The Communitarian Wittgenstein and Brandom's Hegel on Recognition and Social Constitution

This paper critically pushes back against social constitution arguments that scholars have found in Wittgenstein and Hegel. Where the communitarian Wittgenstein holds that the normativity of meaning depends on intersubjective agreement within a language community, and where Brandom's Hegel holds that the emergence of self-consciousness depends on intersubjective recognition, I argue that the intersubjective element per se is inessential to the solutions provided. Against the communitarian Wittgenstein, I argue that the social element contributes too little to be necessary. Diachronic, intrasubjective agreement provides everything intersubjective agreement does. Against Brandom's Hegel, I argue that the social element requires so much to be able to contribute anything that it, too, turns out to be unnecessary. The substantial powers that have to be built in for symmetric and transitive relations of recognition to be possible themselves allow for the possibility of the emergence of self-consciousness without social interaction.