Deontic Scorekeeping, Commitment Laundering, and the Ring of Gyges

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Deontic Scorekeeping, Commitment Laundering, and the Ring of Gyges<br>This is going to be a long one.

E. M. M.<br>Aug 02, 2026

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Poppies at dusk, Schatzalp, Davos, 2019.

The topic of this post is somewhat diffuse, but it hovers around a few core themes related to the work of Robert Brandom and Ludwig Wittgenstein, LLMs, the nature of knowledge, and accountability.<br>Throughout, I will make some rather bold and sweeping statements. Much of what I’m saying is meant to be taken impressionistically, not as staking hard claims. I’m sure some of what I say here is incomplete, poorly thought through, and even just wrong. I’ve decided to go ahead and post it. I’ve changed my mind about this stuff enough times in the past year, one more heap of half-formed thoughts on AI isn’t going to hurt anyone.

Reason and Deontic Scorekeeping

Reasoning is not strictly separable from a specific set of linguistic practices. This is to say that, while we can formalize certain aspects of reasoning (e.g. in symbolic logic), in practice human reasoning is non-monotonic, inherently contextual, and always requires the give and take of an audience to have either meaning or validity. Reasoning and rationality are not ideal structures that exist apart from the linguistic practices in which they are performed.

Non-monotonicity. Consider the following set of claims: Jerry is a tiger. All tigers are cats. Per a basic syllogism, it follows that Jerry is a cat. However suppose someone were to introduce a third claim: Jerry plays baseball. This complicates our syllogism, by introducing an alternative use for “tiger” (e.g. “someone who plays baseball for Detroit”), rendering our tentative conclusion dubious. Nothing about our reasoning was faulty – it’s not even fair to say that our universal about tigers being cats was false – we simply lacked adequate context on the relevant sense of the word “tiger”. When this context was added to the conversation, what had previously been a valid inference ceased to appear as one.

Reasoning and language use are not simply beset by ambiguity and context-dependent intentionality like this, such ambiguities are an inescapable and inherent aspect of human reasoning and communication. The process of communicating is itself a process of negotiating with an audience, a process of attempting to articulate reasons, anticipate understandings, and render explicit whatever is needed to achieve agreement in practice between ourselves and whoever we’re addressing. In fact, all communication as a phenomenon is a matter of negotiating norms between the involved parties for the purpose of achieving alignment in speech and conduct.

The give and take of discourse makes us accountable to each other in a process Robert Brandom calls “deontic scorekeeping”. It’s deontic in that our conversational practice always involves normative expectations about the way our assertions and behavior relate to each other. The scorekeeping is the way the give and take of conversation keeps us accountable to each other by leaving perpetually open the question of whether the assertions we have made and actions we have undertaken are justified by or compatible with the set of other commitments we’ve entered into within the social context of a given conversation. This “deontic scorekeeping” shows up in our concern for honesty and consistency, the way we object when we find that an interlocutor is guilty of inconsistency, fallacy, hypocrisy, or lies, and so on.

Not all linguistic behavior is directly interpersonal in a way that involves this sort of immediate negotiation or dialogue. For example, you are reading this collection of thoughts despite (perhaps) having never met me, and certainly not having the opportunity to reply to what I am saying. We read books, essays, poems, fragments – objects separated at times by many centuries from their authors, for whom the context and commitments undertaken in them are hazy or even entirely lost to us. Reading such texts is playing a modified version of the same game. I read Plato, certain that I will never have full access to whatever he was trying to convey, and clear about the fact that he never had me in mind as a reader of his words, but my business in interpreting him still assumes that he was playing a game like the ones I play with words. I still keep score, and adjust my understanding in order to make sense of his words, to align my reading of them as best I can, so as to make it all tally in a plausible way.

Consider what it would look like for a person to be radically incapable of participation in this game. How could this happen? Well, suppose they simply rejected any notion that their assertions and behaviors constituted a normative whole or established any durable commitments. In this case, we could not expect any degree of consistency in any of their behaviors or assertions. Such a...