Ray Brassier - How to Train an Animal that Makes Inferences Sellars on Rules and Regularities

Provenance

Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

Listen

Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: owner ruling 2026-07-11: institutional recordings released except fee-charging course content; lane recent-institutional -> recent-institutional-released). Series: standalone. Source: audio original (.mp3).

Timestamped map

These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:00

  We should start. Good afternoon. Welcome everybody to the second day of the Human Animal in Politics, Science and Psychonomics workshop. I will introduce our first speaker for this afternoon, Ray Boursier. Ray Boursier is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. Ray's research…

• 00:17:41

  How could an animal learn to speak? Sellers or Hirst's are well-known and apparently fatal objections to any such account. In other words, any accounts of language learning in terms of rules following are susceptible to an allegedly devastating objection. And the objection is very simple. Learning to use a language…

• 00:31:16

  They are points of entry into the linguistic register. And the perceptive system is the paradigmatic language entry transition for Serres. By the same token, not every move is from one position in the game to another. One may make a move that issues in a position outside the game. And these are what he calls language…

• 00:45:50

  In other words, you need someone who's already linguistically competent. So it seems that... Sellers says that... You learn to recognize, you know, animals are trained... Human animals are trained to convert ought-to-be... What he calls ought-to-be's into ought-to-dos. You recognize the state of affairs as something…

• 00:59:24

  Thanks. You know, really, it is not a question of time. It is a question of time. I think it is a really tough question. First of all, the first question, are all animals potentially rational? Well, look, the emergence of rationality is contingent. There is nothing inevitable about the emergence of rationality. Nor…

• 01:12:24

  I think what you want in terms of and what I too want, which is this rationalistic naturalism that can explain these things that I don't think Badiou, Sellers, Brandon, Pippin, any of them can explain and many refuse to. So I'm just curious as to why you made this decision to put your eggs in that sort…

• 01:28:43

  Sorry if I lost you. Obviously, the counter-representative method, you know, this is very schematic, but I think it's very important to insist that rules can be extraordinarily complex. I mean, we're not just talking about, it sounds, you know, when you talk about rules, people think of some things, you know, fairly…

• 01:40:36

  Once again, Ray and Frank, please... We'll give a very short break of 15 minutes. We reconvene at 5 to 4.