Reflective versus Interpretive Equilibrium: on the meaningfulness of debates over contested political concepts

Jairo Martinez Martinez

University of Amsterdam

Debates about what the meaning of fundamental concepts such as democracy or justice should be are of central importance within political theory. However, the fact that the meaning of these concepts is contested —hence ambiguous— makes normative debates about them susceptible to becoming situations in which theorists merely talk past each other. Recently, Georg Brun has attempted to account for the possibility of having meaningful debates over the meaning of contested concepts through a reflective equilibrium approach (2022). He argues that debating theorists can share a sufficiently fixed referent —⁠to ensure clarity about what the ‘thing’ in dispute is—⁠ while defending different conflictual overall meanings of that referent and thus meaningfully disagreeing with each other. My first aim is to argue that Brun’s approach fails despite its sophistication. First, I reconstruct his proposal to then challenge his basic claim that debating theorists need to share enough ‘initial commitments’ regarding the appropriate use of the concept in dispute to avoid talking past each other. Further, I argue that once this initial precondition is shown to be unnecessary, Brun’s proposal becomes incapable of capturing the normative element that makes disputes over contested political concepts meaningful. My second aim is to outline a plausible alternative approach to the initial problem. I argue that Robert Brandom’s ‘deontic scorekeeping’ indirectly shows how we can infer the commitments that follow from other theorists’ definitions of a contested concept without factually sharing them. This allows us to see debates in which theorists’ inferable political commitments are made sufficiently explicit as contributions to the clarification and narrowing down of the meaning of those concepts. Within this framework, the political (un)acceptability of commitments provides the common normative point of view from which theorists can debate without talking past each other.

Chair: Armin Mašala

Time: September 13th, 11:20 – 11:50

Location: SR 1.006, online