Dave Beisecker

In early 2021, a Canadian investigation revealed the discovery of over a thousand grave sites of indigenous children on the grounds of Indian residential schools across Canada. These discoveries prompted US Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland to announce a similar investigation into the ongoing legacy and intergenerational impact of federally sponsored Indian boarding schools in the United States. In addition to documenting the legacy of abuse, neglect and dominance of indigenous peoples, we believe that such reflection upon the impact of Indian boarding schools should also include the justifications that were used to promote the government policy of compelling indigenous children to leave family, tribe, customs and even language behind to be acculturated in remote boarding schools far from home or reservation. For while in hindsight these policies can be both deplored and regretted, they were not crafted in a philosophical vacuum. Specifically, it might come as a surprise to scholars today that Hegelian thought actually featured in the support and promotion of such policies. We propose to tell at least part of this story, by focusing on the leading American Hegelian of the time, William Torrey Harris, who—as director of the famed Concord School of Philosophy and also longtime US Commissioner of Education—was highly influential in both philosophical and educational circles. In that latter capacity, Harris penned a defence of the boarding school system, which drew upon broadly Hegelian ideas and language. So while we have elsewhere defended and lauded Harris and the St Louis Hegelians for their contributions to American philosophy and democratic educational thought, here is one respect in which this influence has not stood up well to the test of time.

Brandom contends that the classical American pragmatists subscribe to a semantic program that is insufficiently one-sided in that it focuses exclusively on the down-stream consequences of concept application, while neglecting its upstream conditions. Focusing on passages from Peirce’s later work, I show that, while Peirce does unpack meaning in terms of the consequences of concept application, his inclusion of the consequences of denying claims involving a concept allow him to capture the inferential space that Brandom contends the classical pragmatists miss. Thus at least Peirce is one classical pragmatist who would not seem to suffer from that particular semantic blindspot.

In recent discussions of the concept of original intentionality , Dennett raises an intelligible challenge to intentional realists, one that has not been adequately addressed by naturalistic theories of mental representation how can something be correct or mistaken about the way things are, where the applicable normativity is intelligible as such, without ultimately appealing to the background of purposes for which a subject has been designed or selected? I respond directly and constructively to this challenge by profiling in suitably informative vocabulary how creatures with certain expectation-based educable capacities could be originally intentional. By explaining how we can understand such critters as engaging in a kind of rational goal-directed activity that is intelligible quite apart from their designed purposes, I show how they are susceptible to two types of corresponding to distinct ways in which expectations can fail to pick out regularities in their environments. I then expand this simple account to show how critters with more sophisticated means of exploiting their environments are capable of further types of errors. I can therefore capture several distinct kinds of intentional activity, corresponding to different ways in which critters can be seen as getting things right or wrong, including primitive inferential capacities. I also sketch a meow by which members of a community can become beholden to norms that are socially instituted and maintained, although I don't pretend to capture our most sophisticated intentional capacities---those inferential and linguistic capacities in virtue of which we are able to reason with one another about how the world is---my account nevertheless shows that there are interesting pre-linguistic boundaries separating the relative intentional capacities of critters, boundaries that are liable to be overlooked by those who insist that thought or reason is somehow limited to linguistic beings. This project, since it articulates the boundaries around the pre-linguistic intentional capacities from which our full-blown conceptual capacities plausibly evolved, is of evident value for the study of animal cognition, and should prove useful for the task of setting reasonable targets for AI research.