Genealogy, according to Robert Brandom, “seeks to dispel the illusion of reason” that was the Enlightenment’s answer to the obedience model of authority. As Brandom puts it, this was 19th-century naturalism’s “revenge” on 18th-century rationalism (Brandom “Reason” 4). Genealogy depends on counterfactual logic that unmasks reasons as causes or products of contingencies (e.g., geographical, biographical) “that are not evidence for the truth of what is believed” (4). Had these contingencies been otherwise, then so, too, the reasons, e.g., “If Mary had caught the train to Manchester on time, Mary would have come to believe P instead of Q.” The genealogy project presents a problem for epistemology: the genealogist potentially ignores his own blind faith in reason, that is, in the very capacity to connect contingencies in objective and final terms beyond the genealogist’s situatedness.   

Brandom addresses this problem quite remarkably in “Reason, Genealogy, and the Hermeneutics of Magnanimity” by redefining genealogy as an Hegelian retrospective rational reconstruction of meaning. The genealogist, through diachronic reciprocal recognition, retrospectively gives the original contingencies that shaped the attitudes at the heart of objective reasoning their normative status. For Brandom, Hegel’s reciprocal “symmetric normative construal of the relations of authority and responsibility between universals and particulars” (12) provides a social dimension to Kant’s asymmetric division of semantic and epistemic labor. As noted above, Kant’s rational, autonomous individual already has on hand (i.e., spontaneously) semantic or propositional contents (universals) when she goes off to make epistemic commitments or judgments (particulars) as an authority unto herself. Kantian conceptual content remains unaffected by its application in judgment. This cleaving of semantic and epistemic labor ignores that “judgments shape our concepts no less than our concepts shape our judgments” (3). Kant’s own semantic naïveté is much like the genealogist’s that takes for granted the impact of particulars on universals, judgments on concepts. 

Hegelian retrospective rational reconstruction, however, is reciprocal, inferential, and social in nature. Its counterfactual logic already allows for the mutual influence of concepts and judgments and therefore illuminates the vast productive relations in meaning-making (again, since Kant’s construal of reason, while normative, ignores the other’s—and hence socioeconomic—influence in recognition and realization). The counterfactual logic underwriting the genealogy project and Brandom’s reading of Hegel that would rescue that project (the better reason itself) by making reason diachronically and reciprocally formed (to borrow from jurisprudence: formed via the backward glance–adjudication–that then gives contingencies–precedents–their normative status), defines knowledge, meaning, and disciplinarity in complex causal, material, and social terms, avoiding what Jennifer Cotter et al. rightly dismiss as “singularities of ‘events’ rather than a totality of relations, or materially grounded connections” (223).

More to the point and why this brief excursion into reconstructive genealogy in the first place: Brandom’s Hegelian pragmatic inferentialism (the activity and rules governing an individual’s giving and asking for reasons) should be seen as a dialectical event, i.e., involving material contradictions, lest there be no stasis (i.e., synthesis) and subsequent change in language and meaning. Lukács, for one, reminds us that “the most vital interaction” is “the dialectical reaction between subject and object in the historical process,” where

even the category of interaction requires inspection. [… ] The interaction we  have in mind must be more than the interaction of otherwise unchanging objects. It must go further in its relation to the whole: for this relation determines the objective form of every object of cognition. (3, emphasis mine) 

Vittorio Hösle has similarly stated that recognizing the dialectics in inferentialism would help “overcome the contingency and relativism that threatens [ … ] anti-empiricist accounts of concepts” (Morris). On the one hand, historical materialism cannot entirely explain how a child comes to learn “cat” or why two individuals disagree over a photograph’s likeness to its subject. These examples are partly pragmatic moments in meaning-making (that is, if on a level of abstraction above information or, for that matter, physicalism). On the other hand, a pragmatism or inferentialism that does not make explicit the material relations and material facts surrounding the inferential act (e.g., social class and labor theory of value) is incomplete since reason then hangs in the air, to borrow from Wittgenstein. Dialectical pragmatism suggests a reality inclusive of historical-material relations and is therefore amenable to Marx’s important observation that social existence determines our consciousness. The dialectical nature of inference—the normative practice of giving and asking for reasons—gives pragmatism its materiality and materialism its epistemology. Without dialectical pragmatism, Hegelian reconstructive genealogy, too, like Enlightenment rationalism, “retains a spark of divinity in the form of the faculty of reason” (Brandom “Reason” 5).