“There is a source of the Myth of the Given to which even philosophers who are suspicious of the whole idea of inner episodes can fall prey. This is the fact that when we picture a child–or a carrier of slabs–learning his first language, we, of course, locate the language learner in a structured logical space in which we are at home. Thus, we conceive of him as a person (or, at least, a potential person) in a world of physical objects, colored, producing sounds, existing in Space and Time. But though it is we who are familiar with this logical space, we run the danger, if we are not careful, of picturing the language learner as having ab initio some degree of awareness–‘pre-analytic,’ limited and fragmentary though it may be–of this same logical space. We picture his state as though it were rather like our own when placed in a strange forest on a dark night. In other words, unless we are careful, we can easily take for granted that the process of teaching a child to use a language is that of teaching it to discriminate elements within a logical space of particulars, universals, facts, etc., of which it is already undiscriminatingly aware, and to associate these discriminated elements with verbal symbols. And this mistake is in principle the same whether the logical space of which the child is supposed to have this undiscriminating awareness is conceived by us to be that of physical objects or of private sense contents.”

–Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind

Is there ever a specific, fixed moment of meaning, even if “meaning-is-use"? The “piecemeal habits of response” could be misleading.

“Proximal theories, no matter how decked out, are Cartesian in spirit and consequence." 
—Donald Davidson

Where is the location of the stimulus? Why not include all of history? Proximity cannot be the answer as proximity is Cartesian, illusory, and a gesture of bad faith.

If a lion could risk, capital would find a way to understand him.

Negative and positive freedom collapse when risk management brings future into present.

I. "Should moral respect go with sapience or with biology?“ (Brandom, Reason in Philosophy)

II. An unsound question until the qualifier:

"Mammalian sensuousness, sentience, is at best a necessary condition of that, not a sufficient one.” 

III. Singer et al. “see morality as normatively driven by the intrinsic sensuous evaluation implicit in the phenomena of pain and pleasure.”

IV. But “kantians see the normative basis of morality as derived from the positive freedom of giving and asking for reasons.”

V. Yet normative statuses cannot be so one-sided since their content must “have an authority that is independent of the responsibility that the judger takes for it.”

VI. Hegel suggests instead that “normative statuses such as authority and responsibility are at base social statuses,” i.e., Hegel rejects two autonomy models implied by Kant’s autonomy thesis: the attitude-dependence of “those over whom authority is exercised” and “the attitudes of those exercising authority, the superiors” (since each “construes the reciprocal notions of authority in a one-sided way”). According to Brandom, “Hegel’s social model of reciprocal recognition” defines authority and responsibility as “the products of the attitudes, on the one hand, of those who undertake responsibility and exercise authority, and on the other, of those who hold others responsible and acknowledge their authority.” Hegel’s “clear advance on the traditional obedience model” brings “symmetry of authority and responsibility” but only insofar as “X and Y are identical: when the authoritative one and the responsible one coincide.” Symmetry comes with the collapse of these roles and “at the cost of making it impossible to satisfy the demand of relative independence of normative force and content.”

Normative status = Attitude of X {to undertake responsibility} + Y {to exercise authority} • Attitude of X¹ {to hold responsible} + Y¹ {to acknowledge authority}

VII. Per Lazzarato, are we not now more than ever rationally and morally bound in risk? In debtor-creditor relations? (The Making of the Indebted Man)

VIII. That is, “debt implies subjectivation” as the governed are trained to “promise.”

IX. Isn’t this economic relation both “rational” and “ethical” in the Hegelian sense?

X. Doesn’t the inferential and material reciprocity in risk management make risk rational and ethical?

Authority and responsibility collapse as risk management makes risk rational and ethical for capital.

Reading Richard Ohmann’s important essay, “Literacy, Technology, and Monopoly Capital,” one sees the compatibility of Marx and Wittgenstein in terms of language and meaning. While some on the Left have hastily and to my mind erroneously politicized Wittgenstein as vulgar postmodernist (relativist), perhaps due in part to Richard Rorty’s politicizing pragmatism (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity), Wittgenstein’s pragmatist philosophy of language (i.e., the “nonsense” in ethics and aesthetics as defined by the Tractatus and the language-games of Philosophical Investigations) is perfectly in line with most materialist epistemologies, that is, at the level of language acquisition (“meaning-use” is the better term as Wittgenstein would not likely see language as something acquired). Here Ohmann considers the history and materiality in writing, which clarifies the pragmatism in conceptions of class-bound literacy. One could extend this reasoning to language itself:

“Suppose that writing (a technology as Walter on rightly insists) had been invented by slaves—say, in the Roman Empire—and for purposes of survival, resistance, and rebellion. How might they have devised a writing system to advance those purposes? Might it have been a shifting code to preserve its secrets from masters? Might there have been a common form that could encode the differential languages spoken by slaves? I don’t know, but my guess is that writing would not have evolved as it did, had its inventors wanted it as an aid to solidarity and revolt.”