commitments it entails, this interpretative and critical stance will not be

coherent. After all, a condition or normative status is not internal to a social situation – and

hence does not ground or legitimate it – simply because a critic cannot make sense of that

situation without it. To illustrate: simply because a Cartesian cannot make sense of herself

without a soul does not mean that a soul is internal to humans. Indeed, an argument of that kind

would be a variation on the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. For immanent critique to be successful,

too, a critic needs to demonstrate that the relation between her extrapolated condition and her

object of inquiry is necessary in some relevant sense. The need to appeal to a necessary relation,

however, binds immanent critique to a form of metaphysics. And this means that post-

metaphysical philosophy cannot proceed unproblematically from an immanent critical vantage. If,

on the other hand, we accept these metaphysical commitments, we seem to license and intensify the

very worries that immanent criticism is supposed to curtail. Insofar as we rely on metaphysics to

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ground our practices, we simply push the initial skeptical concern about partiality or extrinsicality

back a step, and thus fail to adequately meet the original challenge for justification. For the

necessity of the relationship between practice and condition of intelligibility opens up onto the

standard skeptical concerns.

A General Sense o f the Problem

The crux of the dilemma is that immanent critique relies on a notion of scheme-content fitness to get

its evaluative strategies off the ground. However, scheme-content fitness hinges on two further

ideas that do not hang together very well within the present context. The first idea is that a

particular object’s content remains stable across different (historical, or interest-dependent)

contexts. The second is an idea of immanence that connects instance and kind together. If

immanent criticism is to be objective in the sense alluded to in its dictionary definition, the

evaluative criteria used to assess some object or practice must in fact be immanent in them.

There must be a specific relation between object and extrapolated framework that allows us to

read the framework off of the object. ‘Immanence’ fulfills precisely this requirement.

Furthermore, an object’s expressed content must be independent of its instances and

contextually invariant (or, in the language I will introduce below, epistemologically real).

Otherwise this immanent critique forfeits its claim to ‘context-transcendence.’ If critique is to be

objective, its ultimate object and criteria for assessment cannot be relative to a specific

perspective or situation. But this entails some form of epistemological realism about expressed

content. In much the same way that one might suggest that distinct and superficially

incommensurable utterances can express the same proposition, the immanent critic suggests that

the meaning or significance that she attributes to an action cannot exclusively depend upon the

particulars of its instantiation (whether they be the critic’s own, or the particulars of the situation

being criticized) even though its expression might.

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The interplay of ‘immanence’ and ‘context-transcendence’ hones our initial notion of

scheme-content fitness to a critical edge. For it becomes possible for a particular instantiation to

depend upon or express a framework, while nevertheless inadequately fulfilling it. A quick

example should be sufficient to illustrate the point: every Olympic level diver will perform so as

to instantiate the judgeable properties of a good dive – i.e. starting position, approach, take-off,

flight, and entry – without necessarily fulfilling the standards of excellence (i.e. receiving a 10).

The degree of fit between an individual instance and the ideal specified by its associated

framework of assessment thus provides us with the ability to criticize a given practice. The

problem with this approach, however, is that we cannot connect the notions of immanence,

context-transcendence, and fitness together without effectively begging the question. In the case

of ‘immanent critique,’ the problem manifests itself as follows: although immanent critics

maintain that their objects of interest are contingently expressed or constituted by context

sensitive practices, they nevertheless operate as if these objects are unproblematically accessible

to radically distinct historical epochs, contexts, and interpretative pressures. They equivocate

between the epistemologically real object of knowledge and its concrete instantiation.

The Many Names o f Immanent Cri t i ci sm

To show how a commitment to the context-invariance of content and to an expressive

relationship between instance and kind generate this problem for immanent critique, we need to

better specify what immanent critique is, and how it is supposed to work. A comprehensive

survey of the literature on this topic is, however, impossible here. That project would be a book

unto itself, and there are already a number of very good ones on the subject.2 Instead, I shall

simply stipulate the necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for calling a particular piece of

philosophical work ‘immanent criticism,’ and leave it up to others to test the definition by

offering counterexamples or finding faults.

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Drawing on Rahel Jaeggi’s and Tilo Wesche’s work,3 we may say that immanent critique

involves showing (1) that some set of normative statuses supervene on, or are constitutive of a

given situation, object, or practice, (2) how these statuses stabilize, regulate, and perpetuate – in

short, ‘legitimate’ – the situation, and (3) why, in cases where there is some form of failure (or

‘contradiction’), we experience such internal tensions in terms of suffering or hardship (WI 286-

287). Finally, in addressing the manner in which a given, concrete situation has failed, immanent

critique seeks (4) to transform the normative structure underwriting it (ibid.). An account of (1)

explains ‘immanence,’ while answering (2) fleshes out the idea of scheme-content fitness, (3)

provides us with a concrete, motivating sense of unfitness and (4) leads to a positive account of

how to ameliorate matters. Together, these tasks explain, according to Jaeggi, “the dynamic-

transformative character of immanent critique [and] lead to a decisive result: the above sketched

transformation […] is to be understood as a developmental or learning process” (WI 289).

So far as I can tell, every critical strategy that lays claim to the title ‘immanent criticism’

responds to these four issues and insists on a dynamic transformation of normative statuses and

material world. Furthermore, we can account for the specific differences among various

immanent critical programs by seeing how they each respond to (3): as I will show, these different

responses involve delimiting epistemologically real kinds from what an epistemologist would call

a nominal kind according to some specific sense of failure. According to Wesche, the three

principal forms of failure that have driven the predominant models of immanent critique are

epistemic error, compulsion or obsession (Zwangsvorstellung), and simplification (RTD 205).

Kant’s transcendental reflection and Hegel’s phenomenological observation provide the prime

examples of a form of critique that differentiates between truth and falsity (or appearance and

reality) by way of an experience of error, while psychoanalysis and the various avatars of the

‘hermeneutics of suspicion,’ to use Ricoeur’s term, involve some form of compulsion or

obsession. The category of simplification, which Wesche further aligns with the idea of illusion

(Täuschung), provides us with a criterion for the various forms of ideology critique, false class-

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consciousness, and discourse- or performance-based critique (e.g. Habermas’ theory of

communicative action, or Butler’s performative conceptions of personal identity).

Notice, however, that all these different programs still embrace the general idea of

scheme-content fitness. Kant and Hegel, for instance, cleave to a correspondence theory of

truth, and any appeal to compulsion, simplification, or illusion only makes sense if there is a way

things really are, or an appropriate form of behaviour. Furthermore, all of these programs invoke

‘immanence’ to explain how their preferred limit-phenomena (‘failure’) allow critics to

extrapolate a type or conceptual framework from a tokened experience. Put differently so as to

foreshadow my argument’s endpoint, the various notions of error, failure, or suffering allow

critics to show that a nominal kind (think ‘phlogiston’) currently grounds a region of experience.

The nominal kind, however, can be revised so as to accurately capture the actual or effective

conditions of experience. The dynamic process of revision, essential to immanent critique,

presupposes an epistemologically real kind (i.e. an integrated set of autonomous and

fundamental features), since this kind allows us to formulate a specific limit between our

experience and its sources (or conditions of intelligibility), while showing how the experience of

failure leads us to a better understanding of both.

As I intimated earlier, however, the specific sense of ‘immanence’ involved in immanent

critique does not play very well with the idea of scheme-content fitness. On the one hand, the

immanent critic is committed to the idea that there cannot be a change in the concrete social

situation without a concomitant change in normative structure and vice versa (WI 288). The

mutually dependent relationship between world and conceptual framework implies some kind of

necessary connection between them. On the other hand, the same immanent critic needs to hold

that the relationship between scheme and content is contingent, context-sensitive, and changeable. To

see why this is the case, we need only look at the consequences of rejecting either commitment:

if the relationship between our experience and our conceptual framework is not necessary, then

we are condemned to the relativity of local habit and custom. We forsake, in other words, the

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very possibility of context-transcendence. If, however, the relation between scheme and content

is absolutely necessary and invariant, we would have to accept some kind of Panglossian position

in which our suffering is metaphysically necessary.

The immanent critic clearly needs both commitments despite their bald inconsistency.

And I take it that the notion of ‘immanence’ is supposed to reconcile them counterfactually.

‘Immanence’ thus promises resolve the immediate difficulty between what is necessary for

understanding a particular experience, but still changeable – though only by committing us to a

specific metaphysics. So far as I can tell, the best (indeed the only) candidate for a general

account of ‘immanence,’ i.e. the imputed connection between scheme and content that is both

necessary, context-sensitive, and hence changeable, is Nelson Goodman’s notion of

exemplification.4 Goodman defines ‘exemplification’ as “[property] possession plus reference”

(LA 53). As he further explains, “exemplification is reference running from denotatum back to

label [i.e. predicate]” (65) and hence “to exemplify or express is to display rather than depict or

describe” (93).5 A mundane example that works well for both Goodman and the immanent critic

would be the colour swatches from a hardware store, or the tile samples we examine in an

interior design department. The texture, weight, and colour of the tile sample refer to the

predicates that define its kind. On the basis of the kind I can consider whether a given kind of

tile would work well in my kitchen. I am therefore licensed to say that the kind is immanent in

the sample, because the latter exemplifies the former. Notice, moreover, that a given sample

successfully exemplifies its kind when its properties fit a given framework and context. Consider

another example: a paint sample that exemplifies the thickness of the paint rather than its colour

will not fit most of our uses to which we put paint samples, even though it still exemplifies its

kind. Or, to take a classical example, the oak tree is immanent in the acorn to the extent that the

acorn possesses properties that refer to ‘oak tree,’ even if it also contains properties that prevent

it from so developing or is so situated that it cannot develop.

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Seyla Benhabib’s account of immanent critique in her Critique, Norm, Utopia: A Study in

the Foundations of Critical Theory6 develops the same exemplary relation between scheme and

content. Deriving her notion of ‘immanent critique’ primarily from Hegel’s political writings,

Benhabib characterizes immanent criticism as “refus[ing] to stand outside its object and instead

juxtapos[ing] the immanent, normative self-understanding of its object to the material actuality

of this object” (CNU 33). The appeal to immanent normative criteria identifies the requisite

kind, invoking ‘self-understanding’ opens up the possibility of unfitness (or a distinction between

nominal and real kinds), while her ‘material actuality’ introduces the idea of a specific

instantiation. Benhabib further places her ‘critique’ in counterpoint to what she calls ‘mere

criticism,’ which “privileges an Archimedian standpoint, be it freedom or reason, and proceeds

to show the unfreedom or unreasonableness of the world when measured against this ideal

paradigm” (CNU 33). Whereas immanent criticism (what Benhabib calls ‘critique’) works to

extrapolate the theoretical kind or the normative statuses that make an object intelligible, mere

criticism labours to show that (and perhaps how) certain objects do not in fact belong to the

requisite kind, even though they may be nominally related to it. “By privileging this Archimedean

standpoint,” she continues, “criticism becomes dogmatism: it leaves its own standpoint

unexplained, or assumes the validity of its standpoint prior to engaging in the task of criticism.

This means that criticism is not ready to apply its own criteria to itself, for it stops short of

asking whether its own normative standards cannot be juxtaposed to facts by yet another critical

critique” (ibid.). The problem of mere criticism, in other words, is that it fails to establish the

appropriate exemplary relationship between criteria and object – it fails to show that these

criteria are immanent in the situation being criticized and hence fails to be objective. Benhabib

thus reiterates the salient features of our dictionary definition of immanent critique.

Notice that the procedures at work here involve a form of semantic ascent: we move from

concrete particulars to their meanings. And this form of ascent implies being able to reflectively

detach the content or significance of an object from its initial context. Benhabib’s catachrestic use

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of inside-outside tropes provides us with the requisite figures for this operation. In the guise of

‘normative self-understanding’ and ‘material actuality,’ Benhabib reintroduces the Kantian (and

Hegelian) differentiation between an object and a concept of an object. Moreover, she positions

the immanent critic as a phenomenological observer capable of coordinating and moving

between both positions, while crucially remaining distinct from them. This implies a form of

reflective detachment – a distinct meta-critical position from which the tensions between a

context transcendent self-understanding and the material actuality of a specific situation are

manifest. Moreover, it also implicates us in a (semantic) totality in which observer, objects, and

their corresponding concepts hang together.

Benhabib’s characterization provides a nice example because it highlights the

metaphysical background conditions of her preferred philosophical method. Over and above her

implicit reliance on the idea that objects exemplify conceptual schemes, her characterization of

immanent criticism entails a version of epistemological realism, i.e. the view that the objects of

knowledge – i.e. the exemplified kinds – possess specific, yet context-independent properties.7 If

epistemological realism is true, it guarantees that the objects of our critical interest are not

entirely dependent upon the contexts in which we initially find them, thus motivating the idea of

context-transcendence. Moreover, without context-transcendence, there could be no question

concerning the fitness of a particular performance and our evaluative criteria, because there

would be no way to mediate among (or triangulate) contexts. No definitive criteria could be

produced, and no objective evaluations would be possible. The result, to return to the diving-

example, would be something like saying that a given performance instantiates several criteria all

at once, but without being able to coordinate or select among different registers of assessment:

the action is ‘a bad dive,’ ‘a great belly flop,’ a ‘painful entrance into water,’ and – depending

upon the perspective, time, and interest – many more things besides.

The point I am trying to draw out is that without appealing to an epistemologically real

kind, an object would be so enmeshed within its context that every critique or description of it

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would presuppose a distinct context and hence would be (1) extrinsic to it, and (2) offer no way

of integrating or organizing these distinct contexts. Now, if an immanent critic is going to avoid

the charge of extrinsicality or partiality, she requires a ‘check’ or touchstone against which her

critical efforts could be tested, and revision (or critical intervention) could take place. Hence the

commitment to epistemological realism. The problem, however, is that this fix commits us to

something like a Ding-an-sich. After all, things in themselves (and there are at least five ways to

interpret this notion)8 ensure the requisite sense of stability: objects are cross-contextually stable

when they are complete (independent or self-sufficient), when they provide a ‘check’ on reflexive

assessment, and when they make revision and theoretical convergence possible. Furthermore, as

we just saw, all these notions are necessary for immanent criticism to be successful.

Immanence , Exempli f i cat ion , and Epist emologi cal Real i sm

So far, I have suggested that the grammar of ‘immanence’ is coextensive with the logic of

exemplification, and that this allows us to understand immanent critique as ascending from a

first-order phenomenon to the criteria implicit in it, and then reflexively assessing the fit between

phenomenon and implicit criteria in a specific context. What is exemplified, in other words, are

the indispensable features of a practice to which we must be committed if we are to undertake

this activity or have this experience in the first place. The transformative nature of this reflexive

form of assessment, I then suggested, commits us to epistemological realism. For

epistemological realism allows us to maintain that content is context-transcendent and provides

us with a means for explaining the requisite senses of failure of fit between scheme and content

in a given context, while making revision and transformation possible.

This provides us with our first synthetic moment: immanent critique is a species of

transcendental argumentation. For, as Paul Franks has shown, transcendental argumentation also

proceeds from a specific ‘difference in kind,’ which he calls the heterogeneity requirement (AN 208).

Franks shows that transcendental arguments, much like immanent criticism, distinguish

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themselves from dogmatic approaches in that they explicate a region of experience in its

systematic totality by appealing to a heterogeneous ground that is necessarily related to this region and that

makes reflexive assessment possible.9

Franks’ account refines the themes I have already introduced. For, although

‘heterogeneity’ is merely another way of specifying the token-type or instance-kind difference

that gets immanent criticism off the ground, the connections he draws out among it, reflexive

assessment, and systematic totality enable him to show that merely extrapolating a normative

framework from an object of interest and assessing their fit is insufficient. The immanent critic

also needs to show that these extrapolated conditions provide the proper explanatory ground for her

object of interest and, at the same time, account for her relationship to this object and to the

ground she has extrapolated from it. She must also situate object and critical approach within this

framework. Franks’ analysis of transcendental argumentation thus dovetails with our account of

‘immanent critique’ in that both critical strategies respond to the same basic pressures, and begin

from a skeptical concern about our failure to justify our claims to know (e.g. the true from the

false, the good from the bad, the reality from the appearance). What Franks’ heterogeneity and

totality requirements (as we will see in a moment, Franks ultimately articulates these

requirements in terms of what he calls the dualism and monism demands) give us, however, are

the meta-critical resources to determine whether a specific critical intervention succeeds. For if

immanent critique is a species of transcendental argument, then it can fail to reflexively apply the

criteria of assessment, or to identify heterogeneous criteria, or to delineate a theoretically

complete worldview. The failure to reflexively apply these normative criteria – and hence to

situate oneself, one’s object of interest, and one’s activity within the compass of a single, unified

framework – prompts the charge of dogmatism (since critique remains partial and extrinsic), while

the failure to satisfy the heterogeneity requirement prompts the charge of circularity or question

begging; lastly, the failure to delineate a complete worldview leads to charges of regress.

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According to the sense of immanent critique we outlined above, the criteria governing

transcendental argumentation and its pitfalls also apply to immanent criticism.

The point worth underscoring here is that both immanent critique and transcendental

argumentation are committed to the claim that there must be some condition that is invulnerable

to further reflexive assessment. I want to take a moment to further develop this point of contact.

As Robert Stern points out, a transcendental argument involves, minimally, a “claim of the form

‘X is a necessary condition for the possibility of experience, language, thought, etc.’, where the

rationes cognoscendi of this claim is non-empirical, and the rationes essendi is not that it is analytically

true or true by virtue of the laws of nature”.10 Immanent criticism, as I have been describing it,

satisfies this definition of ‘transcendental argument.’ For transcendental arguments attempt to

inoculate us against skeptical doubts (and fallacious forms of argument) by showing how these

very worries hinge upon some set of commitments that a skeptic cannot coherently call into

question. Summarizing this line of thought in a slightly different context (which we will

encounter in detail shortly), Michael Williams writes,

The sceptic is accused of misrepresenting the logical structure of our ordinary system of beliefs, treating all beliefs as if they were on a par. His mistake is to treat ‘hinge’ or ‘framework’ propositions as if they were empirical, hence needing to be backed up by evidence. But they are not like that. Rather, they give structure to our whole way of making judgments. […] [T]he sceptic’s […] cardinal error […] is to treat ‘judgments of frame’ as if they were particular items of empirical knowledge. What we must recognize is that our true relation to them is ‘non-epistemic.’ Taking them for granted is built into the very structure of anything we could recognize as a judgmental practice.

(UD 24-25)

The difference between what Williams here calls ‘non-epistemic judgments of frame’ and

empirical knowledge satisfies the heterogeneity requirement I introduced earlier, while the

integration of framework propositions into a coherent framework would satisfy the monism

demand. This ant-skeptical approach thus exhibits a deep affinity with immanent criticism and

transcendental argumentation. It satisfies the dictionary definition of ‘immanent critique’ with

which we began, and Stern even calls it the “framework strategy” of transcendental

argumentation (TAS 80ff). And, as Williams characterizes it, this approach insists that a given

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object of belief exemplifies a normative framework and that a philosopher can extrapolate it,

without thereby calling these framework propositions into question.

We can illustrate what Williams has in mind by considering the sentence you are reading:

it exemplifies the rules of English grammar, whether it accords with them or not. On the one

hand, it would be impossible to claim that the latter sentence is in English and that it does not

exemplify English grammar. On the other hand, these grammatical rules, which comprise a

linguistic framework, are heterogeneous to the sentence. Irrespective of the language we state

them in (English or French, German, Spanish, etc.), the rules remain distinct from their tokens.

We may, therefore, doubt the accuracy of some statement about English grammar, or a particular

attempt to state a grammatical rule, but it does not follow that we can doubt whether there is

something like ‘English grammar.’ In brief, English grammar is a theoretical kind that provides a

framework in which to understand its tokens. Notice also that this approach is ‘transcendental.’

A first-order claim to know depends upon a set of second-order conditions (whether they are a

priori or a posteriori is inconsequential for our present purposes), which are immanent in – i.e.

exemplified by – the original claim. Hence, insofar as this transcendental approach depends

upon a necessary and exemplary relationship between an object of experience and its

heterogeneous ground, it accords with what we have been calling ‘immanent critique’. As we will

see in a moment, however, this relationship is not symmetric: although every instance of

immanent critique is a form of transcendental argument, not everything we call a transcendental

argument is an immanent critique.

The Epis t emologi cal Demands for a Metaphys i cal Ground

Immanent critique is thus a form of transcendental argument, which responds to a skeptical

worry concerning our epistemological frameworks by insisting on an instance-kind distinction.

We can now further specify the demands that immanent critique and transcendental

argumentation seek to meet. This brings us to our second synthetic moment: the

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epistemological, justificatory character of immanent criticism qua transcendental argumentation,11

which binds it to a specific skeptical worry. As both Franks and Williams argue, transcendental

arguments respond to the Agrippan trilemma (AN 17f and UD 60-67). “When any proposition,

advanced as a claim to knowledge, is challenged,” Williams writes in order to explain the

Agrippan trilemma, “there are only three ways of responding: (1) Refuse to respond, i.e. make an

undefended assumption. (2) Repeat a claim made earlier in the argument, i.e. reason in a circle.

(3) Keep trying to think of something new to say, i.e. embark on a [sic] infinite regress” (UD 60).

The trilemma thus represents a generalized method (UD 61), which – as Franks points out –

“can arise whenever what is at stake is the nature of reasons” (AN 18). What is paramount for

our purposes is that the trilemma targets the relation between explanans and explanandum along

the three success conditions we identified above for transcendental argumentation and

immanent criticism. Rather than doubting a claim’s meaning or truth, the trilemma targets our

attempts to justify it by showing how we fail to identify relevant criteria, satisfy the heterogeneity

requirement, or integrate these criteria into a coherent scheme.12 As Franks further explains,

The problem arises from the combination of two demands. First, there is the Monistic Demand. This is the demand that every genuine grounding participate in a single systematic unity of grounds, terminating in a single absolute ground. […] Second, there is the Dualistic Demand that physical grounding and metaphysical grounding be kept rigorously separate. […] The two demands can be seen to be in apparent conflict once the following observation […] is added: physical explanations do not and indeed cannot terminate in an absolute ground.

(AN 20)

Now as I showed above, precisely these demands motivate immanent criticism. In teasing out an

exemplary relationship that allows us to semantically ascend from an object (of experience) to

the normative framework that makes it intelligible, immanent critique seeks to satisfy Franks’

two demands.

Notice also that these demands dovetail with what Williams called the “epistemologist’s

dilemma: we can either accept skepticism, or make changes in our pre-theoretical thinking about

knowledge that shrink the domain, or alter the status, of what we previously thought of as

knowledge of objective fact” (UD 22). The epistemologist’s dilemma, in other words, provides

us with another characterization of the dynamic learning process intrinsic to immanent critique.

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For insofar as the immanent critic tries to extrapolate and reflexively apply a conceptual scheme

capable of ranging over experience, she labours to situate her actions within a systematic unity of

possible justifications, she must avoid the charges of infinite regress, vicious circularity, and

dogmatism by differentiating her judgments of frame from her first-order experience. This

differentiation, moreover, accepts a general skeptical stance and modifies the status of knowledge

accordingly: in keeping with the dualistic demand, the requisite conditions for assessment must

be non-empirical (e.g. substantial and metaphysical for Leibniz, functional and normative for

Kant), otherwise they would be open to further skeptical worries (and hence why they cannot be

analytically true or causally related). Immanent criticism is therefore premised upon these two

demands, and the difference between physical and meta-physical orders (or ‘material actuality’ and

‘normative self-understanding’ is one prefers).

We can strengthen the affinity between Williams’ dilemma and Franks’ two demands by

noting that Franks’ demands actually imply a third. Over and above the need for systematic unity,

the monistic demand also invokes some conception of the Absolute. Whether we treat it as an

inaccessible thing, an ever-present medium, or as an inferentially (or epistemically) closed

framework, some conception of the Absolute is necessary in order to guarantee systematic

completeness. As we will see, in Williams’ account, this third condition is given a more modest

moniker, namely theoretical integrity. To satisfy the role we have attributed to it, this integrated

Absolute must exist in some robust sense. To the extent, then, that immanent criticism responds

to a skeptical worry concerning the justificatory relation between an instantiated performance

and normative framework, its core motivating concern is epistemological and, as we shall see

shortly, epistemologically realist at that.

The Struc ture o f Transcendental Arguments

I am going to postpone our discussion of ‘epistemological realism’ until the mechanics of

immanent criticism are completely clear. So, for the sake of clarity, let me begin to consolidate: I

have argued that immanent criticism takes its objects of interest to exemplify a theoretical kind (a

16

stable cluster of concepts, principles, normative statuses, etc.), which makes a reflexive form of

‘fitness’ assessment possible by uncovering a necessary relationship between this integrated kind

and the performances that purport to instantiate it. This strategy, I showed, involves both a

sense of semantic holism and reflective detachment, which specify the success conditions for

interpretation. On the basis of this characterization, I then argued in the last two sections that

immanent critique is a species of transcendental argument committed to epistemological realism

insofar as it relies on the cross-contextual stability of an object’s content (or the supervening

framework).

Now for a caveat, or a specific difference: not every transcendental argument is an

instance of immanent critique. Marking this difference will help us better appreciate what is

involved in immanent critique. We owe this distinct sense of the term ‘transcendental argument’

to Barry Stroud, who offers an outline and mounts a compelling critique of this strategy in his

1968 paper, “Transcendental Arguments.”13 Referring to Kant’s deduction of the categories,

Stroud remarks that the appeal of transcendental arguments for contemporary thinkers is their

promise to defeat skeptical worries concerning the legitimacy of our conceptual activities. This

strategy, he contends, attempts to settle the legitimacy of a given claim by establishing its

necessity for some other set of experiences, activities, or conceptual abilities, which we take to be

indispensable, and hence immune to skeptical worries.

So formulated, Stroud’s conception implicitly relies upon the two demands outlined

above, since it accepts a specific sense of dualism while insisting upon a uniform system of

grounds. The problem, according to Stroud, is that transcendental arguments cannot in fact

disabuse us of our scepticism concerning claims to know something about the world itself,14

since the kinds of ‘necessary connections’ this strategy can legitimately establish remain locked

up within our first-person perspectives. Summarizing Stroud’s criticism, Franks states, “It can be

regarded as an accusation that transcendental arguments are inappropriately first-personal and

hubristic. For they establish at most that we cannot help but think in a certain way, not that what

17

we must think is true. To think that reality must meet the necessities of our thinking is hubristic”

(AN 246). Importantly, Stroud’s critique pivots on the logic of exemplification to dialectically

oppose the monistic and dualistic demands: if we accept the demands, idealism appears to be the

only option, but this consequence contradicts our empirical practices, thus engendering

skepticism; if, on the other hand, we reject idealism, our critical practices cannot escape from the

Agrippan trilemma – i.e. we can no longer satisfy the conditions of success we have set for

ourselves. Stroud illustrates his point by offering an example of a plausible transcendental

argument: the relationship between a true sentence S and the language in which it is uttered. Like

my earlier example involving English grammar, the truth of S presupposes the existence of some

language, since one cannot have a true sentence without a language to say it in. Analogously, one

cannot truly assert that there is no language, since the very assertion hinges on a linguistic

framework (this is the basic notion of performative contradiction). Hence, there exists some

necessary relationship between a specifically human experience and the grounds that make such

an experience possible. And in an analogous way to our tile-sample, a sentence exemplifies a set

of properties that define a specific kind, which appears to be logically or explanatorily prior to

the individual utterance. Some necessary relationship thus seems to obtain between uttering a

true sentence and the conditions that make it possible (the existence of a language, the

corresponding state of affairs). Now, according to Stroud, a transcendental argument consists in

(1) uncovering this necessity, and (2) showing how it guarantees the existence of something

previously held open to doubt. So understood, transcendental arguments are exemplary because

they insist upon a non-causal and non-contextual relationship between a token and its type,

while operating according to a familiar two-step argument structure. It would be a category error,

after all, to claim that an utterance is either a cause or an effect of a language (rather than an

effect of a speaker, or the cause of a belief), while the claim that the relationship between

utterance and language is contextual is straightforwardly incoherent, for it would entail that

under some special set of circumstances one can utter a true statement without a language.

18

Stroud’s argument has generated a veritable sub-discipline in epistemology. My sense,

however, is that his account involves a subtle but decisive sophism: his conception of

transcendental argument makes ‘truth,’ rather than ‘intelligibility’ or ‘possibility,’ the paradigmatic

condition or ground.15 This involves treating transcendental argumentation as if it were a mathematically

constructive proof (where one constructs a mathematical object in order to demonstrate that it has

certain properties), rather than a justificatory strategy (where one shows that a claim – irrespective of

truth-value – hinges on certain parameters that cannot be coherently called into question).

Stroud’s account is nevertheless instructive, since it gives us a way of understanding the dualistic

and monistic demands (which correspond to steps [1] and [2] above) in terms of

‘indispensability’ and ‘invulnerability’ (UHK 158), where the latter is a consequence of the former

(UHK 11 and 216f). What distinguishes transcendental arguments from deductively valid ones is

that the manner in which they move from the indispensability of a token’s feature for our

activities to the invulnerability of a kind’s underlying structure is not a logical consequence, but a

pragmatic precondition for a performance. Indispensability thus involves a peculiar form of

necessity that cannot be captured in purely causal or conceptual terms. For instance, no matter

how hard we try to ground an argument for indispensability in a causal explanation, we will

never satisfy the demand for completeness or heterogeneity, and hence never satisfactorily

establish that something was in fact indispensable. The need for a non-causal ground is therefore

a consequence of immanent criticism’s affirmation of the trilemma and its ineluctably first-

person perspective. This further implies that indispensability cannot be an analytic relation either.

For such an appeal fails to establish any necessary connection between a feature of experience

and a condition of intelligibility: the idea of semantic consequence actually presupposes an

antecedent reference-fixing act. If one were to treat semantic relationships as sufficient for

establishing a necessary connection, one would produce nothing more than a short argument to

idealism.16 And this latter kind of argument utterly fails to identify a heterogeneous ground and

therefore entails infelicitous circularity (e.g. the dictionary problem). ‘Indispensability’ must

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therefore appeal to a metaphysical necessity that remains accessible to a first-person perspective. To

be successful, then, transcendental arguments must demonstrate that a metaphysically necessary

relation binds our performances and experiences together.

So far, Stroud’s account travels along roughly the same path as our own reconstruction

of immanent criticism. His conception of indispensability, for instance, seems to be coextensive

with the necessary relation between concrete object and normative framework. There thus seems

to be some overlap between what we have been calling ‘immanent criticism’ and his

‘transcendental argument.’ Nevertheless, there is a crucial difference. Although Stroud correctly

identifies the mechanics of transcendental arguments as moving from indispensability to

invulnerability (a move that we can see already in Kant and Hegel), he insists that this movement

ought to involve a robust notion of truth. For Stroud, a transcendental argument “distinguishes

between the conditions necessary for a paradigmatic or warranted (and therefore meaningful) use

of an expression or statement and the conditions under which it is true” (UHK 24). Having

defined his notion of heterogeneity in this way, he feels licensed to claim that a statement’s truth

is determined by the world itself.

This is where we part company with Stroud. For, in insisting upon ‘truth,’ he decisively

reformulates the dualistic and monistic demands. Instead of our instance-theoretical kind

conception, Stroud conceives the dualistic demand in terms of the difference between warranted

assertability and truth. He then equates the monistic demand with what makes a given belief true

(namely the world itself). In reformulating the distinction between indispensability and

invulnerability in this way, however, Stroud makes transcendental arguments stronger than they need

to be. Hulking transcendental arguments out in this way has the following consequence, which

Stroud takes to be philosophically disastrous: transcendental arguments are either uninformative

or trivial. According to Stroud, this argument strategy threatens to be uninformative because it

tells us nothing about the world, and remains bound up with what some individual must believe.

To avoid triviality, one needs to supplement the original argument with one demonstrating the

20

truth of the claim. But then, so Stroud claims, the supplement does all the work and the original

transcendental argument is redundant.

Though compelling, Stroud’s criticism does not have much to do with transcendental

arguments as such. For Stroud’s attack applies to every argument-form outside of mathematics. A

deductively valid argument, after all, only establishes that the conclusion follows from the

premises, not that the premises or conclusion is true. It too is in need of supplementation. But

that does not lead us to conclude that deductively valid arguments are uninformative as such

(even if we can give examples of uninformative ones). Nor does it lead us to believe that the

supplemental arguments establishing the truth of the premises or conclusion are doing all the

work. It is only when we allow ourselves to be overly impressed by the formal techniques of the

mathematical proof (whereby we effectively construct a mathematical object and derive

conclusions about its properties) that Stroud’s claim feels compelling.

More germane to our concerns, however, is the following point: Stroud’s attack fails to

adequately respond to the monistic and dualistic demands. His version of ‘transcendental

argument’ differs from immanent criticism in that the latter is not concerned with defending a

single claim from skeptical worries. And, in any case, one is not a skeptic because one remains

unconvinced by a particular claim. This was the upshot of the Agrippan trilemma for both Franks

and Williams. As they show, skepticism involves doubting the possibility of knowledge for an

entire field, because an appropriate ground cannot in principle be produced. We identified this

feature in our characterization of immanent criticism’s insistence upon totality, detachment, and

reflexive assessment. Stroud’s contention is fundamentally different. In fact, it seems to be based

on a rather subtle bait and switch. Consider again his argument about the utterance S. As we

remember, S is a true sentence that depends on a language to utter it in. Stroud’s contention,

however, is that the truth of S cannot be determined by the conditions that make it meaningful

(i.e. the conditions governing assertability). Yet, the problem is that his very example slides

between the conditions that make uttering S possible, and S being true. Indeed, Stroud’s example

21

works just as well when S is false. That alone should prompt us to reject Stroud’s account. For

only the possibility of uttering S involves a genuine skepticism – to wit one concerning grounds.

This equivocation explains why most discussions about transcendental argumentation

remain orthogonal to investigations into the notion of immanent criticism. Just like Kant or

Hegel, the immanent critic is concerned with the condition of intelligibility for experience (as

such), and not the immediate context of assertion let alone the truth or falsity of a given claim.

As Kant’s discussion of objective validity and truth in the Second Analogy of Experience shows,

to evaluate the truth of a judgment has as its condition the a priori structure of our cognitive

performances. And one cannot inquire into truth unless one has already determined

meaningfulness. The immanent critic, in other words, responds to skeptical worries by

developing a theory of grounds – e.g. conditions of possibility or intelligibility – that escapes the

Agrippan trilemma. Returning to Stroud’s own example, it is obvious that a speech act can be

meaningful independently of its truth or warranted assertability, and immanent critique seeks to

identify the grounds of meaning. To put it differently, an acorn still exemplifies the oak tree even

if it never grows into one. Stroud’s criticism fails to register this difference. He also

surreptitiously trades a global skepticism about justification (groundedness) for a healthy

reticence to accept a claim as true.

Concepts o f Obje c t s Stroud’s characterization and critique of the wider notion of transcendental argumentation is

nevertheless instructive. Although his criticisms apply only to reasoning that takes truth to be

ontologically or explanatorily prior to meaning, they allow us to better specify what we mean by

‘immanence’ and refine our sense of the metaphysical grounds and grounding relations it

involves. For in showing that metaphysics fulfills a justificatory function within a broader economy

of reasons, he makes clear why metaphysics is a consequence of the epistemologist’s dilemma. As

we saw earlier, immanent critique’s success-conditions require an ontological ground and a

necessary exemplary relation in order to avoid regress, dogmatism, and circularity. This entails

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that metaphysics remains central to our epistemological projects, because ontological commitments

promise to offer invulnerable grounds for our indispensable practices.

This reformulation allows us to refine the notion of immanence itself. For

‘invulnerability’ and ‘indispensability’ clarify how exemplification works, while introducing a

plausible necessary relation between instance and kind. Indeed, when we originally introduced

‘exemplification’ to characterize ‘immanence,’ we left the nature of this referential relation utterly

undetermined. It remained entirely unclear how one would establish property possession and necessary

reference to a conceptual scheme. Stroud’s elaboration of ‘indispensability’ and ‘invulnerability’ fills this

lacuna, since it provides us with the means for establishing possession by identifying the definitive

features of a given experience without which it simply would not be the specific experience that it is.

As Aristotle would have said, individuation implies substance, that is, a grounding kind.

Thus, when we say that an object possesses properties that exemplify a conceptual

scheme, we mean at least two things by it. First, we mean that these properties are indispensable

for some project or practice we are engaged in. Second, we mean that these practices imply the

invulnerability of their normative framework precisely because indispensability is intelligible only

in virtue of a theoretical kind. Like the relationship between an English sentence and English

grammar, the intelligibility of a token entails a type, while the indispensability of the individual

utterance for a field of experience is made possible by its type. So understood, however, the

necessary relationship obtaining between indispensable property and invulnerable kind is practical

and a posteriori in nature.17 This follows from the fact that indispensability is bound up with a

contingent, first-person perspective, and hence it is always relative to a form of life, a shape of

consciousness, or a historical a priori. The very idea of immanence, then, is inherently bound up

with the contingent contours of Reason or rationality itself.

Epist emologi cal Real i sm

We now have a full account of immanent criticism. We have seen that immanent critics seek to

explicate the normative conditions (or statuses) that make an activity or object intelligible by

23

tracing the indispensable features of a practical situation back to a systematically unified and

heterogeneous ground. This approach in turn commits them to epistemological realism and a

necessary, though a posteriori relation that can generalize once instituted. ‘Exemplification’ then

provided us with the model for this relation.

This brings us to our final horizonal fusion, since these commitments also characterize

‘epistemological realism.’ Despite employing the word ‘epistemological,’ this notion rather

designates a metaphysical need to provide a justificatory ground for a given region of experience

by positing an integrated, underlying, and invariant structure to which individual experiences or

claims to know can, at their limit, be reduced. In short, epistemological realism is tantamount to

a ‘neutral’ reformulation of the older notions of substance or essence. As Williams puts it, “if human

knowledge is to constitute a genuine kind of thing – and the same goes for knowledge of the

external world, knowledge of other minds, and so on – there must be underlying epistemological

structures or principles, [and] the traditional epistemologist is committed to epistemological realism”

(UD 108). Insofar as the immanent critic maintains that objects, historical epochs, etc., exemplify

conceptual frameworks, or that these objects are instances of a theoretical kind or a normative

framework, she is committed to the subsistence of these frameworks or kinds. Even though she

may ultimately side with Kant and insist upon their ideality, she is nonetheless committed to the

idea that there is an underlying, unified structure to knowledge (a transcendental object = X that

is always indexed to a transcendental subject), which can be specified and articulated, and which

grounds our claims to know. “To see human knowledge as an object of theory,” Williams

explains,

we must attribute to it some kind of systematic basis. This may involve inference from some class of fundamental evidence-conferring beliefs, as traditional foundationalists maintain; or it may involve governance by certain ‘global’ criteria of explanatory integration, as coherence theorists think. But something must regulate our knowledge of the world: something that we can identify and examine independently of any such knowledge.

(UD 105-6)

Williams’ contention resonates with the model of immanent critique we have been developing.

For traditional epistemology relies on precisely the same kind of reflective detachment we

24

attributed to immanent criticism: reflecting on a region of experience prompts us to consider

that region’s systematic completeness. Like the traditional epistemologist, the immanent critic is

not specifically interested in a given object or claim but in the theoretical frameworks

underwriting it or exemplified by it. The critic and the epistemologist aim to assess a form of life

by identifying its non-epistemic, non-empirical grounds (the bedrock that turns one’s spade, as

Wittgenstein says), and thereby inoculate us against skepticism. Hence, irrespective of her

foundationalist or coherentist (Kantian or Hegelian) sympathies, the immanent critic remains

committed to the existence of a (normative) framework that provides us with the necessary, albeit

a posteriori, basis for the intelligibility of specific regions of knowledge or action.

The interactions of these commitments to a conceptual scheme’s existence and its a

posteriori institution are perhaps clearest in Hegel’s discussion of the Begriff. Indeed, as Kenneth

Westphal has argued,18 Hegel’s Notion (and its cognates, the shapes of consciousness or shapes

of the world, indeed, Spirit itself) comprises two basic principles. “One of these principles,”

Westphal writes, “specifies the kind or mode of empirical knowledge of which a form of

consciousness presumes itself capable. The other principle specifies the general structure of the

kind of object that form of consciousness presumes to find in the world” (HEP 92). So

understood, Hegel’s philosophical method coincides with what we have been calling

transcendental argumentation, since it follows the same basic pattern of analysis: beginning from

a given feature’s indispensability, Hegel extrapolates an invulnerable framework, i.e. a shape of

consciousness, and then reflexively assesses it; if the reflexive assessment does not identify a

contradiction among these two principles, so Hegel contends, the Notion (or Idea) is realized as

absolute. This method embodies a form of epistemological realism. For “[t]he epistemological

realist,” Williams explains, “thinks of knowledge in very much the way the scientific realist thinks

of heat: beneath the surface diversity there is a structural unity” (UD 108). Westphal’s analysis

identifies precisely this kind of commitment. Echoing our discussion of the Agrippan trilemma

and Franks’ two demands, Westphal notes that an “epistemic principle implies certain

25

constraints on what the object of knowledge could be, and so the adoption of an epistemic

principle brings with it a concomitant ontological principle” (HEP 93). The relationship between

these principles defines the Notion, “which is first and foremost an ontological notion” (ibid.).

Theore t i cal In t egrit y and the Power o f Immanent Cri t ique Epistemological realism gives us the precise means to satisfy Franks’ two demands. It allows us

to differentiate experience from its systematically unified grounding conditions by taking the

latter to be constitutive of knowledge and assessment. This form of realism grounds our why-

questions concerning our epistemic relationship to the world in a distinct stratum by

distinguishing between phenomenal appearances and ‘underlying structure,’ while developing a

necessary, exemplary relation between an observational instance (say, the sensation of heat) and

the structural unity of its type (mean molecular kinetic energy). Moreover, it makes possible a

reflexive form of assessment in which the contingency of the initial observation instance gives

way to the necessary structural unity of the underlying kind. New and finer grained observations

or performances allow us to refine the theoretical kind, and this kind in turn allows us to

adjudicate among performances that purport to draw their intelligibility from it. Hence,

irrespective of some skeptical worry about the possibility of qualia inversion, distinct sensory

modalities, or brains in vats, the ‘original’ argument for the indispensability of ‘heat’ would still

have allowed us to extrapolate its unique underlying structure as mean molecular kinetic energy,

and thereby correct false attributions. As Kripke has conclusively shown, despite the utter

contingency involved in fixing its reference, ‘heat’ nevertheless necessarily means molecular

kinetic energy. Despite its a posteriori status and its limitation to the first-person perspective,

indispensability still implies invulnerable theoretical kinds that make reflexive assessment and

revision – in a word, progress – possible.

Williams makes precisely this point. Although he does not explicitly connect his

argument to the problems of immanent criticism, he obliquely demonstrates why an immanent

critic must affirm epistemological realism. Weaker commitments, he shows, simply fail to satisfy

26

the traditional success conditions we attributed to the immanent critic qua traditional

epistemologist. This failure motivates the Agrippan, since in the absence of an ontological

ground, the skeptic’s worries are simply shifted from the problematic nature of the initial claim

to the contingency of its purported indispensability. And this yields a regress. As Williams

remarks, “the fact remains that distinctions can be teachable and projectible while failing to

correspond to any theoretically coherent division of objects. When a classification rests on an

implied background theory, there is no immediate inference from the existence of an easily

mastered kind-term to the theoretical integrity of its associated kind” (UD 108). For that we

need an ontological ground.

To summarize and consolidate: immanent critique commits us to epistemological

realism, because this form of realism offers us an ontological ground that satisfies the demands of

traditional epistemology. Furthermore this gives us the basic material for a theory of progress or

learning, since it allows us to narrate the move from the contingent features of our first-person

identification of an indispensable feature to the unique and necessary structure of a theoretical

kind, as a convergence of our beliefs about the world with the way the world ‘really is.’ This

characterization, furthermore, allows us to move well beyond Stroud’s account. Instead of a

Stroudian insistence on truth, the fulcrum of our account of transcendental argumentation is

theoretical integrity.

Traditional epistemology and immanent critique thus hinge on a metaphysical

commitment to theoretically integrated kinds. For traditional epistemology, as Williams

reconstructs it, “rests on two assumptions. The first is that there is something, our knowledge of

the world, to examine […]. The second is that examining our knowledge of the world, by

charting its relation to ‘experience,’ is tantamount to assessing it” (UD 101). These suppositions

correspond to the basic immanent critical model we have been developing: the priority of

experience conforms to the first-person perspective to which the immanent critic is committed,

while the ‘existence’ criterion offers us a way of parsing the concept of invulnerability, which

27

satisfies the duality demand. Williams further shows how these two assumptions inform our

epistemological practices. Making reference to Bacon’s natural history of heat, Williams writes,

Bacon gives a long list of examples of heating. It includes examples of heating by radiation, friction, exothermic reactions and by ‘hot’ spices that ‘burn’ the tongue. Everything he mentions is ordinarily said to involve ‘heat,’ so we cannot deny that his list reflects ordinary usage. But what we have here is a clear case in which a nominal kind, comprising all the things commonly called ‘hot,’ has no automatic right to be considered a natural kind. It is no objection to the kinetic theory [of heat] that it doesn’t cover the tremendous ‘heat’ produced in my mouth by a chicken vindaloo, never mind the heat often generated by philosophical arguments.

(UD 106-107)

Epistemological realism allows us to distinguish between nominal and natural kinds, while

providing us with the means to refine or revise a nominal kind so as to identify the actual

structural unities underwriting our various experiences of heat. The promise of this explanatory

strategy and the power of immanent criticism in general stem from our ability to identify,

construct, and assess the theoretical integrity of a given conceptual scheme from ‘within’ a given

experiential framework. “If we are to makes sense of the project of explaining how anything we

believe about the world amounts to knowledge,” Williams writes, “we need a way of reducing

our beliefs to order. We have to bring them under principles or show them as resting on

commitments that we can survey” (UD 103).

From this perspective, consider again the dictionary definition of immanent critique with

which we began. Whether we formulate our commitment to a theoretical kind in terms of an

object’s or epoch’s own (semantic) criteria, or through the structural (syntactic) notions of

internal consistency and stringency, we are still committing ourselves to this kind’s emphatic

existence. The kind grounds our investigations, circumvents the Agrippan trilemma, and satisfies

the monistic and dualistic demands. In all of these cases, we move from some indispensable

feature of our fist-person experience to the invulnerability of a theoretical kind, which makes

possible a reflexive form of assessment. And all of this hinges on the notion of theoretical integrity.

Depending on which works they privilege (the Phenomenology of Spirit or Hegel’s later

works), Hegelians will probably prefer the labels Begriff or Idee to Williams’ ‘theoretical integrity,’

but the terminological preference belies their interchangeability. Whichever expression we use,

28

the insight remains the same, namely that we can codify the indefinite number of particular

beliefs we might hold by specifying the basic principles – or constraints – which purport to make

the world intelligible. Although the sum total of our beliefs may not amount to a manifest image

of the world, i.e. may not be topically integrated, this does not preclude the possibility of

epistemological or theoretical integration, which subjects every claim to know to the same

epistemological constraints. These constraints, say a scientific image or absolute ground,

constitute the requisite theoretical kind, and hence systematically delineate the conceptual

scheme that purports to ground individual claims to know. “Only by tracing our beliefs about

the world to a common ‘source,’ which is to say a common evidential ground,” Williams

contends, “can we make ‘beliefs about the world’ the name of a coherent kind” (UD 104). And

this is precisely what the immanent critic takes herself to be in the business of doing.

Williams defines ‘theoretical integrity’ in terms of the autonomy and fundamentality of a

conceptual scheme or theoretical kind. These notions simply translate Franks’ two demands

discussed earlier. For in precisely the same way as the natural kind ‘heat’ is independent of our

sensation of it, a theoretical kind must be independent of any given instance. Autonomy satisfies

the demand for duality between appearance and ground. Fundamentality, in turn, reformulates

the monistic demand, i.e. the need for a unique kind capable of grounding every other instance.

Again, as the example of Bacon suggests, the fundamentality of a kind is assured by its role in

conceptual change and progress. Unlike purely nominal kinds like phlogiston, heat continues to

ground our practices. Hence the epistemologist seeks to explain and assess our knowledge of the

world in precisely the same way as the immanent critic. Both develop reflexive accounts of our

knowledge practices and seek to extrapolate the conceptual scheme that historically situated

entities exemplify. Both seek to describe, assess and refine our self-knowledge. Indeed, were our

extrapolated frameworks to fail either the criterion of autonomy or fundamentality, they would

be trivial, and fail to ground the phenomena to which they are related. As a systematic totality,

which integrates all of our epistemic constraints into one (consistent) set of epistemological

29

claims concerning our ability to know, the presumed theoretical integrity of our conceptual scheme

(or theoretical kind) makes transcendental argumentation, reflexive assessment, and hence

concepts like ‘progress’ and ‘convergence’ possible.

The Di lemma of Immanent Cri t ique

We can now explain the power and seductiveness of epistemological realism – and, by

implication, of immanent critique – by saying that it captures a deep Sellarsian point about the

relationship between ‘seems’-talk and ‘is’-talk. That is, it makes the move from the first-person

singular to the first-person plural possible, by appealing to the way our beliefs purport to track

reality. Although only history will tell whether an initial experience traces out the invariant

structural unity of a thing in the world or merely introduces a coarse-grained nominal kind, an

epistemological realist can be certain that there is nevertheless some essential structure

underwriting our experience and determining the character and content of our epistemic

relationship to the world. We may err, but we are nonetheless guaranteed that knowledge is

possible.

Both the immanent critic and the traditional epistemologist, though, need epistemological

realism. This metaphysical need, moreover, runs counter to the intentions of most immanent

critics and wreaks havoc with ‘post-metaphysical’ philosophical programs, which take immanent

critique to be their methodological core. ‘Normative’ readings of Hegel, for instance, are

simultaneously committed to this interpretative strategy and a deflationary account of Geist (and

its cognates). They take Geist to be the explanans of our individual actions. But these deflationary

readings cannot satisfy the success conditions of their interpretative method. For, Geist must

have specific, context-transcending features that satisfy the heterogeineity requirement. It must

have the metaphysical weight of the ‘is’ needed to ground the normative character of an ‘ought.’

This appears to pose a dilemma for ‘post-metaphysical’ programs, since the coherence of

exemplification or immanent critique is directly bound up with what post-metaphysical

30

philosophers hope to exclude: metaphysics. Without an invulnerable ground, reflexive assessment

leads to infinite regress, dogmatism, or circularity. On the other hand, if we accept

epistemological realism, immanent critique turns out to be self-defeating, because the success of

our practices hinges on the metaphysical grounds and grounding relations provided by

epistemological realism. But this motivates rather than circumvents skepticism, since it is precisely

the relations between instance and kind that the Agrippan constantly calls into question.

Furthermore, immanent critique’s implicit ontology is incompatible with its proponents’ interest

in the specificity and historical situation of cultural objects and practices. The very idea of a

context-invariant kind and an exemplary relation connecting instance and kind together, which purports to

assure that the conditions extrapolated are truly implicit in the object, implies that we are less

interested in the instance than in the kind it exemplifies (and this, I take it, is the gist of Adorno’s

indictment of ‘identity thinking’). Hence the charges of dogmatism and partiality become

unavoidable. Immanent critique thus fails to satisfy its principal commitment to evaluate an

instance according to its ‘proper criteria,’ because the criteria an immanent critic identifies are

autonomous and fundamentally distinct from the object. Immanent critique thus proves to have

no feel for the objects it investigates – and that it is just as dogmatic as the forms of criticism it

seeks to circumvent.

We seem thus to be caught in the horns of a dilemma: on the one hand, saying ‘no’ to

metaphysics means rejecting immanent critique and traditional epistemology, leaving post-

metaphysical programs without method or object. On the other, saying ‘yes’ to immanent

criticism leads to methodological commitments that actually run counter to our expressed

interests. Only on pain of contradiction can we do both; at the same time, neither option seems

particularly comforting. Rejecting immanent critique appears to vitiate a number of dominant

philosophical programs that are fundamentally connected to it, while embracing it generates little

more than a cognitive dissonance that licenses and intensifies the skeptical worries it is supposed

to quell.

31

Notes 1 Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie Bd. 4, ed. Joachim Ritter et al. (Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 1971–2007), p. 1292. My

translation. 2 See, for instance, Raymond Geuss, The Idea of Critical Theory: Habermas & the Frankfurt School (Cambridge:

Cambridge UP, 1981); Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, Utopia: A Study in the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia UP, 1986); Nancy Fraser & Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?: A Political-Philosophical Exchange (New York: Verso Press, 2003); Axel Honneth, “Reconstructive Social Criticism with a Genealogical Proviso: On the Idea of ‘Critique’ in the Frankfurt School,” in Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia UP, 2009), pp. 19-42; Robin Celikates, Gesellschaftskritik als soziale Praxis. Gesellschaftliche Selbstverständigung

und kritische Theorie (Frankfurt aM: Campus Verlag, 2009), pp. 159-248. For an overview of the literature on the subject and an introduction to the problem space, see Rahel Jaeggi and Tilo Wesche (eds.), Was ist Kritik? (Frankfurt aM: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2009). 3 See Rahel Jaeggi, “Was ist Ideologiekritik?” in Was ist Kritik?, pp. 266-295 (cited hereinafter as WI), and Tilo

Wesche, “Reflexion, Therapie, Darstellung: Formen der Kritik,” in Was ist Kritik?, pp. 193-220 (cited hereinafter as RTD). All translations are mine.

4 The Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1976), p. 53ff. Cited

hereinafter as LA.

5 To be sure, this last remark leaves out the subtleties of Goodman’s account. For not only does he distinguish

between ‘description’ and ‘representation,’ but he also delimits these two notions from exemplification and expression. Attending to these nuances is not necessary for our purposes, but perhaps a short clarification is in order. As noted above, exemplification moves from a particular’s properties to a label or predicate, whereas descriptions and representations proceed from predicate to particular. Representations and descriptions denote. The difference between them, Goodman contends, is a function of the overall articulateness of the syntactic systems to which they belong; descriptions involve a highly articulate differential system whereas representations do not (LA 225-226). What is perhaps more pressing for us to note is the difference between exemplification and expression. On Goodman’s account, expression is an indirect, metaphorical form of exemplification. “In summary,” Goodman writes, “if a expresses b then: (1) a possesses or is denoted by b; (2) this possession or denotation is metaphorical [and acquired]; and (3) a refers to b” (LA 95). Notice that ‘exemplification’ is analogous to Robert Brandom’s ‘expression.’ See Robert B. Brandom, Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003), pp. 7f and 52-61. 6 Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, Utopia, op. cit. Cited hereinafter as CNU.

7 See Michael Williams, Unnatural Doubts: Epistemological Realism and the Basis of Scepticism (Oxford: Blackwell UP,

1991). Cited hereinafter as UD.

8 In All or Nothing: Systematicity, Skepticism, and Transcendental Arguments in German Idealism (Cambridge: Harvard UP,

2005; cited hereinafter as AN), Paul Franks identifies four kinds of interpretation of the thing in itself: (i) the two methods interpretation, (ii) the two aspects interpretation, (iii) the two existents interpretation, and finally (iv) the two essences interpretation (39f). If we allow ourselves to step outside of Kant-commentary, we can add a fifth, Neo-Kantian form of interpretation: the two tasks interpretation, which we find in Hermann Cohen and Heidegger. It focuses on the distinct totalities that are available to reason and to the understanding. According to this reading, the thing in itself can be understood as either a telos, or an arché, i.e. as either the systematic coherence of all knowledge towards which reason strives, or as the absolute plenum from which all our activities emanate. The two tasks interpretation thus differs from the previous four interpretations that Franks outlines in that it ceases to treat the Ding an sich as a discrete thing standing against a knower. Proponents of this view treat the Ding an sich as the singular, pragmatically instituted medium of our rational activities. Hermann Cohen’s doctrine of the infinite task explicitly interprets Kant’s noumenon in this manner, and Heidegger’s question concerning the meaning of Being, which opens Being and Time, rehearses the same line of argument in favour of treating the thing in itself as a plenum. 9 This is the overarching thesis of All or Nothing.

32

10

Robert Stern, Transcendental Arguments and Scepticism: Answering the Question of Justification (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

2000), p. 10. Cited hereinafter as TAS.

11

On this point, see also RTD, 199f, and Rainer Forst, “Der Grund der Kritik. Zum Begriffe der Menschwürde in

sozialen Rechtfertigungsordnungen,” in Was ist Kritik?, pp. 150-164. 12 I am tempted to say that the three horns of the trilemma correspond to the three kinds of failure internal to

specific approaches to immanent criticism, since the failure to identify the appropriate criteria is an epistemic error, and the failure to integrate all features of a worldview into a systematic whole yields some form of simplification. The odd notion out remains compulsion or obsession, which would be aligned here with the idea that failing to satisfy the heterogeneity requirement leads to a form of repetition (compulsion). This alignment of the relevant notions of failure (and their concomitant critical practices) with the horns of the Agrippan trilemma would explain Wesche’s insistence that “the three forms of critique do not mutually exclude one another, but are actually complementary. Because each one covers a specific portion of the spectrum of possible illusions, their multifaceted development provides us with a full [vollständig] concept of critique” (RTD 205). I will leave this systematic concern as an open question here so as to avoid falling victim to my own compulsions to overly integrate. 13 Barry Stroud, “Transcendental Arguments,” The Journal of Philosophy 65.9 (1968): 241-56. Reprinted in Barry

Stroud, Understanding Human Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), pp. 9-25; cited hereinafter as UHK. All references to Stroud’s paper will be to the latter book.

14 Today, Stroud’s considered position seems to be that if one accepts the structure of transcendental argument as

compelling, one must embrace transcendental Idealism (UHK 155-76 and 210-13), or a deflationary version of the linguistic turn (UHK 177-202). Even then, my sense is that Stroud’s version of transcendental argumentation can only produce a ‘short argument to idealism’ (see note 17). 15 On this point, see for instance TAS, pp. 10-11 et passim.

16

See Karl Ameriks, Kant and the Fate of Autonomy: Problems in the Appropriation of the Critical Philosophy (Cambridge:

Cambridge UP, 2000), esp. pp. 163-86. Short arguments originate as a meta-theoretical response to a skeptical worry concerning the legitimacy of a specific form of epistemological limitation. That is, they emerge from the need to ecumenically establish the truth of some claim independently of a set of disputed background commitments. To this extent, short arguments are not constructive; they do not set out to elaborate and defend a new theoretical position, but to justify or lend further credence to an already instituted thesis. As such, short arguments are derivative, stipulative, and finally trivial. Moreover, depending on the precise formulations involved in the stipulative definitions, short arguments may also be viciously circular. “The key idea of what I mean by a ‘short argument’,” Ameriks writes, “is, very roughly, that reflection on the mere notion of representation, or on such very general features as passivity or activity involved in representation, is what is meant to show that knowledge is restricted from any determination of things in themselves” (163). According to Ameriks’ reconstruction, the short argument arises in response to a perceived failure in Kant’s work to show that the empirical realm a priori exhausts all that we can know theoretically. That is, the origins of the short argument are inextricably bound up with arguments concerning the nature of totality as delimited by the things in themselves, which Kant’s original readers believed was essential for demonstrating that the First Critique exhausted the limits of possible knowledge. The necessity attaching to the ‘thing in itself,’ they seem to have thought, guarantees the exhaustiveness of Kant’s theoretical framework. Like the transcendental arguments we have been considering, what is at issue is the source of this necessity. However, instead of a progressive argument to establish that a given feature of our subjective experience is indispensable, short arguments proceed analytically. What is problematic about them, however, is that they are completely trivial – they simply define a skeptical worry out of existence (130), without justifying the definitions they use. 17 Crispin Wright makes the same point in his “Facts and Certainty” T.R. Baldwin (ed.), Studies in the Philosophy of

Logic and Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004), pp. 51-94. 18 Kenneth R. Westphal, Hegel’s Epistemological Realism (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989). Cited

hereinafter as HEP.