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Axel Mueller

Northwestern University, Philosophy, Faculty Member

Philosophy of Science +39

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4. Rahmen und Hintergrund von Putnams bedeutungstheoretischen Überlegungen

Referenz und Fallibilismus

Löst Brandoms Inferentialismus bedeutungsholistische Kommunikationsprobleme?

Zeitschrift für Semiotik

Dieser Beitrag untersucht, inwieweit Brandoms in Making It Explicit (MIE) und Articulating Reason... more Dieser Beitrag untersucht, inwieweit Brandoms in Making It Explicit (MIE) und Articulating Reasons (AR) entwickelte inferentialistische Semantik Probleme lösen kann, die sich aus dem im Inferentialismus unter relativ unkontroversen Zusatzannahmen entstehenden und von Brandom bewusst zugrundegelegten Bedeutungsholismus ergeben. Aus dem Inferentialismus folgt mit Bedeutungsholismus eine perspektivische Bestimmung sprachlichen Gehalts, die wegen der damit angenommenen Idiolektbasis ein Kommunikationsproblem erzeugt. Brandom betrachtet dieses systematische Informationsgefälle als natürliche Motivation zur Kommunikation. Er erklärt Kommunikation mittels eines Modells des „Navigierens zwischen Perspektiven“, das letztlich auf der Verfügbarkeit substitutioneller und anaphorischer Äußerungsverknüpfungen beruht. Semantisch entscheidend ist die These, dass anaphorische Ketten rein inferentieller, also referenzfrei semantisch bestimmter Natur sind, sowie die Behauptung, dass anaphorisch-infere...

A Public no Demos: What Supranational Democratic Legitimacy (in the EU and Elsewhere) Requires

European Journal of Philosophy, 2016

Reading Putnam, 2012

Does Kantian mental content externalism help metaphysical realists?

Synthese, 2011

Realism, Beyond Miracles

Hilary Putnam, 2005

7. Vorbemerkungen: Die Stellung einer Rekonstruktion der Bezugnahme in Putnams Philosophie

Referenz und Fallibilismus

5. Putnams Problematisierung kriterialer Theorien der Bedeutung

Putnams pragmatischer Kognitivismus

How to Continue Kant's Perpetual Peace with Addams' New Ideals

Pragmatismo y Naturalismo: dos programas filosóficos, un presente en duda

Some Remarks on the Relations of Semantic Externalism and Conceptual Pluralism

RESUMEN Este articulo defiende la tesis de que la teoria de Putnam sobre el uso de conceptos empi... more RESUMEN Este articulo defiende la tesis de que la teoria de Putnam sobre el uso de conceptos empiricos constituye de principio a fin la columna vertebral de su filosofia. Por tanto, la teoria de Putnam sobre los conceptos empiricos deberia ser al menos compatible con los aspectos mas distintivos tanto de su realismo (esto es: externalismo semantico) como de su pragmatismo (esto es: pluralismo conceptual). El articulo sugiere incluso la tesis mas fuerte de que la teoria de los conceptos de Putnam es esencial para los propositos explicativos de ambos. Al hacer esto, propone que la teoria de Putnam se lea mas bien como la exhibicion de los aspectos contextuales del uso del lenguaje que como una descripcion de sus fundamentos metafisicos, epistemicos o cognitivos. Se considera que la continuidad de la teoria muestra asi que el realismo y pragmatismo de Putnam son y siempre han sido inseparables.

Some remarks on Semantic Externalism and Conceptual Pluralism

The meaning of ‘populism’

Philosophy & Social Criticism

This essay presents a novel approach to specifying the meaning of the concept of populism, on the... more This essay presents a novel approach to specifying the meaning of the concept of populism, on the political position it occupies and on the nature of populism. Employing analytic techniques of concept clarification and recent analytic ideology critique, it develops populism as a political kind in three steps. First, it descriptively specifies the stereotype of populist platforms as identified in extant research and thereby delimits the peculiar political position populism occupies in representative democracies as neither inclusionary nor fascist. Second, it specifies on this basis analytically–normatively the particular stance towards liberal representative democracy (in particular towards popular sovereignty and democratic legitimacy) that unifies populism’s political position and explains how populist politics can be compelling for democratic citizens. The normative core (populist ideology) turns out to require no more than two general principles of legitimizing political authorit...

How to Continue Kant's Eternal Peace: Jane Addams' "New Ideals

4 Realism, Beyond Miracles

Special Issue on POPULISM of Philosophy and Social Criticism, TOC & Introduction

TOC and Introduction , 2019

This introduction presents the articles contained in this special issue of Philosophy and Social ... more This introduction presents the articles contained in this special issue of Philosophy and Social Criticism
on the topic of populism. It does so by placing them in the field of discussions that the
standard conception of populism as ‘illliberal democracy’ has stimulated in many areas of the
populism-research that was produced in response to the recent increase in populist governments
in established constitutional democracies world-wide. Following the methodological canon of
studies in the field, it presents the individual contributions roughly in three segments according to
leading questions they focus on. In each segment, the introduction attempts to indicate the degree
to which the articles depart and provide reasons for departing from the initial standard conception
and thereby point to new relevant directions for further work. The first segment (articles 1. -4.)
consists of essays that take on the definitional and empirical question of what and where populism
is, and which varieties of it there are. The second segment (articles 5. -8.) presents new work
focusing on the diagnostic question of what conditions and institutional conditions enable contemporary
populism in established liberal constitutional representative democracies. They thus
also aim at explaining or at least providing insight into the structures on the supply side (party
politics) that make populism popular as an ‘outsider option’. The third and largest segment (essays
9. -15.) comprises essays that present various approaches to answering the therapeutic question
what democratic political systems and societies can do to confront, absorb or internalize the
lessons from populist challenges.

Mueller A (2019) The Meaning of Populism

Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2019

This essay presents a novel approach to specifying the meaning of the concept of populism, on the... more This essay presents a novel approach to specifying the meaning of the concept of populism, on the
political position it occupies and on the nature of populism. Employing analytic techniques of
concept clarification and recent analytic ideology critique, it develops populism as a political kind in
three steps. First, it descriptively specifies the stereotype of populist platforms as identified in
extant research and thereby delimits the peculiar political position populism occupies in representative
democracies as neither inclusionary nor fascist. Second, it specifies on this basis analytically–
normatively the particular stance towards liberal representative democracy (in particular
towards popular sovereignty and democratic legitimacy) that unifies populism’s political position
and explains how populist politics can be compelling for democratic citizens. The normative core
(populist ideology) turns out to require no more than two general principles of legitimizing political
authority by elections. Surprisingly, it does not need a separate anti-pluralist or exclusionary
commitment: it entails it. Third, this normative model allows a response to a contested question in
the theoretical discussion, namely, whether populism (properly specified) can be democracyenhancing.
The article defends the negative answer in virtue of the normative core alone and
does so as much vis-`a-vis a minimal (purely electoral) as vis-`a-vis a normatively ambitious (liberal)
conception of democracy. The reconstruction of the normative core of populist ideology enables a
novel argument to show that populism is incompatible with the continued democratic legitimation
of political authority even in the normatively most austere conception of ‘electoral democracy’,
not just with ‘liberal democracy’. Assuming a normatively more ambitious concept of democratic
legitimation in terms of political autonomy, the model also produces an extremely direct argument
showing that populists cannot fulfil their promise of ‘taking back control’ over political decisionmaking
to the population.

On Charles Taylor & Hubert Drefus' Retrieving Realism (2016)

Taylor and Dreyfus claim to offer a theoretically ambitious alternative (with "contact-theory" ab... more Taylor and Dreyfus claim to offer a theoretically ambitious alternative (with "contact-theory" about mind-world relations as its core) to the Cartesian picture they take to be dominant in Western epistemology and metaphysics. They aim at thereby enabling arguments in favor of a wide-ranging constructive philosophical position that recasts and doesn't merely abandon the useful distinctions discovered in this tradition. They call it "pluralistic robust realism" (154). My aim in this critical essay is to scratch the surface, to pull out one discussion and make a suggestion. I first present some main lines of the argument of the book, then focus on Taylor and Dreyfus' explication of what they mean by calling theirs a "robust" as against Rorty's "deflationist realism". I see their explication develop in two separate arguments, one theoretical philosophical debate about truth as correspondence, the other a direct argument against the hypotheses underlying Rorty's brand of nonrealism to the effect that since "we cannot step out of our language" and all our access to facts is through linguistically structured representations, we have no claim to knowledge of a reality transcending our representations and no intelligible grip on the idea that our representations are informative of a representation-independent reality. My suggestion is that Taylor/Dreyfus' own understanding of the conflict of this type of conception with a more realist position ultimately undermines rather than supporting their own attempt at offering an attractive realist alternative.

A Public no Demos: What Supranational Democratic Legitimacy (in the EU and Elsewhere) Requires

Disputes about the question of the relationship of democracy and economy in the EU have a long hi... more Disputes about the question of the relationship of democracy and economy in the EU have a long history and found their expression in the extended period of self-finding of the EU between the poles of being merely an international agreement of economic cooperation and of being a political project of European unification necessarily issuing in a national (perhaps federal) state. The question how much EU-sovereignty can be legitimized within national decision-making political communities is, if anything, more pressing now than at the inception of the EU. 1 At the same time, the recalcitrance of problems during the latest crisis in the Eurozone, and the energy of the rejection of supranational governance in the name of returning to familiar patterns of national sovereignty in recent elections and openly anti-democratic and xenophobic popular movements often avert deeper, principled doubts. One of these more principled skepticisms concerns the very possibility that any governance-structure like the EU could produce democratically legitimate decisions binding national democratic sovereigns. How much EU-sovereignty is legitimate can only be asked assuming it false that no supranational sovereignty at all can be legitimate. Such profound skepticism as it expresses itself in the successful Brexit-referendum and the wave of announcement of similar 'taking back of con-trol' referenda throughout the member-states, however, requires normatively to believe it to be true that national decision making must have priority, which is itself only a legitimate norm if the national level is per se more legitimate than suprana-tional decision-making that includes the national government merely as part of a group of decision-makers. This usually implicit assumption is also the backdrop for the legal reasoning that led several European national supreme courts (most notoriously the German constitutional court) with constitutionally assured democratic credentials to reaffirm their authority in jurisdiction, and to reject as lacking

4. Rahmen und Hintergrund von Putnams bedeutungstheoretischen Überlegungen

Referenz und Fallibilismus

Löst Brandoms Inferentialismus bedeutungsholistische Kommunikationsprobleme?

Zeitschrift für Semiotik

Dieser Beitrag untersucht, inwieweit Brandoms in Making It Explicit (MIE) und Articulating Reason... more Dieser Beitrag untersucht, inwieweit Brandoms in Making It Explicit (MIE) und Articulating Reasons (AR) entwickelte inferentialistische Semantik Probleme lösen kann, die sich aus dem im Inferentialismus unter relativ unkontroversen Zusatzannahmen entstehenden und von Brandom bewusst zugrundegelegten Bedeutungsholismus ergeben. Aus dem Inferentialismus folgt mit Bedeutungsholismus eine perspektivische Bestimmung sprachlichen Gehalts, die wegen der damit angenommenen Idiolektbasis ein Kommunikationsproblem erzeugt. Brandom betrachtet dieses systematische Informationsgefälle als natürliche Motivation zur Kommunikation. Er erklärt Kommunikation mittels eines Modells des „Navigierens zwischen Perspektiven“, das letztlich auf der Verfügbarkeit substitutioneller und anaphorischer Äußerungsverknüpfungen beruht. Semantisch entscheidend ist die These, dass anaphorische Ketten rein inferentieller, also referenzfrei semantisch bestimmter Natur sind, sowie die Behauptung, dass anaphorisch-infere...

A Public no Demos: What Supranational Democratic Legitimacy (in the EU and Elsewhere) Requires

European Journal of Philosophy, 2016

Reading Putnam, 2012

Does Kantian mental content externalism help metaphysical realists?

Synthese, 2011

Realism, Beyond Miracles

Hilary Putnam, 2005

7. Vorbemerkungen: Die Stellung einer Rekonstruktion der Bezugnahme in Putnams Philosophie

Referenz und Fallibilismus

5. Putnams Problematisierung kriterialer Theorien der Bedeutung

Putnams pragmatischer Kognitivismus

How to Continue Kant's Perpetual Peace with Addams' New Ideals

Pragmatismo y Naturalismo: dos programas filosóficos, un presente en duda

Some Remarks on the Relations of Semantic Externalism and Conceptual Pluralism

RESUMEN Este articulo defiende la tesis de que la teoria de Putnam sobre el uso de conceptos empi... more RESUMEN Este articulo defiende la tesis de que la teoria de Putnam sobre el uso de conceptos empiricos constituye de principio a fin la columna vertebral de su filosofia. Por tanto, la teoria de Putnam sobre los conceptos empiricos deberia ser al menos compatible con los aspectos mas distintivos tanto de su realismo (esto es: externalismo semantico) como de su pragmatismo (esto es: pluralismo conceptual). El articulo sugiere incluso la tesis mas fuerte de que la teoria de los conceptos de Putnam es esencial para los propositos explicativos de ambos. Al hacer esto, propone que la teoria de Putnam se lea mas bien como la exhibicion de los aspectos contextuales del uso del lenguaje que como una descripcion de sus fundamentos metafisicos, epistemicos o cognitivos. Se considera que la continuidad de la teoria muestra asi que el realismo y pragmatismo de Putnam son y siempre han sido inseparables.

Some remarks on Semantic Externalism and Conceptual Pluralism

The meaning of ‘populism’

Philosophy & Social Criticism

This essay presents a novel approach to specifying the meaning of the concept of populism, on the... more This essay presents a novel approach to specifying the meaning of the concept of populism, on the political position it occupies and on the nature of populism. Employing analytic techniques of concept clarification and recent analytic ideology critique, it develops populism as a political kind in three steps. First, it descriptively specifies the stereotype of populist platforms as identified in extant research and thereby delimits the peculiar political position populism occupies in representative democracies as neither inclusionary nor fascist. Second, it specifies on this basis analytically–normatively the particular stance towards liberal representative democracy (in particular towards popular sovereignty and democratic legitimacy) that unifies populism’s political position and explains how populist politics can be compelling for democratic citizens. The normative core (populist ideology) turns out to require no more than two general principles of legitimizing political authorit...

How to Continue Kant's Eternal Peace: Jane Addams' "New Ideals

4 Realism, Beyond Miracles

Special Issue on POPULISM of Philosophy and Social Criticism, TOC & Introduction

TOC and Introduction , 2019

This introduction presents the articles contained in this special issue of Philosophy and Social ... more This introduction presents the articles contained in this special issue of Philosophy and Social Criticism
on the topic of populism. It does so by placing them in the field of discussions that the
standard conception of populism as ‘illliberal democracy’ has stimulated in many areas of the
populism-research that was produced in response to the recent increase in populist governments
in established constitutional democracies world-wide. Following the methodological canon of
studies in the field, it presents the individual contributions roughly in three segments according to
leading questions they focus on. In each segment, the introduction attempts to indicate the degree
to which the articles depart and provide reasons for departing from the initial standard conception
and thereby point to new relevant directions for further work. The first segment (articles 1. -4.)
consists of essays that take on the definitional and empirical question of what and where populism
is, and which varieties of it there are. The second segment (articles 5. -8.) presents new work
focusing on the diagnostic question of what conditions and institutional conditions enable contemporary
populism in established liberal constitutional representative democracies. They thus
also aim at explaining or at least providing insight into the structures on the supply side (party
politics) that make populism popular as an ‘outsider option’. The third and largest segment (essays
9. -15.) comprises essays that present various approaches to answering the therapeutic question
what democratic political systems and societies can do to confront, absorb or internalize the
lessons from populist challenges.

Mueller A (2019) The Meaning of Populism

Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2019

This essay presents a novel approach to specifying the meaning of the concept of populism, on the... more This essay presents a novel approach to specifying the meaning of the concept of populism, on the
political position it occupies and on the nature of populism. Employing analytic techniques of
concept clarification and recent analytic ideology critique, it develops populism as a political kind in
three steps. First, it descriptively specifies the stereotype of populist platforms as identified in
extant research and thereby delimits the peculiar political position populism occupies in representative
democracies as neither inclusionary nor fascist. Second, it specifies on this basis analytically–
normatively the particular stance towards liberal representative democracy (in particular
towards popular sovereignty and democratic legitimacy) that unifies populism’s political position
and explains how populist politics can be compelling for democratic citizens. The normative core
(populist ideology) turns out to require no more than two general principles of legitimizing political
authority by elections. Surprisingly, it does not need a separate anti-pluralist or exclusionary
commitment: it entails it. Third, this normative model allows a response to a contested question in
the theoretical discussion, namely, whether populism (properly specified) can be democracyenhancing.
The article defends the negative answer in virtue of the normative core alone and
does so as much vis-`a-vis a minimal (purely electoral) as vis-`a-vis a normatively ambitious (liberal)
conception of democracy. The reconstruction of the normative core of populist ideology enables a
novel argument to show that populism is incompatible with the continued democratic legitimation
of political authority even in the normatively most austere conception of ‘electoral democracy’,
not just with ‘liberal democracy’. Assuming a normatively more ambitious concept of democratic
legitimation in terms of political autonomy, the model also produces an extremely direct argument
showing that populists cannot fulfil their promise of ‘taking back control’ over political decisionmaking
to the population.

On Charles Taylor & Hubert Drefus' Retrieving Realism (2016)

Taylor and Dreyfus claim to offer a theoretically ambitious alternative (with "contact-theory" ab... more Taylor and Dreyfus claim to offer a theoretically ambitious alternative (with "contact-theory" about mind-world relations as its core) to the Cartesian picture they take to be dominant in Western epistemology and metaphysics. They aim at thereby enabling arguments in favor of a wide-ranging constructive philosophical position that recasts and doesn't merely abandon the useful distinctions discovered in this tradition. They call it "pluralistic robust realism" (154). My aim in this critical essay is to scratch the surface, to pull out one discussion and make a suggestion. I first present some main lines of the argument of the book, then focus on Taylor and Dreyfus' explication of what they mean by calling theirs a "robust" as against Rorty's "deflationist realism". I see their explication develop in two separate arguments, one theoretical philosophical debate about truth as correspondence, the other a direct argument against the hypotheses underlying Rorty's brand of nonrealism to the effect that since "we cannot step out of our language" and all our access to facts is through linguistically structured representations, we have no claim to knowledge of a reality transcending our representations and no intelligible grip on the idea that our representations are informative of a representation-independent reality. My suggestion is that Taylor/Dreyfus' own understanding of the conflict of this type of conception with a more realist position ultimately undermines rather than supporting their own attempt at offering an attractive realist alternative.

A Public no Demos: What Supranational Democratic Legitimacy (in the EU and Elsewhere) Requires

Disputes about the question of the relationship of democracy and economy in the EU have a long hi... more Disputes about the question of the relationship of democracy and economy in the EU have a long history and found their expression in the extended period of self-finding of the EU between the poles of being merely an international agreement of economic cooperation and of being a political project of European unification necessarily issuing in a national (perhaps federal) state. The question how much EU-sovereignty can be legitimized within national decision-making political communities is, if anything, more pressing now than at the inception of the EU. 1 At the same time, the recalcitrance of problems during the latest crisis in the Eurozone, and the energy of the rejection of supranational governance in the name of returning to familiar patterns of national sovereignty in recent elections and openly anti-democratic and xenophobic popular movements often avert deeper, principled doubts. One of these more principled skepticisms concerns the very possibility that any governance-structure like the EU could produce democratically legitimate decisions binding national democratic sovereigns. How much EU-sovereignty is legitimate can only be asked assuming it false that no supranational sovereignty at all can be legitimate. Such profound skepticism as it expresses itself in the successful Brexit-referendum and the wave of announcement of similar 'taking back of con-trol' referenda throughout the member-states, however, requires normatively to believe it to be true that national decision making must have priority, which is itself only a legitimate norm if the national level is per se more legitimate than suprana-tional decision-making that includes the national government merely as part of a group of decision-makers. This usually implicit assumption is also the backdrop for the legal reasoning that led several European national supreme courts (most notoriously the German constitutional court) with constitutionally assured democratic credentials to reaffirm their authority in jurisdiction, and to reject as lacking