I. The problem is when “non-arbitrary” aesthetic and ethical judgments become numerical since these judgments are pragmatic in nature. Rubrics are helpful because they allow instructors and students to make explicit what *they* mean by good writing. But to use a rubric to arrive at a grade is the hidden positivism in comp pragmatism.

II. The judge analogy is helpful with one obvious qualification: grading a paper does not set a precedent that future instructors are in some sense bound to (i.e., constrained by, exercise authority over), nor does a graded paper represent the present instructor’s obligation to a past instructor’s graded paper. That is to say, there is no specific example that constitutes normative status for past, present, and future instructors in the way that a judge’s decision does. Now in terms of quantification, even in the best case scenario, where the number, too, is seen as a language-game, i.e., pragmatically instituted by instructor(s), one can still suggest that the grade is an act of bad faith since the game contradicts itself: the number is used non-numerically!

III. A joke provides a good example for further clarification: Following Martin Pulido, a joke’s funniness isn’t in the joke itself but in the response to the joke. The response (laughter) is like an aesthetic or ethical claim, a kind of nonsense (no pun intended) that makes manifest the joke’s value; or, to sound more Wittgensteinian, a joke’s “funniness cannot be said only shown.” As Pulido writes, “The nonsense of value statements can never be used to justify a positivist claim that we should then turn to science’s subject matter, for then this ‘should’ is itself nonsensical as a value statement.” The “nonsense” that is aesthetic and ethical claims (e.g., “This is an excellent essay”) should not be measured in absolute terms, to which numerical assessment relegates [sic] nonsense. A grade tries to say what can only be shown.

“Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction.”
 
—Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics

The Global Contract. I’m researching a monograph considers the implications of Wittgenstein’s understanding of meaning for contemporary pragmatist philosophy of language and materialist cultural theory. Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Brandom suggest a pragmatism that might clarify the sociality of meaning in the large sense and more specifically reveal how risk becomes ethical and rational for late capitalism, i.e., the normative dimension to the inferential reciprocity underwriting financial logic (e.g., credit/debt, assessment, accountability, and domestic and international preemptive strategies), what could be seen as our Global Contract. The book aims to answer two important, overlapping questions: How does the inferential and material reciprocity in risk management make risk ethical and rational for capital? How does the financialization of daily life (Martin) shape the ostensible social contract for laboring bodies transnationally?