Just Doing What I Do: Expert Action, Reflection and Self-Ascription

Presented at the Varieties of Experience Conference at Glasgow University

In a recent debate between John McDowell (1994; 2007a, 2007b) and Hubert Dreyfus (2007a; 2007b; 2007c) about the content of expert actions, the topic of the experience of agency takes center stage. The focus of the debate is on what types of contents are best attributable to expert actions. For example, when Freddy Sanchez (second baseman for the Pittsburgh Pirates) throws a ball to first base, what is the content of that action?

Dreyfus argues that the phenomenology of expert action— what he calls “absorbed bodily coping”— shows that such actions are “non-mental... non-conceptual, non-propositional, non-rational and non-linguistic” (2007b: 352). McDowell argues that even expert actions, if they are to count as agentive experience, must be minded, conceptual and rational. He cites a version of the Kantian dictum: “intentions without overt activity are idle, and movements of limbs without concepts are mere happenings, not expressions of agency” (1994: 89).

In this paper, I intervene in the debate between McDowell and Dreyfus and defend the position that expert action is reflective in a way that is not as problematic as Dreyfus contends. In §1, I summarize Dreyfus’s description and analysis of expert action as absorbed bodily coping. Dreyfus presents many different examples and many different arguments in the debate. I provide an analysis of five pivotal arguments, which present five constraints for any successful account of expert action. Dreyfus argues that McDowell’s conceptualism does not allow him to account for expert action, because of conceptualism’s commitment to a robust type of reflection.

I focus in particular on McDowell’s claim (1994: 47): “It is essential to conceptual capacities, in the demanding sense, that they can be exploited in active thinking, thinking that is open to reflection about its own rational credentials.” On a minimal interpretation of this claim, this implies that actions require self-ascription of action. Dreyfus is skeptical of this notion in the debate, as evinced by this Sartrean claim: “in absorbed activity the ego is altogether absent and only emerges with reflection” (2007b: 373). According to Dreyfus, since McDowell thinks that expert actions are minded, conceptual and rational, then such actions would have to involve conscious reflection, occurrent deliberation, and the issuance of spoken practical reasons. Dreyfus marshals phenomenological evidence from a variety of cases of expert action that attempt to show that nothing of the sort is involved: absorbed bodily coping cannot involve reflection.

However, I suggest that although McDowell is unclear and imprecise about what he takes reflection to be— since he merely appeals to the “I do” which must accompany all our actions— that does not mean that there is not an account of reflection that is compatible with the phenomenology of expert action. In §2, I defend what I call a ‘dispositional account of the self-ascription of actions,’ and argue that if this minimal account of reflection can be defended, then expert action can be understood as minded, conceptual and rational, in at least that respect. In §3, I argue that the dispositional account of self-ascription doesn’t go against the five constraints provided by Dreyfus’s arguments.

§I: Dreyfus’s 5 Arguments, 5 Constraints, and Expert Action

There are several examples that Dreyfus employs in the debate, each of which plays a different role in his overall argument. To highlight them all would take us too far afield. Dreyfus does not present separate arguments, phenomena and constraints as such; I intend to do him a service by naming them and discussing them. I hope to briefly survey Dreyfus’s main arguments, focus on five constraints on expert action, and single out one phenomenon for discussion. I should also say that I do not intend to defend McDowell’s conceptualism about expert action in general. Instead, I will focus on the question of whether if conceptualism about expert action entails that reflection is involved, then is there a plausible account of reflection that can be maintained that meets Dreyfus’s constraints.

The key conditional that is relevant for the debate is that concepts require reflection. I call it ‘the key conditional’ because it crosses over each of the arguments that Dreyfus lodges against McDowell.

It is clear that Dreyfus’s main example in the debate is a particular type of action that involves the expert’s agentive experience as “in the flow” or “in the zone.” For example, take our second baseman, Freddy Sanchez, fielding a ground ball, tagging second, and throwing it to first base for a double play. This is the type of phenomenon that is central to the debate about expert action.

The arguments that arise in the debate are the following:

1) the argument from situation-specificity
2) the argument from speed
3) the argument from interruption
4) the argument from non-linguistic animals
5) the argument from expertise

1) the argument from situation-specificity—————————————————

Dreyfus argues that much of our absorbed bodily coping is situation-specific. Take for example, an everyday ride in an elevator. In the elevator, we simply recognize and acknowledge the etiquette associated with standing distance. It doesn’t seem like we think, reason or reflect about how far we should stand away from others. Similarly, when we are engaged in a conversation, we observe norms of discussion— both linguistic and non-linguistic— about what to say and about turn-taking. In many cases of expert action, our action arises out of such particular circumstances, that the situation far outstrips any descriptions we could have of it. These and other phenomena support the argument from situation-specificity. Dreyfus argues that expert action cannot be conceptual because the content of absorbed bodily coping is situation-specific.

For instance, when the second baseman throws to first base, the activity utilizes such fine perceptual discriminations and requires such specifically tailored responses that concepts could not possibly be involved. In order to throw a ball efficiently to first base, Freddy needs to locate and orient himself as an embodied being in a particular space and time. Part of Freddy’s absorbed bodily coping is to situate himself on the field, and he does so by becoming one with the field, “feeling” the presence of first base, the distance from homeplate to first, and the distance between himself and his target.

Dreyfus argues, “a person’s perceptions and actions at their best would be so responsive to the specific situation that they could not be captured in general concepts” (2007a: 51). For Dreyfus, the best description of the action of throwing to first is as a “successful intuitive situational response that is characteristic of expertise” (53). According to Dreyfus, McDowell’s commitment to action in general being conceptual and reflective rules out accounting for this type of action, because concepts are general and expert action has a certain fineness of grain to its execution. (Dreyfus’s argument here bears comparison to the “fineness of grain” argument for non-conceptual content in Evans (1982), Kelly (2001), Peacocke (2001)).

The argument from situation-specificity gives us the first constraint on expert action. The situation-specificity constraint suggests that in order to account for expert action, one cannot attribute states of reflection that rule out accounting for the situation-specificity of the action.


2) the argument from speed———————————————————————

Another case of absorbed bodily coping that Dreyfus considers is grandmasters playing lightning chess. Grandmasters engage in such rapid and deft moves. Similarly, returning a serve in tennis or responding to an attacker in martial arts each require such quick reaction times. According to Dreyfus, these types of speedy actions suggest that concepts, reasons and reflection could not possibly be involved. Dreyfus’ argument from speed proposes that speedy actions must be non-conceptual and non-reflective. The idea is that conceptual and reflective action is slower than non-conceptual and non-reflective action. For example, Freddy Sanchez is able to perform the action with such speed and deftness that he makes it “look easy,” as is commonly said by spectators. Apart from that type of third-personal description, Freddy also feels (from his perspective) that he is “in the flow,” “in the zone” or “just-doing-it.” He doesn’t think about how pivotal the throw is for winning the World Series, for instance. Instead, he just carries out the action in a way that arises out of years of constant training. From the third person and first person perspective, it just doesn’t seem like concepts could be applied.

According to Dreyfus, if Freddy needs to throw to first base and pauses to apply a concept or to reflect on his own activity, then he will not be able to throw to first in time. Dreyfus argues that according to McDowell’s account, if the content of the intention of throwing to first is conceptual, then that action must involve reflection. McDowell often suggests that concepts require the capacity for reflection. According to Dreyfus, if throwing to first is reflective, then that action must be slower than unreflective actions. Thus, actions involving the application of concepts must occur at a speed slower than those not involving concepts. So, Dreyfus concludes, speedy actions do not involve concepts— Freddy’s action of throwing to first is a non-conceptual action.

The argument from speed gives us the second constraint on expert action. The speed constraint demands that in order to account for expert action, one cannot attribute states of reflection that hamper the speed of the action.

3) the argument from interference————————————————————

Another example discussed in the debate is one of a failure of absorbed bodily coping. There are occasions when because one thinks, reflects, or rationalizes, that one’s action is interfered with or interrupted. When athletes are asked about their performance during a game, they commonly say, “I was just trying to stay out of my head.” This might suggest that the expert athlete is like a pilot on course, that when she begins to think and reflect, is hurled into a tailspin and crashes. Dreyfus’s argument from interference takes up a disordered case of the exercise of absorbed bodily coping. Dreyfus contends that expert action cannot be conceptual because there is an inverse relation between what McDowell calls “the free, distanced orientation” (1994: xxx) required for conceptuality and the embodied and embedded exercise of skillful action.

Dreyfus discusses the famous example of Chuck Knoblauch. As second baseman for the New York Yankees, Knoblauch was so successful he was voted best infielder of the year. However, one day, rather than simply fielding a hit and throwing the ball to first base, he stepped back and took up a ‘‘free, distanced orientation’’ towards the mechanics of his throw. After that, he couldn’t recover his former absorption and often—though not always—threw the ball to first base erratically. According to Dreyfus, “In this case we can see precisely that the enemy of expertise is thought... He couldn’t resist exercising his capacity to reflect. Indeed, he became such a full-time rational animal that he had to be dropped from the team, and he never returned to baseball” (Dreyfus 2007a: 354).

Dreyfus’s argument here is that expert action cannot be conceptual because conceptuality understood in terms of reflecting upon the mechanics of one’s absorbed coping interferes with the action. If Chuck or Freddy don’t stay out of their heads, then their usually instinctive and intuitive actions become interrupted. In the usual case, the ball player is absorbed in the action. It is only when things are going wrong that he feels the need to reflect, for instance, when he is bobbling the ball, or the ball is wet, or when his foot is slipping out on the astroturf of the outfield, for instance.

The argument from interference gives us the third constraint on expert action. The interference constraint requires that in order to account for expert action, one cannot attribute states of reflection that interrupt the flow of the action.

4) the argument from non-linguistic animals———————————————

Another of Dreyfus’s lines of reasoning parallels a famous argument in the debates about whether perception has a conceptual or non-conceptual content, namely the argument from non-linguistic animals. Presumably, non-linguistic animals can perform many of the movements that linguistic animals can, sometimes with much greater facility. Monkeys can use tools to catch ants. Dogs can catch frisbees and balls leaping from lake docks. Raccoons can find and eat apples in the dark. According to Dreyfus, in these cases, non-linguistic animals are engaging in a type of absorbed skillful coping of a type that cannot be conceptual.

McDowell’s account of concepts suggests that those creatures that do not possess concepts would not be capable of these actions, since the possession of concepts is tied to having linguistic abilities. Dreyfus’s argument is that we share perceptions and actions with other animals, non-human, non-linguistic, and non-rational. Since we share those perceptions and actions with such animals, and they do not possess concepts, then such perceptions and actions cannot be conceptual. (This bears comparison to Evans (1982) and Collins (1998)). So, the type of action that Freddy engages in, throwing a ball efficiently to first base is the type that could equally be carried out by non-linguistic animals. For instance, capuchin monkeys can throw stones at a target (Westergaard and Suomi (1994)). The argument from non-human animals gives us the fourth constraint on expert action. The non-human animals constraint claims that in order to account for expert action, one cannot attribute states of reflection that could not in principle be attributable to non-linguistic animals.

5) the argument from expertise—————————————————————

The last argument that I will consider deserves to be called Dreyfus’s master argument. The key phenomenon that Dreyfus discusses is a type of absorbed bodily coping that is distinctive of expert action. Dreyfus suggests that when one learns to perform the embodied task, then if detached thinking and rule-following is the means to one’s learning, then one cannot gain expertise. Take for example, learning how to improvise on an instrument. There are no detached observations or rules that would enable one to become an expert soloist on the saxophone, for instance. According to Dreyfus, learning how to improvise involves just doing it unreflectively until one becomes an expert. Similarly, in learning how to throw efficiently to first base, Freddy Sanchez didn’t read any books about it. He didn’t study the body mechanics in a kineaesthetic textbook. He didn’t receive instruction about abstract rules of the arm’s most economical movement. He was just shown, mimicked and performed the action with increasing talent.

Dreyfus’s argument from expertise contends that given that a subset of actions are expert actions, and expert action embeds a distinct level of embodied expertise, then that level of skill cannot be captured in conceptual or rational terms. The expert second baseman draws on a vast repertoire of expert-level discriminations— in perception and action— and is capable of simply carrying out the action required without thinking. He merely does what everyone else must represent, intend, conceive of, or reflect upon. Sanchez performs in the flow, in the groove, in the now, rather than calculating and comparing alternative courses of action. Dreyfus thinks that Sanchez doesn’t have to decide or choose to do as he does, he just throws the ball to first, “going on in the normal way” (as Wittgenstein might say).

This account arises out of Dreyfus’s particular account of skill acquisition, which might be called a ‘five-tier account.’ Dreyfus outlines five tiers of skill acquisition: a. novice; b. advanced beginner; c. competent performer; d. proficient performer; e. expert. The level of the expert is what is the focus of many examples that Dreyfus employs in the debate. The expert relies upon a vast repertoire of discriminations to simply carry out the action without reflection. Dreyfus argues, “the phenomenology suggests that, although many forms of expertise pass through a stage in which one needs reasons to guide action, after much involved experience, the learner develops a way of coping in which reasons play no role” (53). So, according to Dreyfus, the expert second baseman, like Freddy, copes with the situation in a way that does not involve applying concepts or engaging in reflection, given that to do so would make Sanchez’s performance “[regress] to mere competence” (2007a: 355).

The argument from expertise (the master argument) gives us the final constraint on expert action. The expertise constraint suggests that in order to account for expert action, one cannot attribute states of reflection that would degrade expert action to merely proficient or competent performance.


interlude————————————————————————————————

My goal here has been to outline the five arguments, five constraints and one key phenomenon. The concrete example that is the center of discussion is throwing a ball efficiently to first base. When done by Freddy Sanchez such an action is definitely an expert action, and an action that involves absorbed bodily coping. We now have to ask what are the central conclusions to draw from this. We have to ask whether it makes sense to say that this action is minded, conceptual and rational, as McDowell’s conceptualism is committed to. Of course, I cannot argue here that expert action is minded, conceptual and rational tout court, nor would I want to. Instead, I will focus in particular, on the issue of whether it makes sense to say that there is a kind of reflection involved in expert action. According to Dreyfus, expert action does not involve the self or the I, because the action occurs as a product of a type of pre-reflective self-awareness. Dreyfus argues that in all expert professional actions, the second baseman (or even expert everyday actions— the chef throwing a chicken bone in the trash) the action of throwing efficiently at a target does not involve a self or “the I” at all. However, McDowell’s position is committed to the idea that at least at the personal level, there is a type of self or I involved. One capacity that McDowell takes to be central is the capacity to attach what he calls an “I do” to one’s actions, which is the capacity to self-ascribe that action. I now turn to a discussion of this notion.

§II: expert action, reflection and the dispositional account of self-ascription——

As I discussed above, the key conditional involved in all these arguments is that concepts require reflection. In order to defend such an idea, one could easily return to Kant’s discussion of the key conditional in the First Critique. Kant argues there that the application of concepts in experience in general requires the ability of an agent to self-ascribe that experience. However, Kant’s discussion of the key conditional is difficult, and I do not want to get stalled in Kant interpretation. Instead, I will attempt to spell out an interpretation of the key conditional that meets Dreyfus’s constraints. McDowell is actually on the fence between two possible positions on the key conditional. Since he does not do the work of delineating between these positions, his account of self-ascription of actions suffers. Apart from keeping McDowell from being misinterpreted, I also think that there is a defensible view of the key conditional on one side of the fence.

Allow me reiterate the issue at hand. The question is: Does expert action require concepts? Dreyfus argues that if expert action is conceptual, then that action is reflective, which is understood in terms of occurrent, actual real-time self-ascription. Dreyfus surveys the phenomena and decides that such self-ascription does not seem to be experienced in action. So, expert action cannot require concepts. I agree with Dreyfus that the phenomenology of expert action does not involve reflective, occurrent, actual real-time self-ascription. Anyone that has played a sport at the expert level would report that expert action in the zone, in the flow, just doing it, does not seem to involve reflection. Anyone watching an American football player being interviewed knows that when asked how they accomplished such an expert feat, they respond, “I was just doing what I do.” But, it is unclear why that should count against the key conditional.

Even if one admits the point that expert action does not seem to involve reflection of this kind, this is compatible with the position that the self-ascription of action is minimally reflective, for an obvious reason.

If action was not minimally reflective— in the sense that it was available to be self-ascribed— then there is no way that action could have a phenomenology at all. For example, if I am throwing a ball to first base, then when I say that that action is my own action, then I must have been able to self-ascribe that action. However, what is puzzling is that Dreyfus’ picture of expert action makes the phenomena of expert action seem more like the behaviors of Dr. Strangelove, symptoms of what cognitive scientists call ‘anarchic hand syndrome,’ than legitimate action. Dreyfus provided a slogan (in conversation): “the brain does the action without the mind.” But, an action cannot have a first person phenomenology, unless it is an action that is intelligible as one’s own. If Dreyfus means that things merely happen to the body or the body merely executes a happening in its environment, then how could such activities be available to us at all? They would be subpersonal goings-on largely hidden from us. At least, in the minimal case, the expert action needs to be accessible to one’s experience.


However, in the following, my focus is on two ways of interpreting the key conditional that concepts require reflection. Unfortunately, McDowell suggests that his view is committed to both ways of interpreting the notion of reflection. I will argue that he should be committed to only one. One view is an actualist account of self-ascription. An actualist about self-ascription suggests that one self-ascribes one’s experience by focusing on, attending to or monitoring one’s action. Another view is a dispositionalist account of self-ascription. A dispositionalist about self-ascription suggests that one self-ascribes one’s experience by having the ability/capacity to say or think of one’s experience that it is one’s own.

In the debate, McDowell writes,
“if an experience is world-disclosing, which implies that it is categorially unified, all its content is present in a form in which, as I put it before, it is suitable to constitute contents of conceptual capacities. All that would be needed for a bit of it to come to constitute the content of a conceptual capacity, if it is not already the content of a conceptual capacity, is for it to be focused on and made to be the meaning of a linguistic expression. As I acknowledged, that may not happen. But whether or not a bit of experiential content is focused on and brought within the reach of a vocabulary, either given a name for the first time or registered as fitting something already in the subject’s linguistic repertoire, it is anyway present in the content of a world-disclosing experience in a form in which it already either actually is, or has the potential to be simply appropriated as, the content of a conceptual capacity” (2007a: 347; my underlined emphasis).

In this quote and in others (especially in Mind and World), McDowell’s conceptualism seems to teeter on a fence between actualism and dispositonalism about concepts. The same occurs in his account of the self-ascription of action.
An actualist about self-ascription thinks that whenever one’s action is self-ascribed, then that action is focused on, attended to, or monitored by the agent. In the debate, McDowell does at times suggest that he holds this view of expert action. He sometimes says that the attaching of the I-think is a matter of thinking about one’s action. The common way that this is described is that one labels or affixes a linguistic expression “I think” to it. McDowell’s discussion in the debate suggests that self-ascription involves an ostensive focusing on, attending to or monitoring of one’s action. In this sense, Dreyfus is correct to point out that this implies an implausible account of expert action, since if conceptual capacities involve focusing, attending and monitoring, then expert actions cannot be conceptual. If we consider the phenomenology of absorbed bodily coping, then there is nothing it is like to monitor one’s action in this way. When one is engaging in expert action, one is engaging with the situation, namely one is “in the zone.” What account should McDowell have adopted instead?

McDowell has at his disposal a dispositional view of self-ascription, but he never makes clear that he holds that view. Let’s return to the example to make clear what I mean by ‘the dispositionalist account of self-ascription of action.’ When Freddy throws the baseball to first base, his absorbed embodied coping is conceptual according to McDowell because it realizes a practical concept, namely [throwing the ball efficiently to first base]. McDowell’s tendency to phrase “the categorial unity” that is involved in being an agent in terms of the “I-think” brings us to the actualist picture above. The reason for this is that usually, the I-think suggests that one is thinking about such and such in real time. This is the notion of the I-think that Dreyfus operates with. Under this construal, one takes oneself to be an observer of one’s action unfolding as if it were a bit of theater. Dreyfus is right to challenge him on this point, because it is just puzzling how the I-think could be thought to be “formally operative” when the subject doesn’t report any thinking going on at all.

Let’s take an example to make this clearer. Suppose there is a runner on third base and no outs. Further, suppose Freddy Sanchez gets a fast grounder and rather than holding the runner at third, he quickly throws the ball to home plate. The runner at third anticipates Sanchez’s throw and instead of continuing to home, he turns back to third. The batter is safe at first and the runner at third is safe. After the play is over, the first baseman asks Sanchez what he was thinking. Sanchez says, “I thought he was running home. I didn’t think he would try to run back to third.” This is the kind of report that Sanchez might give. If we ask him, was he consciously thinking these things, he would say, “No.” In that sense, then, he was thinking, but he was not thinking about his action in the way that Dreyfus supposes. To assume so is simply to make the Cartesian assumption that all thought is phenomenologically available to us.


McDowell tries to provide a response to Dreyfus in the following quote:
“The involvement of rationality in human action, in my picture, is not a result of adding an ‘‘I think’’ to representations of one’s actions. That would fit a detached, contemplative stance towards one’s actions, but that is not my picture. Self-awareness in action is practical, not theoretical. It is a matter of an ‘‘I do’’ rather than an ‘‘I think’’. And the ‘‘I do’’ is not a representation added to representations, as Kant’s ‘‘I think’’ is. Conceiving action in terms of the ‘‘I do’’ is a way of registering the essentially first-person character of the realization of practical rational capacities that acting is. The presence of the ‘‘I do’’ in a philosophical account of action marks the distinctive form of a kind of phenomenon, like the presence of the ‘‘I think’’, as at least able to accompany representations, in Kant’s account of empirical consciousness.” (2007b: 367).

While this quote does make some headway in responding to Dreyfus, it leaves open many questions. McDowell does not account for the distinctive form that the “I do” introduces, apart from making an analogy to the I-think, which he denies here and elsewhere (Mind and World Lecture 5) captures his view. What is the kind of phenomenon that McDowell has in mind? I suggest that if we can answer this question, then we can answer Dreyfus's challenge that expert action is not reflective.
I would suggest that we provide a dispositionalist account of the “I do.”

To say that it is a dispositional account is to stress that the “I do” has a tendency to accompany those bodily movements that count as agentive experience. Let’s step back and discuss exactly what is at stake. McDowell suggests that practical concepts, including concepts of the action, say, “throwing the ball efficiently to first base” and “the I do” have to at least be able to accompany representations. What that means is that if one is to count as performing an action, one must be able to express that that action is one’s own. This might occasionally be accomplished by reporting upon it in full phenomenological detail, as Dreyfus supposes. Freddy might say, “I threw the ball to first base.” However, it more likely involves something far more minimal. One might be able to express that one’s action is one’s own by performing an additional action.

In the case of “throwing the ball efficiently to first base,” one can show that one possesses the capacity to perform that action through demonstration. It is another action that one can perform that places one’s initial action in the space of concepts. That other action is simply performing the action and expressing something to the effect of “Do this... like so.” In the case of the “I do,” one can demonstrate that one possesses the capacity through further demonstration as well. It is another action that one can do that places one’s self-ascription in the space of concepts. That other action is simply performing the action and expressing something to the effect of “I am doing this.” To try to capture McDowell’s point here, it might be helpful to discuss a similar point that comes up in the ethical case of giving a reason for one’s action.

According to McDowell, an action being a rational action does not mean that one utters the reason (to oneself quietly or out-loud) when one is engaging in the action, but instead that one is capable of providing a reason. In this case, he holds a dispositional account of reason-giving. Oftentimes, it need be no more complicated than simply pointing. The demonstration is the ground for the reason; in the most minimal case it suffices. Consider the question of whether we see someone as shy. If one does fail to see someone as shy, it is not because they fail to have good eyesight (though this is necessary condition) or even fail to have good attention (the mental analogue of good eyesight). But rather, they have failed to acquire the concepts that enable what McDowell calls the rational "self-scrutiny of an ethical outlook" (1994: 81). One cannot recognize that an individual is shy unless one has the capacity to recognize and acknowledge that one is in a value-loaded situation. According to McDowell, a conceptual upbringing enables one to cast the situation as a value-loaded situation that obtains in what Sellars called ‘the space of reasons.’ If someone teased and bullied a shy boy, then one might ask, “Don’t you see? He’s shy?” In order to make the point, one could point to the entire situation as evincing the boy’s shyness.

Does it make sense to appeal to demonstrations in the case of expert action? How could such an appeal to demonstrations account for the ability or capacity to self-ascribe one’s actions? Suppose we asked Freddy about his expert action. We could ask, “Why did you throw the ball to first base?” As is usually the case in any interview of a sports player, the answer is, “I was just doing what I do.”

“Just doing what I do” is the kind of response that is indicative of the dispositional account of self-ascription. It is the additional demonstrative behavior that places the action in the space of reasons. It is important to register here, that one need not occurrently self-ascribe one’s action— thinking, "I am throwing the ball to first bas">— when one is engaging in absorbed bodily coping. Dreyfus is definitely correct about that. Freddy does not appeal to the solicitations in his environment when he is asked, “Why did you throw the ball to first?” Those states and processes are certainly inaccessible to personal level description. But, neither does Freddy remain silent. Freddy has the ability or capacity to report on his own action, and that is why it makes sense to call Freddy’s bodily movement an exercise of agency, rather than a mere happening.


§3: The Five Constraints————————————————————————

Does this account of the dispositional “I do” meet Dreyfus’s five constraints that I presented above? We can describe the disposition to self-ascribe one’s action with ‘I do’ in a way that does not rule out that the expert action is situation-specific. There is no general rule or representation applied that rules out that the action arises from a particular situation. An agent need not be required to give a full description of their action either, but if one says genuinely that one didn’t do it, then it doesn’t amount to one’s own action. As I mentioned above, if this is not the case, then Dreyfus’s account of expert action assimilates such action to alien hand syndrome. So, the dispositional account of the self-ascription of action meets the situation-specificity constraint.

The disposition to self-ascribe one’s action with ‘I do’ does not go against that action being speedy, either. Given that the capacity to self-ascribe is operative only as a disposition or power, that capacity cannot slow down one’s action. It is only if the “I do” were occurrently reflected upon that it would slow down one’s action. But, to depict self-ascription in this way could be nothing but a strawman. When one self-ascribes an action, it’s not as if while one is engaging in the action, namely while the action is up-and-running, one pauses to self-ascribe the action. No such thing occurs. So, the dispositional account of the self-ascription of action meets the speed constraint.

Similarly, since one doesn’t self-ascribe in real time, there is no chance of interruption or interference. During the activity, the ability or capacity to self-ascribe the action is operative, but that ability or capacity does not interrupt or interfere with one’s action. The “I do” is pervasive in the action in the sense that it makes one’s action available for expression and report. So, the dispositional account of the self-ascription of action meets the interference constraint.

In addition, there is no reason why a type of dispositional “I do” could not be entertained by non-linguistic animals. The capacity to say “I do” is simply the capacity to act in accordance with other creatures like oneself to participate in a certain form of life. In the human case, we happen to say, “I do,” but this need not be the case with other non-human animals. The dispositional account of self-ascription of action can have an analogue in the non-linguistic animals case. Although McDowell does not discuss such a possibility, we might consider that non-linguistic animals (at least those that are social in nature) have a tendency to hold each other to entitlements and commitments in a way that might suggest that they have the capacity for a minimal form of self-ascription. So, the dispositional account meets the non-linguistic animal constraint.

We can account for the self-ascription of action of experts in an important way too. Anyone who has watched experts report on their reasons for doing such-and-such during a match have experienced the expert’s tendency to talk about their own experiences, even if in impoverished language. That an expert can say this in any particular case shows that that action is reflective in the sense of being potentially self-ascribable. This need not commit one to occurrently reflecting in any way. So, dispositional reflection need not be in conflict with expert action.

I have argued against Dreyfus’ claim that expert action cannot involve reflection. I argued that although McDowell is unclear and imprecise about what he takes reflection to be, that does not mean that there is not an account of reflection that is compatible with the phenomenology of expert action. I discussed a ‘dispositional account of self-ascription of actions,’ and argued that if this minimal account of reflection can be defended, then expert action can be understood as conceptual, in at least that respect. Insofar as the dispositional account of self-ascription doesn’t go against the five constraints provided by Dreyfus’s arguments, then it is compatible with an account of expert action.

Intro to Mind and World

I'm going to be presenting in prose form some of parts of my lectures of my lectures on Mind and World. I begin with the Kantian background for the lectures. Although McD says that he's writing a prolegomena to the Phenemonology of Spirit, it's Kant's first critique (and third) that provides much of the architecture for the edifice. There are two sets of notions that need elucidation. On the one hand, concepts and intuitions. And on the other hand, spontaneity and receptivity.

One way to access why these Kantian notions are pivotal is to begin with the question that leads to the need for these notions. And, Lecture 1 really begins with a how possible question: “How is empirical content possible?” McDowell draws from Kant in order to answer this question. What does McDowell take from Kant? First, he uses the general transcendental strategy. And answer to the how-possible question cannot go merely through a causal-intentional explanation. Two contrasting answer to the how-possible question that McDowell would reject might be (1) the causal abstractionist picture in which empirical content is possible through multiple abstractions from sensory particulars and (2) the intentional nativist picture in which empirical content is possible through our already having intentional contents in our mind/brains. Neither of these pictures answer the how-possible question, because they leave anxieties about empirical content. They attempt to answer Zeno's paradox of the stadium by walking across the stadium, where Mcd wants to answer such philosophical conundrums by showing that that which makes empirical content seem impossible is actually the product of a philosophical skepticism that we need not accept.

Part of the answer to this philosophical skepticism is to adopt Kant's distinction between spontaneity and receptivity and concepts and intuitions. Let's review what Kant says about these in the Inaugural dissertation. The Inaugural Dissertation 1770: Kant introduces the key distinction between intuitions and concepts, and introduces the distinction between sensation and the intellect, and introduces the distinction between phenomena (things as they appear) and noumena (things as they are). Also, in a Letter to Herz (1772): claims that the whole secret of metaphysics is to explain how intellectual concepts which neither produce their objects nor are produced by their objects nevertheless necessarily apply to such objects. Thus, even before the first critique, Kant has a distinction between intuitions and concepts. But, what is this distinction. Intuitions: our ability to receive representations, i.e., our receptivity in experience; intuitions are products of sensibility and the sensible grounds of empirical knowledge. Concepts: our ability to cognize an object through these representations, i.e., our spontaneity in experience; concepts are rules of the understanding. It is unclear whether McDowell would accept this characterization of Kant's distinction. More needs to be said later about what McDowell's notions are, and how faithfully they map onto Kant's notions.

But, for McDowell, regardless of the particular interpretations of intuitions and concepts, Kant’s Dictum is central for McDowell: “Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind” (A51/B75) It pays to compare this notion with something that Aristotle "writes" in De Anima: The mind which is actively thinking is the objects which it thinks.

Let's focus more particularly on intuitions. Intuitions relate to objects as singular terms to objects; intuitions “relate immediately to the object and is singular.” This raises several questions. Are intuitions directly referential non-conceptual representations? Kant suggests that intuitions are phenomenal presentations of objects in sensibility, but nota bene the dictum at A51/B75. Let's focus more particularly on concepts. Concepts relate to objects as general terms to objects. ‘Concept’ “refers to [the object] mediately by means of a feature [or marks] which several things may have in common.” Are concepts purely descriptive non-sensible representations?
Kant suggests that concepts are rules for the application of general terms to objects, but nota bene the dictum at A51/B75. In each case, intuitions and concepts are not defined in terms of each other, so they are distinct in some respect, but the Kantian dictum forces us to see them as together in judgment. So, we need to ask, is there an interdefinability problem in Kant's notions of intuitions and concepts? Is there the same problem in McDowell's notions of intuitions and concepts?

Throughout the lectures, we'll call the Kantian dictum the Togetherness Principle (TP). McDowell calls this the Kantian Dictum, but principles are easier to assess than dictums. The interdependence of intuitions and concepts. The togetherness principle may show that intuitions are not independent of concepts and concepts are not independent of intuitions.(Sellars (1968) and McDowell (1994)). But, we are forced into an oscillation then, because if we stress the independence too much, then we have to reject the togetherness principle. If we stress the togetherness principle too much, then we have to reject independence. In a way, this is the problem of intentionality. But, I should say that there are other passages can contradict the togetherness principle (check out Hanna's recent book on the topic): “objects can indeed appear to us without necessarily having to be related to functions of the understanding” (A89/B122);
“appearances can certainly be given in intuition without functions of the understanding” (A90/B1222); “the manifold for intuition must already be given prior to the synthesis of the understanding and independently from it” (B145).

Some have argued that these passages are consistent with the Kantian Dictum because the Kantian Dictum applies only to objectively valid judgments. Objectively validity is what furnishes the “conditions of the possibility of all knowledge of objects” (A89/B122). This would suggest that Kant thought there where empty concepts and blind intuitions that were not objectively valid (Bermudez (2003)). But, Kant might argue that such non-conceptual intuitions and non-intuitional concepts may be theoretically problematic and empirically useless. Further, McDowell will argue in Lecture III that non-conceptual content is problematic on several grounds. This debate about conceptual and non-conceptual content still continues and is probably the most rigorous debate emerging out of Mind and World. But, it should be said here that if Kant thought that the Kantian dictum was meant to insure objective validity, then McDowell is correct to borrow it in the way that he does, because the "objective purport" of empirical content is his main concern. But, how is this knowledge of the external world possible? (I'm here slumming with the term 'external,' not something that McDowell would do...)

How is Knowledge Possible? Notice that Kant asks how-possible questions about neither relations of concepts nor applications of empirical concepts. It is not difficult to explain how we know that all cats are animals; it is not difficult to explain how we know that a particular has a property, e.g., Spacetime (my cat) is a cat. The central how-possible question is how is synthetic apriori knowledge possible? How does this relate to McDowell’s question: “How is empirical content possible?” McDowell’s “How Possible” Question: How is empirical content possible? Assuming that the tribunal of experience (Quine 1956) is exhausted by sensory transactions then how is it possible that thought can have any bearing on the world? What is the obstacle to our making sense of thought bearing on the world? What makes empirical content possible?

There are two answers that trouble McDowell. I close this post with a summary of the intolerable oscillation. The interminable oscillation is between the Given on the one hand and coherentism on the other hand. On the one hand, the idea that empirical content can be understood solely in the logical space of nature (what McD calls 'bald naturalism'). On the other hand, the idea that empirical content is different in kind (sui generis) from empirical description (what McD calls 'rampant platonism'). In the next post, I will try to summarize the oscillation...

Keeping Humpty Dumpty on the Wall: A Critique of Brandom’s Inferentialist Reliabilism

I'm presenting this paper on May 1st at University of Waterloo. I would appreciate any comments or criticisms.

Keeping Humpty Dumpty on the Wall: Brandom’s Inferentialist Reliabilism

“And how exactly like an egg he is!” she said aloud, standing with her hands ready to catch him, for she was every moment expecting him to fall. “It’s very provoking,” Humpty Dumpty said after a long silence, looking away from Alice as he spoke, “to be called an egg –very!” “I said you looked like an egg, Sir,” Alice gently explained. “And some eggs are very pretty, you know,” she added, hoping to turn her remark into a sort of compliment. “Some people,” said Humpty Dumpty, looking away from her as usual, “have no more sense than a baby!”
— Lewis Carroll from Through the Looking Glass, Ch. VI

In Sellars’s “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” Sellars outlines the conditions upon which a non-inferential observation report expresses knowledge that an object is green: “not only must it be a symptom or sign of the presence of a green object in standard conditions, but the perceiver must know that tokens of “This is green” are symptoms of the presence of green objects in conditions which are standard for visual perception” (1956: 75). The first condition for knowledge is a type of reliability condition, because . [I will use triangular brackets to mark the contents of non-observational reports to abstract from the two possible tokens Sellars has in mind, i.e., Mentalese and natural language tokenings. This distinction does not arise explicitly until Sellars’s later work, but the resources for the distinction are already present in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.”] needs to be a reliable symptom of a green object. The second condition is a type of reportability condition. An observer of green must not only be able to be aware of her reliability, but she must actually report that she is reliable. [The distinction between reporting roles and expressing roles is pivotal to Sellars’ construal of mental states (1956: §14-15). The reportability condition is motivated by the intuitive idea that if one is sapiently aware of a perceptual state, then one is likely to be able to report upon that perceptual state. For example, if one says, “This is green” about a green object, then one is expressing the perceptual state of seeing green. If one says “I think (it seems to me that) this is green” then one is both expressing one’s sapient awareness of seeing green and reporting one’s perceptual state of seeing green. By denying the consequent above, if a subject is not able to report upon her perceptual states, then she does not have sapient awareness of those states. This is largely inspired by Rosenthal’s (2005) reading of Sellars’s view of the distinction between expressing role and reporting role.] Both Robert Brandom (1994: 215-217, 1995, 1997: 152-162, 2000: 104, 2004) and John McDowell (1997: 161) think one or another of these conditions is too stringent.

Brandom thinks the reportability condition is not necessary (in Sellars’s form). [I suggest below, however, that there is an implicit reportability condition in Brandom’s view.] Instead, Brandom thinks that one can augment the belief condition of traditional JTB accounts of knowledge such that a reliable tokener of comes to have the normative status of knowledge without requiring that she be aware of her reliability. Brandom modifies the reliability condition by bolstering the credence of belief, meaning, that the belief is inferentially articulated and so tied to truth-conditions. A reliably tokened perceptual report of is sufficient for knowledge. Brandom’s position will be called inferentialist reliabilism.

McDowell thinks that the robust Sellarsian version of the reportability condition is not necessary, but that a modified dispositional version of the reportability condition is necessary. Further, McDowell suggests that Brandom’s inferentialist reliabilism is not sufficient to guarantee knowledge because his position does not guarantee truth. [McDowell’s account might be read as elucidating a possibility Sellars rejects, i.e., that the knowing-that claim in the reportability condition be cashed out in terms of knowing-how, pace Sellars’s suggestion that K-how presupposes K-that (1956: 75).]

In this paper, I hope to achieve four separate ends. First, I will explicate Brandom’s inferentialist reliabilism as a response to Sellars’s internalist reliabilism. Second, I will criticize Brandom’s reliabilism as failing to “Humpty Dumpty” on a wall between two positions: indicator reliabilism and internalist reliabilism. Third, I will diagnosis the problem for the inferentialist reliabilist’s attempt to straddle the wall between these two positions. Fourth, and finally, I will offer an emendation to inferentialist reliabilism through concentrating on the possibility of building the wall up from the side of internalist reliabilism. A notion that is basic to internalist reliabilism— the notion of seeming-to-perceive—will be shown to be necessary to produce a plausible inferentialist reliabilism. Inferentialist reliabilism can be saved if Brandom incorporates a notion of experience along the lines of McDowell’s two-tiered episodes of knowing. But first, I engage in some name-calling.

Sellars’s position is a type of internalist reliabilism, in which for one’s perceptual state of to be observational knowledge, one must infer that one has been and is (occurrently) a reliable tokener of the concept green in standard conditions. In Sellars epistemology, perceptual experience contains claims that a subject may or may not endorse. The endorsement of perceptual experiences are observational reports upon such experience. A perceptual experience of seeing is actually a seeming-to-see, rather than simply a purely causal relationship between a bare particular and a subject. In this respect, Sellars issues a “level-ascent requirement” (deVries and Triplett (2000: 82-3)) upon episodes of knowing— a putative knower must do more than reliably report a green object. They also must have general worldly knowledge and linguistic understanding. Episodes of knowing are not mere productions at the end of a reliable process, but generally must be construed as inhabiting the social practice of giving and asking for reasons.

Brandom thinks that Sellars requirement upon perceptual knowledge “perhaps goes too far” (1997: 157). As Brandom reads Sellars’s view, under internalist reliabilism, a reporter cannot be credited with knowledge unless she can offer an inferential justification of her belief. In opposition to the level-ascent requirement, Brandom claims, “it is enough that the subject of knowledge be reliable to be entitled to a belief (without having to be able to cite that reliability as a reason for it)” (1995: 906). Elsewhere, Brandom asks, “why isn’t it enough that the attributor of knowledge know that the reporter is reliable, that the attributor of knowledge endorse the inference from the reporter’s responsive disposition noninferentially to apply the concept red to the thing’s (probably) being red? Why should the reporter herself have to be able to offer the inferential justification for her noninferential report?” (1997: 159). [It is not clear that Sellars thinks that one has to provide an “inferential justification,” but simply know that they are reliable. An occurrent requirement for an inferential justification may be too strong, as it might be possible to see the transition from reliability to knowledge that one is reliable as evincing a transition from sentient awareness to sapient awareness.] What is Brandom proposing instead?

Brandom’s reliabilism might be best read as applauding two insights of historical epistemological reliabilism. The first insight (The Founding Insight) is that knowing does not require knowing that you know— reliably-formed beliefs qualify as knowledge even though the subject cannot justify that belief herself. The second insight, (Goldman’s Insight) involves the idea that processes are reliable relative to the contexts of belief, i.e., relative to reference classes for the particular process under consideration.

As Brandom (2000: 115) points out, Goldman showed that the justification condition for knowledge cannot either reduce to the causal antecedents of one’s beliefs (e.g., in the barn facade case, being caused by an actual barn is not sufficient to produce knowledge in cases where there are relevant alternatives in the reference class.) nor one’s internal ability to justify one’s inferences based upon one’s perceptual states. For Brandom, a putative knower’s justification is “external to the subject’s beliefs and to their connection to their causal antecedents” (2000: 115). According to Brandom, one’s love of reliabilism, however, should not lead one to either (1) a denial of the need for classical accounts of justification that rely upon reasons (evincing a Conceptual Blindspot) or (2) a reliance upon natural scientific inquiry at the expense of traditional JTB epistemology (evincing Naturalistic Blindspot). [My criticisms of Brandom’s view are not based upon a belief in either of these blindspots. I agree with Brandom that reliabilism should not imply either position.] What can inferential reliabilism do for us then?

Inferential reliabilism enables us to ascribe knowledge to people that Sellars’s model of reliabilism would rule out as episodes of knowing. Brandom uses several different examples: the Aztec pot expert (2000: 99), the blindsight chicken-sexers (2000: 102-6), Monique and the hornbeams (1994: 219), and others. I will focus on the pottery expert. In that example a pottery expert can “reliably though not infallibly” [This is an important admission for Brandom. There are contextual treatments of relative alternatives that are resolutely infallibilist, e.g., David Lewis’s position in “Elusive Knowledge.”] tell the difference between Toltec and Aztec potsherds. She simply “finds herself believing that some of them are Toltec and others Aztec” (2000: 98) and has a great success rate. She also denies that she is reliable and looks for confirmation before reporting her evidence in journals. Brandom thinks that if her colleagues find that her “gut reactions” are reliably tokened, (because they endorse the material inference from particular observations), then it is reasonable to say that she knows that a pot is, for instance, Aztec. Knowing that one knows is not necessary for knowing, because in this case the pottery expert knows, but doesn’t believe that she knows. [Notice that all that Brandom requires of the transition from reliability to knowledge is that accidental true belief or epistemic luck be ruled out.]

Why does Brandom want to say that the pottery expert knows in this case? If a subject has a differential response disposition to token in the proximity of actual Aztec potsherds, then the subject has gained the concept of . Perception, for Brandom is a special type of transition from one level— reliable dispositions to respond— to another level— the space of reasons in which the pottery expert submits a conceptualized report. It is not sufficient that one be a sentient creature that reliably responds with when Aztec potsherds are around, for example, as a parrot that has been trained to utter might accomplish. One must also be able to make a language entry transition or move. [Brandom describes perception as a language entry transition. This derives from Sellars discussion of language games: he talks variably about “conditioned response to (x)” (1963: 314); “learned transition” where the stimulus is meant by a response within a game (1963: 329); “learn to respond to the same situation” (1963: 343). What type of learning does Sellars have in mind? Also, is Brandom's notion simply Sellars’s notion? How do they differ? My big worry is that if language entry moves (observations) are entirely non-inferential (1994: 235), then how do they become moves for the subject. A claim about experience must be about a present state of a subject, not a mere move in a logical space.] Language entry transitions are pivotally important moves in the game of giving and asking for reasons about perception. For Brandom, perception and perceptual report is a move that an individual makes by reporting observations that express conceptually articulated beliefs.

Language entry transitions are perceptual beliefs that may or may not be justified in the space of reasons. For instance, the claim that the pottery expert makes, i.e., “That’s an Aztec potsherd” is only reliable (and therefore knowledge) if it is justified by similar types of material inferences made in practice with Aztec pottery around. In order for the pottery expert to possess knowledge, three conditions have to obtain. The pottery expert’s colleague must (1) attribute a commitment (a belief), (2) attribute an entitlement (a justification), and (3) undertake a commitment (a belief in her reliability) (1995: 903-4). It is not necessary for the attributee to possess a commitment or undertake an entitlement in order to possess knowledge—coming by the belief by a reliable process is sufficient.

Episodes of knowing by reliable belief-forming processes are credited with their normative status as knowings based upon the material inferences that sapient creatures make in practice. There is an institution of normative statuses that would justify attribution of knowledge to someone who is a reliable tokener of . As Brandom points out, “what matters is that they be the outcome of a reliable belief-forming mechanism—one whose output is likely to be true” (1995: 896). [The “likely” is problematic. McDowell (1995: 881) points out that reliability can only provide for approximate objectivity—cannot wrench objective purport from something approximating objective purport. It’s like trying to make epistemic bread out of non-epistemic ingredients.]

Someone might ask (in a naturalistic spirit), “Why aren’t such reliable belief-forming mechanisms external to the space of reasons?” Brandom recoils from this suggestion since all sapient beliefs are articulated as states or episodes inside the space of reasons (and/or concepts). Brandom thinks that so long as the states or episodes are conceptually articulated by creatures within the practice of giving and asking for reasons, reliability should be sufficient to guarantee knowledge.

One way to clarify what Brandom has in mind is to show that Brandom thinks a plausible reliabilism about observational knowledge should attempt to avoid two unsatisfactory views: (1) indicator reliabilism and (2) internalist reliabilism.

Indicator reliabilism is basically the thermometer model of knowledge outlined by David Armstrong: “perception is nothing but the acquiring of knowledge of, or, on occasions, the acquiring of an inclination to believe in, particular facts about the physical world, by means of our senses” (1961: 105). [It pays to recognize also that Armstrong takes consciousness of one’s mental states to be a type of higher-order perception. We perceive that we are seeing and that is what constitutes our seeming to see X. This has given rise to self-monitoring models of consciousness.] Brandom does not want his view to reduce to this type of view. Internalist reliabilism is Sellars’s position (and McDowell’s position) that knowing via a reliable tokening of implies knowing that (in a sense to be discussed further below) one is a reliable tokener of .

Brandom’s position might be read as trying to sit comfortably between these two views. Brandom takes reliability from indicator reliabilism, while trying to distinguishing sapient knowings from sentient knowings* [I’ll use an asterisk to mark non-human animal states.]. Brandom elucidates what is distinctive about sapient awareness from internalist reliabilism while rejecting that second-order knowledge is necessary.

The “joint determination” (1994: 235) both causal and conceptual that Brandom discusses in making sense of language entry moves seems to make his position straddle between reliability and minimal acknowledgement of reliability. Assume we are talking about a human being seeing a red patch. Then, perceptual observations may be reliable seeings (and thus possibly non-sapient knowings for Brandom) or reliable sapient seeings, i.e., seemings-to-see. But, if the latter, then why would a conceptualized content fail to be accessible to sapient consciousness? If seeing is sufficient, then what does sapient consciousness matter? If seeming-to-see is necessary, then why is simply seeing an episode of knowing?

I will argue below that Brandom’s attempt to “Humpty Dumpty” between two sides of the wall while perched on the wall of inferentialist reliabilism leads him to fall upon either side. And. rather than attempt to put him back together as an indicator reliabilist or an internalist reliabilist, I will attempt to build a better wall for him to sit upon. The resolution comes through a distinction between seeing, expressing, and sentience, on the one hand, and seeming-to-see, reporting, and sapience on the other. It will be suggested that Brandom falls off the wall because of his lack of a robust theory of experience.

Why might Brandom’s view be construed as a type of indicator reliabilism? It is possible to show that chief problem that indicator reliabilism faces crops up in Brandom’s reliabilism. One problem for indicator reliabilism is that one cannot distinguish a thermometer or a parrot that has knowledge from a human being that has knowledge. The trouble comes in the difference between a sentient Parrot “report” and a sapient report .

Brandom’s view provides us with the problem of construing what exactly is tokened by the reliable process in question. Is it a bird-belief* or human-belief? Brandom points out that the claim that putative knowers may be construed as thermometers or parrots is “a bit cavalier” (1995: 896). He asks, “What is the difference between a parrot who is disposed reliably to respond differentially to the presence of red things by saying “Raawk, that’s red” and the human reporter who makes the same noise under the same circumstances?” (1995: 897).

Brandom just points out that what matters is “how one distinguishes concept use from nonconceptual activity” (1995: 896). Since the pottery expert is a sapient creature, i.e., one that says “We,” the difference between her beliefs and the parrots beliefs* is that her belief condition also satisfies an implicitly contained understanding condition. She inhabits the space of reasons and so understands what she is saying. Parrots inhabit the space of nature and their reports* merely happen to them.

This, however, does not resolve Brandom’s dilemma. One cannot merely say, “It’s a special kind of belief” unless the putative sapient belief can in practice be distinguished from the sentient belief. Why should I attribute to the Potsherd expert a sapient belief? In the discussion of the case, there is nothing keeping me from attributing a brute sentient state to the pottery expert except Brandom’s insistence that she is the type of organism that is prone to inhabit states that sapient creatures inhabit. And, if the parrot exhibits the same degree of reliability (and that is sufficient for knowledge), then why could I not attribute knowledge* to the parrot? And if reliability is sufficient for the parrot, then why would I not attribute knowledge* to the pottery expert?

In fact, there seem to be occasions in which it is more reasonable for me to attribute a non-sapient state. Assume that the Potsherd expert were to reliably discriminate between Aztec and Toltec with 100% success throughout her entire career, but continued to “not believe that she is a reliable noninferential reporter of Toltec and Aztec potsherds” (2000: 98). Should we think she is rational and/or sapient in Brandom’s sense? Should we think that she is reporting on her seeing or merely expressing her seeing? The difference is subtle, but extremely important. If the answer to the second question is negative, then our answer to first should be negative. But, if she is merely expressing her perceptual state, then what reason do we have to attribute robust sapient beliefs to her?

Brandom might respond that, as a sapient being, she is in the line of work of giving and asking for reasons. She can use concepts and have beliefs, can make her way about in the space of reasons, even though she cannot give reasons for her beliefs in this particular case. Brandom wants to say that the inferential articulation of those responses, the role they play in reasoning, “makes those responsive dispositions to apply concepts” (1995: 897) reports that constitute knowledge.

How should we understand these abilities to apply concepts? One reading of such a disposition might be the following. One has the ability to apply concepts if one is in the space of reasons. But, then we need to understand in the particular case of the pottery expert whether she is reliable. It seems plausible to say that she could be reliable and have knowledge locally, meaning, there is a local possibility of a putative knower having reliably tokened a concept and not be able to give reasons. But, it seems unlikely that the pottery expert should be globally unable to provide reasons, given that that’s what locates her in the space of reasons.
Brandom argues that if it is likely that my endorsement of the pottery experts belief leads to truth, then my inference from her expression and reliability to knowledge-attribution— “a belief-endorsing policy is reliable just insofar as it is likely to lead to truths” (1995: 901). But, how would I, the attributor, make out such a policy? It could only be by having a mutual understanding of the concepts involved in the perceptual reports. But, as we saw above, there are reasons to see the pottery expert’s tokenings of merely as expressions of her reliability. As such, we might wonder if they are reports at all. However, if we consider such states reports, then why would we want to deny that the pottery expert would have an awareness of her states as being reliable. It is not as if she is non-consciously experiencing Aztec potsherds.

One problem with Brandom’s view is that it rules out the possibility that one at times entertains sentient perceptual states. It makes the idea of one’s sapient awareness of states basic to the states as conceptual states. This is clear in Brandom’s presentation “No Experience Necessary”: “the only sense of ‘immediate awareness’ we need in order to understand our perceptual knowledge of the world around us” (2000(online): §2) is the reliable differential responses to apply concepts. [There are theories of perception that involve an inference (conscious or non-conscious) in the transition from the perceptual state to the consciousness of that perceptual state. It is not clear, however, that Brandom considers the possibility of a non-conscious transition, because for Brandom, a non-conscious transition would be a sentient inference, and inferences are what distinguish sapience from sentience. This might keep Brandom from considering an ability that at some anthropologically prior time, had an inferential or expressive role, that came to have a reporting role, i.e., the possible inference from seeing to seeming-to-see.] To be aware of something is just to apply a concept to it, and nothing else. Brandom faces a worry that one finds oneself as a sapient creature and thus possessing full-fledged human knowledge is “a favor from the world” (1995: 878). Simply by becoming trained as a sapient creature, in Brandom’s reliabilism, a subject is guaranteed to inhabit only sapient states. This is an implausible position about sapient awareness, as it denies the idea that being conscious of a perceptual experience is thinking about it in some respect.

Why might Brandom’s view be construed as a type of internal reliabilism? Brandom wants to avoid the implications of internalist reliabilism, i.e., that knowledge implies knowledge that one has knowledge. We saw above, that we need to assume that a report indicates the existence of a sapient commitment; if one can make a full-fledged conceptual claim about one’s perceptual “experience” then one is likely conscious of that experience. Now, the difficulty for Brandom arises. Let’s return to the pottery expert and assume that she has a sapient belief . Now, assuming that she has had sapient perceptual states of seeing Aztec potsherds, it seems a short step to saying that she would at some point recognize, at least understand, her reliability. [If not, then learning is done blindly and equally becoming conscious is a type of blind differential response training.]

This should not be taken to suggest that knowledge should be considered to be internal to the perceptual state of the knower, but it also should not rule out the type of critical reflection that is distinctive of concept use. Brandom (2000(online): §1) places his position in line with the type of Davidsonian and Sellarsian position that McDowell lays out in Mind and World. It is a position that only involves a causal constraint rather than a rational constraint from experience. Every perception, i.e., every language entry transition “stands at the end of a whole causal chain of reliably covarying events, including a cascade of neurophysiological ones” (2000: 206n7). This places Brandom alongside Davidson and Sellars spinning in the void in which all that can justify a belief is another belief. For Brandom, what makes a belief true is its role in inferential practice. This raises a serious issue for the attributor of commitments to the pottery expert.

How does the attributor recognize a reliable belief-forming process as reliable? First, the rule that is provided for the attributor cannot fall into the two problems that Brandom faces in specifying rules in Ch. 1 of Making it Explicit. The pottery expert’s belief cannot be construed as a mere regularity, otherwise the rule may be reduced to law. If that it is possible to reduce the belief to a law, then the attributor (as was shown above) may have reason to attribute a sentient belief*. It the rule is a general explicit rule, then Brandom faces the gerrymandering problem, in which the description of the process can make any belief reliable. Also, the description that the attributor provides cannot be too general, such as “A reliable process is one that reliably produces true beliefs.”

What types of commitments should we attribute, i.e., what is the description of the process under which the pottery expert does have knowledge. The difficulty that Brandom faces here arises from his social perspectivalism. This position does not allow for a definite answer and the demerits of social perspectivalism fall on the attributor. The attributor will believe that the pottery expert is utilizing a reliable process and infer that she has knowledge. It is a problem for Brandom if the attributor does not (in principle) have a way to type processes accurately. At this point, relevance to reference classes will only complicate things, because it is a short step to the claim that the attributor should take that process to be reliable that she should take to be reliable specified by her context.

There may be a way to offer an emendation of Brandom’s view to obviate these difficulties. First, it seems correct to say that one at times achieves a normative status of a knower but for which one cannot occurrently give a reason. But, one should be able to give a reason, because one that is in the business of giving and asking for reasons is also ipso facto a semantically self-conscious being (McDowell, 1997: 162). This means that there is a transcendental requirement upon inhabiting conceptually articulated states that one has engaged in some type of semantic critical reflection, according to McDowell. That seems to be all that is required by Sellars’s reportability condition. [One could argue this by showing that knowing-that is a forming of thinking-that, i.e., making a claim about one’s experience that is directly related to the world as facts or states of affairs. The minimal thinking-that in the reportability condition could be construed as “thinking that one is reliable,” being conscious (i.e., as a type of knowing-with) of one’s reliability, where one might recognize that one is in the “in” crowd, i.e., the space of reasons.]

What is important for Sellars and McDowell is that one make a perceptual transition from a seeing to a seeming-to-see. That is what is constitutive of sapient perceptual experience. Brandom makes the mistake of getting rid of the logic of “looks”/“seems”/“appears” for the logic of “inference X is reliable”. Instead, Brandom makes the perceptual tokenings of concepts, e.g., and the awareness of perceptual tokenings of merely a matter of stimulus-response dispositions. If we want to articulate reliability, then we cannot place the constraint upon outside the space of reasons.

Brandom is merely talking in the dark when he places strong stress on a truth-requirement implicit in the concept of sapient belief. Coming to have a perceptual belief cannot guarantee truth with a mere likelihood of being true. This is why McDowell writes the following, “so far from providing a first glimpse of the world-directedness of (empirical) conceptual content, I think Brandom’s treatment of observation reports makes empirical content unintelligible” (160-1).
I agree with McDowell that Brandom’s reliabilism places a too huge burden on the attributor to be able to spell out the reliability of tokened contents of . McDowell suggests that Brandom’s perspectivalism keeps the putative reporter from being able to have a perspective on his or her own reports. We, therefore, do not get an anchor in the relationship between the reporter, the attributor and the facts they are conferring about. In order for the pottery expert and her colleagues to stand on the same normative ground, some type of semantic self-consciousness needs to be assumed. I would suggest that “it appears to one that one sees X” is prior to “one infers that one sees X”. One cannot enter and make a language entry transition in the game of giving and asking for reasons until one recognizes the game has begun, and part of recognizing and acknowledging the game is being conscious of the game in the first instance.

One thing we can do is keep the conversation with the pottery expert going. The putative knower says something. What does she say? Now, in answering this question, given the resources of Brandom’s reliabilism, we are forced to either turn her into a parrot (indicator reliabilism) or make the pottery expert hyper-aware of the content of what she says (internalist reliabilism). The minimal requirement of her commitment is that she must at least understand what she says. But, then why does the attributor in understanding what she says accrue a further access to the reasons for what she says? It seems clear that the possibility of the attributor and the attributee understanding what is said presupposes that each have access to reasons. To allow such access does not necessarily lead us to an interiorization of the space of reasons, rather it allows us to be aware that we are within such a space, and makes our reflection on our belief-acquisition, specifically empirical beliefs, indebted to that space.

Brandom’s issue with Sellars, we saw, is that the putative knower on Sellars’s view is required to be able to “inferentially justify the non-inferential claim” (1994: 217). First, it is not clear that Sellars internalism requires one to be able to inferentially justify one’s report. There is a way to describe the transition from a seeing to a seeming-to-see that is either non-inferential (direct) or inferential (indirect). If we focus on seeming as a state of one’s assessments of one’s own experience in an indirect i.e., inferential way, then it seems too stringent to expect a perceiver to be able to inferentially justify one’s report. But, if we explain seeming-to-see in terms of a once-inferential-but-now-directly-accessible relationship to one’s perceptual states, then the requirement is not too stringent. It involves attributing states at the level of dispositions to respond (what is expressed non-verbally (e.g., swerving when a car door opens while biking) or verbally (e.g., trained responses of parrots (and children)) and awareness of those states at the level of reports.

This modification signals that reports are not merely indicative of the language entry transition as a set of laws for stimulus-response mechanisms as Brandom suggests. Rather, reports are indicative of a relationship to one’s perceptual states, i.e., a relationship of being conscious of those states. And as such, they are rule-governed transitions, not law-governed transitions. But Brandom could equally respond that his transitions are not meant to be merely causal inputs and equally causal outputs. But, then he is forced to accept that reasons are something different in kind than causes in such a way that forces the pottery expert’s beliefs into the void.
We have seen that notwithstanding Brandom’s suggestions, experience is necessary to account for perceptual knowledge. Maybe we do not need a concept as robust as Sellars’s notion or McDowell’s (minimal?) notion, but at least some notion of semantic self-consciousness is necessary, i.e., how it “seems” (in Sellars’s sense) for one to see an Aztec potsherd. I think the strength of transcendental empiricism is in construing consciousness itself, a seeming-to-see within the space of reasons, just like any claims about experience. Even if dispositions to become conscious of perceptual tokenings have become well-worn in our mental economy, that does not mean we can spend them without reason.

Brandom would probably not rush to accept this emendation, since the emendation implies that a theory of experience is necessary to make his reliabilism successful. As he notes in his note in Articulating Reasons, “‘Experience’ is not one of my words” (2000: 205n7) and that in using the phrase “perceptual experience” he is speaking with the vulgar. But, if his only other options are speaking with parrots or speaking to himself while spinning in the void, then speaking with the vulgar is not so bad. It may be especially charming considering he would be in the company of Kant, Sellars and McDowell. For inferential reliabilism to have objective import, i.e., to engender claims about the world, it should be explicated in a logic that implies that there is a difference between seeing and seeming-to-see, a logic that engages with the semantics of appearance talk. Any logic that incorporates that distinction guarantees that a theory of experience is necessary.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Armstrong, D. (1961). Perception and the Physical World. London: Routledge.
Brandom, R. (1994). Making it Explicit Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Brandom, R. (1995). “Knowledge and the Social Articulation of the Space of Reasons” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 55.4: 895-908.
Brandom, R. (1997). “Study Guide” In Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. pp. 119-181.
Brandom, R. (2000). Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Brandom, R. (2000(online)). “No Experience Necessary: Empiricism, Non-inferential Knowledge, and Secondary Qualities” [online—www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/representation/papers/BrandomNEN.pdf]
deVries, W. and Timm Triplett (2000). Knowledge, Mind and the Given: Reading Wilfrid Sellars’s “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co.
Goldman, A. (1976). “Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge” In The Theory of Knowledge Ed. Louis Pojman. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth
McDowell, J. (1999). “Sellars’s Transcendental Empiricism” in Realism, Rationality and Revision Walter de Gruyter, Berlin and New York, 1999, pp. 42-51.
McDowell, J. (1994). Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
McDowell, J. (1995). “Knowledge and the Internal” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 55.4: 877-893.
McDowell, J. (1997). “Brandom on Representation and Inference” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 57.1: 157-162.
Rosenthal, D. (2005) Consciousness and Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Sellars, W. (1956). “Empiricism and Philosophy of Mind” In Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Sellars, W. (1963). Science, Perception and Reality. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul

The Phenomenological Body Program

Day One

This conference examines contemporary and historical phenomenological approaches to the body and embodiment and offers alternative accounts that engage with or criticize the phenomenological approach.

Conference Program Day 1

10:15 a.m.: Opening Remarks

10:30–11:45 a.m.: Avram Blaker (Temple University)
“Higher than Facts, Lower than Essence: Ambiguity, the Body, and Objectivity in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology”
Response: Matt Congdon

12:00–1:15 p.m.: Frances Bottenberg (Stony Brook University)
“The Case Against Disembodying Descartes”
Response: Joshua Pineda

3:00-4:15 p.m.: Maxwell Tremblay (The New School for Social Research)
“Coherence and Collectivity: Fanon and the Limits of the Individual”
Response: Bill Remley

4:30–5:45 p.m.: Michael Brownstein (Penn State University)
“Does Scholarly Knowledge Ruin Bodily Knowledge? On the Relationship between Embodied Understanding and Social Theory”
Response: Mark Theunissen

6:00–8:00 p.m.: Hubert L. Dreyfus (UC Berkeley)
“The Myth of the Pervasiveness of the Mental”

Day Two:

This conference examines contemporary and historical phenomenological approaches to the body and embodiment and offers alternative accounts that engage with or criticize the phenomenological approach.

Conference Program Day 2

12:00–1:15 p.m.: Michael Butera (Virginia Tech)
“A Phenomenology of Sensory Loss: The Late-Deafened”
Response: Anna Strelis

1:30–2:45 p.m.: Alisa Mandrigin (University of Edinburgh)
“Body as Subject and Object”
Response: Janna van Grunsven

3:30–4:45 p.m.: Gabriel Gottlieb (The New School for Social Research)
“Eye, Mind, Body: Fichte on Human Embodiment”
Response: Karen Ng

5:00–7:00 p.m.: Jay M. Bernstein (The New School for Social Research)
“Rape: Notes Towards a Moral Ontology of the Body”

Location: 6 East 16th Street, Rooms 906/913 Admission: Free; seating is limited; reservations required by emailing

Contact Information: nssrphilconference@gmail.com

The Phenomenological Body

At the New School for Social Research, there will be a conference called The Phenomenological Body: Its Spaces and Limits on March 26-27th, 2009 ... Dreyfus is the keynote speaker. I will be working on my paper on the Dreyfus/McDowell debate on bodily awareness this month, so check back for a discussion of that debate, and in April, a report on what will hopefully be some interesting discussions with Dreyfus at the conference.

new philosophers' carnival

here.

The Varieties of Experience

The University of Glasgow Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience is holding a conference called "The Varieties of Experience." McDowell fans interested in writing about McDowell's moral realism might reflect on the relationship of his moral realism to his conceptualism about perceptual experience.

Here's the description with Descartes's snappy rendering of vision:




"In recent years there has been renewed interest in the idea that we can talk legitimately about perceptual, or perception-like experiences, that don’t relate to any of the sensory modalities, traditionally conceived: moral experiences, aesthetic experiences and experiences of agency have all been touted as perceptual, or at least, perception-like. This renewed interest has been complemented by more general work on the nature of perceptual experience.

Under this heading, the Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience at the University of Glasgow is holding a Graduate Conference on this subject, and we invite papers on the subject of the varieties of experience: possible topics include, but are not limited to, moral experiences and related themes in ethical intuitionism, aesthetic experiences, experiences of agency, synaesthesia and synaesthetic experiences, perceptual disorders such as blindsight, the individuation of the senses, perceptualist approaches to pain, the content and epistemological significance of moral and agentive experiences, as well as papers dealing with the nature of perceptual experience more generally."

The Engaged Intellect

A new anthology of McDowell's Essays:

The Engaged Intellect

Table of Contents:

I. Ancient Philosophy

1. Falsehood and Not-Being in Plato’s Sophist
2. Eudaimonism and Realism in Aristotle’s Ethics
3. Deliberation and Moral Development in Aristotle
4. Incontinence and Practical Wisdom in Aristotle

II. Issues in Wittgenstein

5. Are Meaning, Understanding, etc., Definite States?
6. How Not to Read Philosophical Investigations: Brandom’s Wittgenstein

III. Issues in Davidson

7. Scheme-Content Dualism and Empiricism
8. Gadamer and Davidson on Understanding and Relativism
9. Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective

IV. Reference, Objectivity, and Knowledge

10. Evans’s Frege
11. Referring to Oneself
12. Towards Rehabilitating Objectivity
13. The Disjunctive Conception of Experience as Material for a Transcendental Argument

V. Themes from Mind and World Revisited

14. Experiencing the World
15. Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind

VI. Responses to Brandom and Dreyfus

16. Knowledge and the Internal Revisited
17. Motivating Inferentialism: Comments on Chapter 2 of Making It Explicit
18. What Myth?
19. Response to Dreyfus

• Biography
• Credits
• Index

• 

Having the World in View

McDowell's Woodbridge Lectures are now available in book form with other essays:

"Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel and Sellars"


table of contents:

I. Having the World in View: Sellars, Kant, and Intentionality

1. Sellars on Perceptual Experience
2. The Logical Form of an Intuition
3. Intentionality as a Relation

II. Kantian Themes in Hegel and Sellars

4. Hegel’s Idealism as a Radicalization of Kant
5. Self-Determining Subjectivity and External Constraint
6. Sensory Consciousness in Kant and Sellars
7. Conceptual Capacities in Perception

III. Reading Hegel

8. The Apperceptive I and the Empirical Self: Towards a Heterodox Reading of “Lordship and Bondage” in Hegel’s Phenomenology
9. Towards a Reading of Hegel on Action in the “Reason” Chapter of the Phenomenology
10. On Pippin’s Postscript

IV. Sellarsian Themes

11. The Constitutive Ideal of Rationality: Davidson and Sellars
12. Why is Sellars’s Essay Called “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”?
13. Sellars’s Thomism
14. Avoiding the Myth of the Given

• Bibliography
• Credits
• Index

the upsurge of spontaneity

a paper to be presented at the central APA on the Dreyfus-McDowell debate:

Andreas Elpidorou (Boston University): “The Upsurge of Spontaneity: The Role and Place of Merleau-Ponty in the Dreyfus-McDowell Debate.” Paper 2 in Session II-F, ‘Continental Philosophy’ (Friday 9:00 a.m.)

Elpidorou's abstract from the proceedings:

In a multifaceted debate between Dreyfus and McDowell, Merleau-Ponty has been unambiguously placed on the side of the former. In line with Dreyfus, Merleau-Ponty holds that conceptual activity is founded upon a pre-thematic and unreflective engagement with the world. Spontaneity, they both agree, is the result of the transformation of the non-conceptual to the conceptual. In what follows, I argue that Dreyfus's account of this transformation is only partially in agreement with the one advanced by Merleau-Ponty. More explicitly, I demonstrate that whereas Dreyfus holds that the difference between the nonconceptual and the conceptual is a difference in kind, Merleau-Ponty puts forth a more nuanced explanation of the relationship between the two: Namely, by arguing that the two differ both in degree and in kind, Merleau-Ponty does away with the exclusive dualism that Dreyfus inherits by maintaining a difference in kind, which is a radical or categorical difference.

obscure comment by Leiter...

In a recent article on the state of the vocation of philosophy in The Philosophers Magazine, Brian Leiter makes the following comment about McDowell: "There are perhaps a handful of living philosophers who can even pretend to dominate the central issues in the field – the nature of truth, knowledge, and value – like the recently deceased. John McDowell at the University of Pittsburgh stands out in this regard, though the range of philosophical opinion about his work is so wide that it is hard to see him occupying anything like the place of the recently departed. (A famous and influential philosophical naturalist, for example, refers to him as “McDarkness,” which is indicative of the extremities of opinion about his philosophical merit.)" While Leiter is correct that the range of opinion is wide, this does not mean that he will not hold a place in the canon like the recently departed, e.g., Davidson, Hempel, Lewis, Quine, Rawls, PF Strawson. The comment in parentheses shows that Leiter is not inclined to explicate "the range of opinion" but would rather focus on the negative opinion. However, instead of providing reasons for this opinion, he quotes an ad hominim remark by "a famous and influential philosophical naturalist," whose name does not appear. Fame and influence do not provide reasons, neither to accept the undisclosed figure's opinion nor to accept that 'McDarkness' is a fitting name for McDowell. That I am even considering whether I should agree with Leiter's nickname for McDowell may be a sad reflection of the state of the vocation. And, highlighting someone's nickname for McDowell doesn't indicate the extremities of opinion, but merely one extreme.

i'll be in greece, writing...

because it is the will of the gods...

i'm working on a paper for this contest called: "the superiority of anti-constructive naturalism" which defends McDowell's naturalism

University of Kentucky
Sixth Annual Prize Essay Competition in
European Philosophy from Kant to the Present


QUESTION: Is any Variety of Naturalism Superior to Others?


This topic may be addressed historically, systematically, or through any combination of these two approaches. The winning essay will receive a prize of $1000 and, upon recommendation of the selection committee, be published in Inquiry. The author of the winning essay will also be brought to the University of Kentucky in the Fall of 2009 to present it.

The winner of the first four annual Prize Essay Competitions were Sami Pihlström (University of Helsinki), Robert Guay (Binghamton University), Helder De Schutter (University of Leuven), and Herbert de Vriese (University of Antwerp) for their essays “Recent Reinterpretations of ‘The Transcendental’ Revisited” (Inquiry 47, No. 3 [2004]), “The ‘I’s Have It: Nietzsche on Subjectivity” (Inquiry 49, No. 3 [2006]), “Nations without Nationalism” (Inquiry 50, No. 4 [2007]), and “The Myth of the Metaphysical Circle” (Inquiry 51, No.3 [2008]). The prize essay selection committee declared no winner in the fifth competition.

Essays will be judged by a process of blind review. Submissions should be appropriately formatted for such a process, with the author's name and other identifying information appearing only on a separate cover sheet. Essays should be double spaced, in English, and no more than 8000 words in length. Past and present faculty and students at the University of Kentucky are ineligible to compete. Submissions should not have been previously published or submitted for publication.

The deadline for submissions is March 1, 2009. Essays should be submitted in triplicate in typed (hard copy) form to Ms. Katie Barrett, Department of Philosophy, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506-0027 USA. No electronic submissions please.

page 123 meme where there should be philosophy

Self and World tagged me with this meme, so in the spirit of playing along...

• Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages)
• Open the book to page 123
• Find the fifth sentence on that page
• Post the next three sentences
• Tag five people

the nearest book is Jennan (J. T.) Ismael's "The Situated Self" which is a book I will be discussing at some point on this blog and am reviewing for Metapsychology.

Here's the three sentences: "I have been speaking as though the problem of establishing internal relations between properties exemplified by experience of different subjects is a purely epistemic one, that is, that there are facts about whether your green experiences are like mine, but it just happens that we have no way of ascertaining them. God could tell, as we might say, were he to look. That suggestion was supported by the examples" (pg. 123).

This passage, as you might infer from the examples mentioned is in a section on inverted spectra, which I have yet to read... so I will not comment on it.

But, it occurs to me that quoting passages out of context is a strange practice. And this type of practice is of a piece with strange fascinations with lexical pastiche, numerology, and hypertext connections. If I didn't think it would inspire a Pynchonesque paranoia in readers I probably wouldn't engage in it, but in the hopes that a strange emergent phenomena will spring from this...

The other books that might have been in the running, but I wasn't touching them at the time (ha... "the nearest book," as if there isn't always one in my hands...): Campbell's "past, space and self" (a must-read); Lycan's "consciousness and experience" (a don't-read); and Hurley's "Consciousness in Action" (an absolutely-must-read)...

Anyway, I hereby tag: duckrabbit; the space of reasons; grundlegung; a brood comb; and philosophy sucks.

another hiatus

i apologize for the recent most prolonged hiatus from spontaneity&receptivity. i have been writing my dissertation and have not been focusing as much on McDowell as i had originally planned. i intend to return to commentary on McDowell as time affords... another reason for my hiatus is my recent travels exploring first nature and bodily intentionality...

mcdowell and dreyfus responses on "the myth of the mental"

It’s been a long time coming, but I’m wrapping up my running commentary on the McDowell/Dreyfus debate by commenting on both responses. After which, there will be an blog-afterparty over at Gabriel’s blog “Self and World” where the McD/D debate is also discussed....

“Response to Dreyfus” by McDowell

What still remains unclear in this debate is McD can discuss mindedness in terms of an activity, rather than as detached from activity. D. doesn’t understand what it means for mindedness to be involved in an activity UNLESS it can be observed phenomenologically to be present in the activity. The proper response is registered here, because McD explains how the actualization of a concept in action (the intention in action) might be realizing the concept: “Realizing such a concept is doing the thing in question, not thinking about doing it” (367).

McD is correct in arguing that the Knoblauch case “cannot show that mindedness is not in operation when one is immersed in embodied coping. When Knoblauch still had the bodily skill that he lost, his mindedness was in operation in exercises of his skill. His throwing efficiently to first base was his realizing a concept of a thing to do” (367).

McD seems to accuse D. of a subpersonal/personal level conflation in that D. is comfortable with a bodily limb realizing means-end reasoning, whereas, McD wants to preserve the idea that an agent moves her limb, the limb doesn’t move the agent. As I said in an earlier post, D. does talk as if perception and action can be described as bubbling up from the level of solicitations of absorbed bodily coping to the level of experience.

McD’s point against D.: “I am the only person-like thing (person, actually) that is needed in a description of my bodily activity. If you distinguish me from my body, and give my body that person-like character, you have too many person-like things in the picture when you try to describe my bodily doings. And the need Dreyfus thinks there is for this awkward separation of me from my body reflects a conception of mindedness that I think we should discard.” Again, this is to show that any subpersonal/personal level explanations that attempt to register what the body does in perception or action as opposed to what the individual does in perception or action as distinct is just replicating Cartesian dualism, specifically property dualism...

The basic differences between D. and McD are the following:

(1) D. maintains a dualism between the unreflective bodily engagement cast in terms of a distinction between solicitations and affordances or between bodily schemas and intellectual activity, whereas McD does not maintain this dualism, instead insisting that engagement with affordances is a form of spontaneity engaged with receptivity in operation. The practical form of spontaneity for McD is neither means-end reasoning qua inference-making nor after-the-fact justification/rationalization of such action, but instead intention-in-action, elucidated further here.

(2) D. maintains a subpersonal/personal distinction which is theoretical in the sense that the bodily schemas represented in NCC are the source and allow for the emergence of CC which is at the level of reflective thinking, since D. continues to infer from CC to reflective thinking— attending, focusing, etc., whereas McD does not create this distinction and would rather remain at the commonsense personal level, even for non-human animals...

“Response to McDowell” by Dreyfus

First, readers should read note 1 carefully, in which D. admits that H. did think there is an as-structure to coping, and McD is charged with a phenomenological point that this requires concepts, but McD’s point is not phenomenological, but instead transcendental. I cannot make this point here, but it should be noticed that a card-carrying Kantian might think that the phenomenology that D. tends to engage is problematic since introspection confuses the level of reflection in inner sense with the level of transcendental psychology (cf. Anthropology AA VII: 133). Regardless, what McD is concerned with is what must be there in order to make sense of such coping being human coping, not coping (absorbed or not absorbed) of a reflecting phenomenologist.

In a sense, this is actually closer to H.’s point, since what must be in order to is really being as being. D. nevertheless still continues to suggest that demonstrative concepts are occurrently applied in active coping, rather than dispositionally applied, and so rules out McD’s position. But, the point that McD makes over and over in Mind and World and elsewhere is that if the content of experience CAN be characterized with demonstrative concepts, then there is no reason to think it is not conceptual.

D. makes an interesting turn in talking about capacities since this solves the worry above: Capacities are exercised on occasion, but that does not allow one to conclude that, even when they are not exercised, they are, nonetheless, ‘‘operative’’ and thus pervade all our activities. Capacities can’t pervade anything, D. argues. So, to describe the status of concepts that are somehow ‘operative’ even when they are not ‘experienced’ as operating, McDowell introduces the technical term ‘conceptuality’ (p. 1). In a way, however, this makes D.’s account of the Aristotelian notion of capacity or ability very important in that if the conceptual is an activity, then D. is merely assuming that activity cannot be operative or cannot be in the realm of facts or states of affairs.

But, McD allows them in, so, we have another difference between them. This can become clearer if we notice that McD’s notion of Aristotelian activity/capacity as it is developed in the concept of second nature is a dispositional account. Maybe this entire point is also related to the question of whether D. needs to describe things synchronically, because he is doing phenomenology, while McD only needs to account for the undertaking in general, rather than the occurrent undertaking of the subject. But, I’m not sure.

Here’s D.’s subpersonal/personal conflation coming through: “The coper does not need to be aware of himself even in some minimal way but only needs to be capable of entering a monitoring stance if the brain, which is comparing current performance with how things went in the past, sends an alarm signal that something is going wrong. Then one becomes attentive to one’s performance and one is solicited by the situation to make appropriate adjustments.” (374).

Couldn’t the same question be asked, “is this part of the phenomenology?” Unlikely... again, on 376, D. assumes that attentive experience and attendant ego must be realized as operative in receptivity, either of perception or action, but this is not necessary... I don’t want to suggest that McDowell must develop an account of dispositions, capacities, activities etc. to make the point, but it would have helped if he had just run through that Aristotelian influence as a reminder, rather than ignoring D.’s point.

Both the “Wittgenstein on Following a Rule” paper and the “Two Sorts of Naturalism” paper could have made a lot of disagreement clearer. I think McD’s view is horizontal in the sense that his account of unreflective bodily activity is on a continuum with reflective intellectual activity, while D.’s view is vertical in the sense that his account of bodily activity is described on the level of NCC (the body) and CC (the mind), and so D.’s view preserves a dualism that McD’s doesn’t.

incomplete but potentially useful topical map of mind and world

LECTURE 1: CONCEPTS AND INTUITIONS
§1: Introduction of the Kantian Dictum
§2: the dualism of coherentist scheme and Given
§3: why the Given is useless for its purpose
§4: cooperation of spontaneity and receptivity
§5: active/passive and inside/outside of experience
§6: Davidson’s coherentism
§7: Private Language argument and the Given
§8: reiteration of oscillation
Afterword Part I: Davidson in Context: 1-9
LECTURE 2: THE UNBOUNDEDNESS OF THE CONCEPTUAL
§1: reiteration of the oscillation and diagnosis via inextricability of S&R
§2: the charge of idealism
§3: Wittgenstein’s fact ontology
§4: inner experience; outer experience
§5: the sideways-on picture
§6: inner experience and objectivity conditions
§7: demonstrations and the little ‘g’
§8: the charge of anthropocentrism
§9: Kant on spontaneity
LECTURE 3: NONCONCEPTUAL CONTENT
§1: reiteration of the oscillation and the conceptual
§2: Evans on the content of experience
§3: inner experience, AGAIN!
§4: Evans’ view, the Myth of the Given?
motivations for non-conceptual content
§5: fineness of grain argument
§6: belief-independence argument
§7: non-linguistic animals argument
Afterword Part II: postscript to L3: 1-5
LECTURE 4:
§1: Reiteration of the Oscillation between Davidson and Evans
§2: Evans’ conception of dumb animals.
§3: The dualism of disenchanted nature and spontaneity as sui generis
§4: Bald Naturalism
§5: Rethinking Nature
§6: Responsiveness to meaning and the constitutive ideal of rationality
§7: Aristotelian Second Nature as a remedy
§8: Naturalism as Second Naturalism
LECTURE 5:
§1: reiteration of the oscillation emphasizing Bildung and Meaning
§2: the kantian dictum of agency
§3: naturalized platonism and LW’s quietism
§4: kant on reason and nature
§5: kantian second nature and the ‘I’
§6: confusions about the conceptual...
Afterword Part III: Postscript to L5: 1-5
LECTURE 6:
§1: reiteration of the oscillation emphasizing rational animals
§2: Kant and the modern predicament of the subject
§3: the openness of experience and dissolving skepticism
§4: perceptual capacities of non-human animals and the environment/world distinction
§5: duplicating the “inner environment”
§6: Nagel and subjectivity/proto-subjectivity
§7: the evolution of spontaneity
§8: language as the repository of tradition
Part IV: Postscript 1-4:
1. Aristotle’s innocent naturalism
2. Brutes don’t have absolute spontaneity
3. language as the repository of tradition and later Davidson
4. tradition

Dreyfus on The Return of the Myth of the Mental

In the intro, D. admits agreements and disagreements. He admits that McDowell rejects the baleful interpretation of Aristotle in which phronesis is overly intellectual and not situation specific.

The basic point here that needs to be made more clearly is that in understanding the operation of phronesis in the ethical case, one needs to grasp a general principle, e.g., stealing is wrong, perceive the situation as a situation that counts as stealing and make the inference that one should not steal in this case. These stages of grasping the general, perceiving the particular, and applying the general to the particular might be situation-dependent in that the second phase is pivotal to the operation of phronesis. That is the import of McD’s emphasis on moral perception in his articles not only about Aristotle’s ethics, but also about his account of secondary qualities in his making room for moral realism.

The explanation for a failure of bodily coping in D.’s critique is the involvement of reflection or what McD calls “reflectiveness” (82). D. says, “situation-specific mindedness, far from being a pervasive and essential feature of human being, is the result of a specific transformation of our pervasive mindless absorbed coping.” (353). D. thinks that the phenomena of bodily coping “show that embodied skills, when we are fully absorbed in enacting them, have a kind of non-mental content that is non-conceptual, non-propositional, non-rational and non-linguistic" (abstract).

McD. rightly accusses D. of not being able to distinguish between the coping of expert humans and the engagement of non-humans with their environments. If D. thinks that the “free distanced orientation” that allows humans to be initiates in the space of reasons/concepts/freedom is not involved in the human case, then there seems to be no difference between human animals and non-human animals. D. says, “we have the capacity to step back and reflect but I think it should be obvious that we cannot exercise that capacity without disrupting our coping.”

But, McD.’s account does not need minimizing in this way from occurrently exercising the free, distanced orientation to the capacity to exercise it, since McD is clear that spontaneity qua phronesis is a capacity or disposition to take up the posture or stance that is indicative of the space of reasons. And, in discussing the Knoblauch example, D. shows his tendency to make a real distinction between body and mind: “There was nothing wrong with Knoblauch’s body; he could still exercise his skill as long as the situation required that he act before he had time to think” (354).

Why not say that there was something wrong with his body (for any lack of competence or tendency towards performance error is ultimately a problem of the body). Knoblauch failed to exercise his skill and ability because he was introspecting his perception of his body or trying to introspect the skill or ability, and such introspection interferes with the exercise of the skill or ability. In a sense, Knoblauch is applying a concept to the activity of throwing to first– the concept “pay attention” or “focus on the mechanics”– where that concept interferes. But, that doesn’t mean that because applying those concepts makes the activity fail that the activity is non-conceptual.

The basic point is that D. is confusing conceptualized bodily coping and introspected bodily coping, since he thinks that McD is committed to not being able to explain the Knoblauch problem. The activation of conceptual capacities in perception or action require only that we have the capacity to take up a free distanced orientation on occasions where there is something amiss. That’s why it is a “standing obligation” (81) to reflect rather than a persistent command to reflect.

There seems to be further evidence that D. accords the solicitations/affordances distinction in parallel with his body/mind distinction. According to D., M-P and H conceive of affordances in terms of solicitations not as affordances that are part of the world of perceivers/agents.

The figure that D. employs shows the contrast as a difference in what McD and M-P admit into the world. According to M-P the system of solicitations brought about by attractions and repulsions are non-rational, so according to M-P they cannot be as McD puts it a rational openness to the layout of reality. Here, M-P makes openness to the world a matter of our bodily openness, but nothing else. It is interesting also, that Dreyfus details the openness that M-P allows in terms of a normative set of relations.

Though normativity may ultimately be a matter of attractions and repulsions, why should we begin at that level of description? D.’s picture cast in terms of M-P’s notion of solicitations really rules out affordances as McD thinks of them, since it rules out legitimate spontaneity, in the sense of freedom to reflect upon one’s affordances as allowing (or disallowing) some perception or action. For D., solicitations bubble up for us into affordances, but the demands and requests of solicitations do not allow the questionability and answerability that spontaneity requires. Demands and requests are not simply brute impacts on our bodies (though they may be at a certain level of description); demands and requests sometimes afford the subtlety of response that rational questions and rational answers involve. And, D. seems to rule this out.

D. assumes that activity in which things are going well always lacks mindedness and activity in which things are not going well always forces us into a level of mindedness involving attention, focusing, etc. But, neither of these assumptions can be made good unless we MUST think that absorbed bodily coping is non-conceptual and unless we MUST think that bodily coping actualizing conceptual capacities always involves occurrent reflection. But, neither of these seem to be legitimate assumptions.

D. doesn’t notice adequately that these are the assumptions that make his view different from McD’s view. Instead, he says, “I can now sum up our differences: McDowell, following Kant and Sellars, claims that our ‘‘openness to the world’’ is that of subjects, rational by nature, directly open to an already determinate, rational, unified world. These subjects can then focus on and make explicit the implicit data and features their attention reveals. Following Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, I claim that affordances can indeed be experienced as data or features in a world of facts permeated by mindedness but that this objective world and its conceptual order presupposes a preobjective/presubjective world. That world is opened up by our body’s responses to solicitations drawing it to maintain and improve its grip on what, on reflection, we take to be the determinate, unified, namable, and thinkable, objective world.” (360).

D. continues to infer from conceptual capacities being operable in receptivity, specifically in the receptivity of unreflective bodily coping of skill-exercising experts, that this involves “paying attention” (361), but McD explicitly says it doesn’t. D. points out that M-P is committed to in his two-tiered conception of the unreflective bodily coping by way of body schemas and the ascension to the conceptualization of such intentional NCC. “The world of solicitations, then, is not foundational in the sense that it is indubitable and grounds our empirical claims, but it is the self-sufficient, constant, and pervasive background that provides the basis for our dependent, intermittent, activity of stepping back, subjecting our activity to rational scrutiny, and spelling out the objective world’s rational structure.” (363)

But, this pictures the subject actually living in two worlds, the world in which our bodies respond to solicitations in the way of attractions and repulsions, and the world in which these solicitations are translated, deciphered, transmuted into affordances of an objective world. It is not only that D. here is making a real distinction between body/bodies on the one hand and mind/minds on the other, but also is falling into the myth of the Given, since there is notion of the data or features that are covered up by a “cryptomechanism” of perception. This is the outer boundary that characterizes the Given.

And, D.’s reinstatement of the veil of perception is not any longer a veil of ideas, or secondary qualities, or perceptual mechanisms, but instead “indeterminate solicitations to act” (259). These indeterminacies may be theoretically necessary to someone concerned with explaining the necessary conditions of perception and action— remember, in McD’s case he fully welcomes non-conceptual content in that sense, which is just the material conditions of perception— but, D.’s attempt to make this follow from the phenomenology of perception seems absurd.

I’m not sure why we should follow D. in thinking that the content of the experience of perception and action involves such solicitations, unless we thought it necessary to accept his two-tiered approach of bodily solicitations and rational affordances. And to read such a story into the phenomenology of that experience just seems like bad phenomenology.

mcdowell on intention in action

here.

McDowell on The Myth of the Mental

McD locates the charge that D. lodges against him as being that mind is pervasive in perceptual experience. The myth of the mental is supposed to be something that both M-P and H. would disagree with since M-P rejects intellectualism and H. rejects characterization of objects in terms of present-to-hand properties.

McD responds first to the charge that unreflective bodily coping (UBC) is not a part of perceptual experience, but he only says it must be conceptual. D. thinks that rationality is situation-dependent, but McD rejects the assumption that McD thinks it is situation-independent. There is no reason why McD couldn’t agree with Aristotle’s notion of living the fulfilled life (recently quoted in a Visa commercial): Being well, or living the fulfilled life is reacting and acting towards the right persons and things, in the right degree, at the right place and time, for the right causes and reasons, in the right way.

McD agrees fully with H’s interpretation of phronesis and rejects D.’s assumption that practical reasoning is detachable from reason in action or spontaneity. D. saddles McD with a detached conception of rationality that is neither his own nor in his interpretation of Aristotle, nor really is properly Aristotle’s. We can see this through an exegesis of the ordinary word “habit.” McD is correct to point out that D. makes the distinction between situation-dependent exercise of practical reason and the conceptual rationality which is situation-independent, i.e., either reasoning prior to an action or rationalizing posterior to an action.

As I said in my last post, actualization of conceptual capacities, whether in perception or action are not prior, posterior or really even occurent. McD’s view of concepts is a dispositional view. McD also disagrees with D.’s charges about humans and non-human animals, saying “there are descriptions of things we can do that apply also to things that other animals can do.” Humans are open to a world and non-humans merely inhabit an environment (343).

However, McD also makes room in this Gadamerian distinction for the idea that humans qua rational animals share affordances with non-human qua non-rational animals. Such affordance-sharing does not mean that our engagement with affordances need be understood in a two-tiered theory that D. ascribes to M-P and H and offers Todes’s account as the best exemplification. This merely assumes that there is a basic lower story captured in mere responses to a nonconceptual given that surfaces in an upper story that enables a rational openness to a world. No matter how much you fill in the details or flesh out this view, there is always the question of whether we must be committed to entertaining such a view in the first.

Instead, it should be that the rational openness to the world is an engagement with affordances as affordances from an environment that enables a world rather than merely an environment. Grasping such affordances can be situation-dependent and allow an orientation to world which is permeated with mindedness. It is unclear what distinctive phenomenology D. is drawing on that makes it plausible to say that unreflective bodily coping is nonconceptual, in the sense that it doesn’t involve the use of concepts or rationality. Much of the problem with the debate between McD and D. is actually that McD is providing arguments (mostly transcendental) and D. is providing phenomenological descriptions, and while these two methodologies are not incompatible, the differences between their methodologies at times make them talk past each other.

And regardless, even if we agree on what phenomena are relevant to the discussion, e.g., Chuck Knoblauch’s loss of throwing ability (if you look at his stats, there is a discernible difference between 1998-2000), speedchess players, there is still a question of whether we need to feel motivated by some non-ordinary reasons to accept that theory-building of the sort D. recommends is in order. And, reliance on phenomenology doesn’t determine this...

Another way to put this is: just because you ask nurses, cakebakers, chessmasters, or artists etc. “are you conceptualizing, thinking, reasoning about what your doing?” in the distinctively answer-priming way, and they respond as if their hearts-in-practice modes of activity would be put in question, that “of course not,” then they have provided the transcendental argument that experience is non-conceptual. McD’s best claim in this regard is “an implication of this for perceptual content can be put like this: if a perceptual experience is world-disclosing, as opposed to belonging to the kind of coping with a mere environment that figures in the lives of creatures lacking orientation towards a world, any aspect of its content is present in a form in which it is suitable to constitute the content of a conceptual capacity” (346).

McD also allows, however, (as he has in many other places) that there is such a thing as non-conceptual content, but that if there is it refers not to anything intentional, but to the material of perception. It is for this reason that when someone argues that McD’s account of perception and action doesn’t involve sensation, they must be confused about his view. McD admits that the matter of experience is non-conceptual and that this is what we share with non-human animals, but the form is conceptual. The difference between human sensibility and non-human sensibility is a matter of degree in the structuring of the matter of experience.

I think McD is correct to locate another difference between he and D. in the problem that D’s phenomenological leanings give rise to: D separates the I from the experience such that the I is taken to be something which merges with “this body.” It’s not as if “this body” is has an independent character apart from oneself as embodied in general. And, regardless, D. is wrong to think that just because the M-P and H are phenomenologists, that they’ve got the phenomenology correct.

Dreyfus on The Myth of the Mental

Dreyfus (D) contrasts McDowell’s (McD) account with the phenomenologists Merleau-Ponty (M-P) and Heidegger (H) by claiming that their takes on existential openness to the world, both in perception and action, are not conceptual, whereas McD’s is resolutely conceptual.

I know next to nothing about M-P, but I think D’s reasons for thinking H holds a non-conceptual view of perception and action are flawed, because ready-to-hand doesn’t mean non-conceptual, just not reflective. Dreyfus argues that the proper account of Aristotle’s notion of phronesis is not conceptual, but instead follows H’s interpretation of phronesis: “understanding that makes possible an immediate response to the full concrete situation.” D. suggests that H’s interpretation does not involve concepts, reasons, or freedom even, so McD’s account is too strong.

D. says, “in assuming that all intelligibility, even perception and skillful coping, must be, at least implicitly, conceptual – in effect, that intuitions without concepts must be blind, and that there must be a maxim behind every action– Sellars and McDowell join Kant in endorsing what we might call the Myth of the Mental.” (6-7)

But, the Kantian point that concepts and intentions must be operative/actualized in perception and action does not rule out the possibility that perception and action could be automatic, fast, non-conscious, or any of the other below-the-line notions that D. employs in his examples. D. contrasts the Kantian account with examples of expertise in which reflective gets in the way, or is not involved, or doesn’t phenomenologically enter the experience. So, chessmasters move pieces automatically, quickly, without reflecting on the layout of the chessboard.

D. wants to infer from this, “thus phenomenology suggests that, although many forms of expertise pass through a stage in which one needs reasons to guide action, after much involved experience, the learner develops a way of coping in which reasons play no role.” D. is arguing that since cyclists, nurses, and chessmasters cannot express reasons for their tactical rule-following, they must not have conceptual activity going on, but instead are merely responding to the situation unreflectively.

But, the question is: What is the best way to describe these phenomena? Must we describe such activity in terms of non-conceptual content? Must we describe such activity in terms of conceptual content? One of D.’s questionable assumptions is that the activities aren’t within the space of reasons because one is not aware of a prior intention or posterior rationalization, but that is not McD’s assumption.

McD could freely agree with D. on the first have of this point: “These features [affordances], although available to the perceptual system, needn’t be available to the mind.” According to D, the chessmasters take on the layout of reality is intentional but not conceptual, since it doesn’t involve being able to label the activity with a word. But, D. doesn’t have good reason to think that Heidegger’s account is necessarily non-conceptual?

Further, he doesn’t have good reason to think McD’s notion of conceptual activity is ALWAYS open to reflection, rather than that its paradigm exercises are open to reflection. D. thinks that conceptual activity (in perception and action) doesn’t involve thinking, intending, noticing, attending... But, it is not clear that McD thinks it always does on robust senses of this family of terms.

All McD has to argue is that for Heidegger and Aristotle on phronesis, the understanding required is a form of know-how and conceptualism is compatible with such know-how in a way that D. fails to allow, partly because of the conception of conceptual activity he foists on McD. And, it is not a benefit of D.’s view that he needs a theory following Todes: “a detailed phenomenological account of how our embodied, nonconceptual perceptual and coping skills open a world, and then to suggest a possible answer to how such skills could be transformed into skills with conceptual content.”

But, why think this is necessary? Why should we think that Heidegger’s ready-at-hand and present-at-hand distinction is a basing, transformative, or transactional account between the nonconceptual and conceptual? D. is trying to motivate the need to explain the relation between being-in-the-world as nonconceptual engagement and being-rational or thinking-in-the-world as conceptual activity.

But, what motivates the need to ask what makes possible conceptual activity as based on nonconceptual engagement, unless we accept this dualism? It is really Dreyfus’ notion of thinkingly understanding that commits him to this two-tiered program, and to a form of dualism of the conceptual and merely negatively defined non-conceptual.

kant on "global representations" and McDowell's self

I just finished reading (for the second time) ch. 2 of Andrew Brook’s Kant and the Mind in which he elucidates the idea that the self of transcendental apperception, or the I-as-subject, or what he calls “a single complex representation called a global representation” (13). Brook defines a global representation as “a representation that has a number of particular representations and/or their objects or contents as its single global object” (33) and a single global representation as “an intentional object that represents a number of intentional objects and/or the representations that represent them, such that to be aware of any of these objects and/or their representations is also to be aware of other objects and/or representations that make it up and of the collection of them as a single group” (33). I don’t want to get mired in Kant scholarship, or the specifics of Brooks taxonomy that allows him to elucidate many important points in Kant’s theory of mind, but I do want to not a pivotal difference between Brooks view of the global representation and McDowell’s insistence in Lecture 5 of Mind and World what a desirable Kantian interpretation and Kantian account of the self of self-consciousness would involve. McDowell’s desire in Lecture 5 §5 is to “allow the connection between self-consciousness and consciousness of the world, which figures in an equivocal way in his thinking, to take a satisfactory shape” (99). I don’t think that Brook’s interpretation of transcendental apperception or what he calls ASA or apperceptive self-awareness allows such a desire to be realized. And one major reason for this is that Brook’s notion of a global representation cannot capture something I take to be pivotal in understanding TA and ASA. Here is a hypothesis: Kant’s notion of transcendental apperception or global representation is a worldview, or as McDowell puts it: “a singled out tract of a life” (103). We might interpret that singled out tract of a life quite generally, in the sense of a general experience or a possible experience in Kant, and then we can situate self-consciousness in a wider context, the context in which being a subject in the world requires a variety of conditions to be met: that one exists in a natural world that appears in space and time, that is partially determined by the material objects that are presented in receptivity and partially determined by actualized forms or structures of experience provided by spontaneity, and further that possessing unity of consciousness involves actually realizing a synthetic unity. This synthetic unity must capture the pivotal importance of productive imagination, which might involve enacting a procedure in which one actually traces out an ordinary path through the objective world. In this sense, being aware of oneself as oneself is not the product of a global representation in the sense in which an individualist like Brooks likes to put it (despite his desire to rid himself of commitments to homuncular functionalisms), but instead is the product of a global representation in the sense in which we creatures living this form of life, possessing these bodies, using these tools, e.g., language, pictures, hammers, dishwashers, inevitably unify our experience given these structures as conditions. In this sense, the unity of nature is prior to the unity of consciousness, and the outer limit of the unity of nature is the practice that McDowell calls “spontaneity-at-large.”

online videos of philosophy lectures

Some very interesting links to lectures and conferences on philosophy and cognitive science:
http://broodsphilosophy.wordpress.com/2006/06/15/online-videos-of-philosophical-lectures/

mcdowell and vehicle externalism

McDowell thinks that it is not necessary to infer that because intentional content is externally constituted, its vehicle is necessarily external. But, McDowell’s reason for avoiding this inference from content to vehicle is his anti-scientism. He viewed the only option for a vehicle as some internal representations or cognitive processes “in the head.” Rather, his argument is really the mind is not anywhere, so the mind is not “in the head.” If there are architectures or implementation or realizations that are not “in the head,” but nevertheless enable us to make sense of the conceptual ability for self-consciousness, then we can adequately capture the Fregean picture, yet not be committed to vehicles as organs (whether material or immaterial).
The vehicle is only minimally individual, by which I mean it might be realized as skills and abilities of the creature. This is made available by an interpretation of Putnam’s notion of mental occurrences as the operation of skills and abilities in “Brains in a Vat”: “attempts to postulate special mental objects, 'concepts', which do have a necessary connection with their referents, and which only trained phenomenologists can detect, commit a logical blunder; for concepts are (at least in part) abilities and not occurrences. The doctrine that there are mental presentations which necessarily refer to external things is not only bad natural science; it is also bad phenomenology and conceptual confusion.”
Such skills or abilities that constitute self-consciousness are procedural schemata, rather than occurently realized representations. This goes against the hypothesis that self-consciousness is realized in representations in the individual, e.g., in the individual’s brain or body.
We benefit from not positing self-standing inner representations that allow the individual to reflexively self-refer. McDowell’s analysis of Putnam’s argument suggests that we should make room for the idea that the content of the mind, the self, the mental life, is external to the individual. McDowell’s argument suggests that the content of mental states might be conceived as external, though McDowell does not extend content externalism to the vehicles of those thoughts.
His suggestion comes by way of a reminder (Since McDowell hardly ever makes claims or positions, because of his desire to avoid constructive philosophy, but instead assembles reminders, so we should be hesitant in saying that he is committed to any ‘-isms.’) that on a certain interpretation of Frege’s theory of content (specifically arming Frege with the Russellian conception of singular thought), we are not forced to accept internalist assumptions about mental content. This leaves the burden of proof with the internalist to show that the mind, and an important feature of mindedness, e.g., self-consciousness, cannot be in any way external to the subject S.
But, the “in the head” metaphor can be difficult to deal with without a literal interpretation, so part of the hard work is making sense of what “in the head” is taken to mean. Ultimately, the desire for a literal interpretation of “in the head” makes us look for a corresponding organ for the mind to be in, whether material, e.g., the brain, central nervous system, or for Aristotle, the heart, or immaterial, e.g., immaterial substance.
According to McDowell, there is a confusion in the very idea of looking for a vehicle when we talk about “the mind” or “the self,” since strictly speaking the most we can achieve is that mental life “takes place where our lives take place” (281). But, as saw in §3, the position of vehicle externalism about skills and abilities might enable us to provide a more detailed account of this vague notion of “where our lives take place.” If we can supplement this notion of “where our lives take place” with where we exercise the skills and abilities that constitute self-consciousness, then we might develop an adequate vehicle externalism about self-consciousness.

abstracts from mcdowell conference in 2005

here. some abstracts of papers delivered. after the conference the papers were published (with other papers whose abstracts are missing here) in European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 14, Number 2, August 2006.

Michael Williams

Science and Sensibility: McDowell and Sellars on Perceptual Experience

John McDowell’s Mind and World has three main elements: a problem, its solution and an account of the deep background to the problem that explains why McDowell’s solution is either not considered or dismissed. In developing these elements—and particularly with respect to the first two—McDowell generously acknowledges his debts to Sellars, though he also puts forward some serous criticisms of Sellars’s final position. So how close are Sellars and McDowell. A case can be made that they are very close, especially if we look beyond Mind and World to McDowell’s Woodbridge Lectures. We can, it seems, find Sellarsian anticipations of all three elements in McDowell’s view. But appearances are misleading. Sellars and McDowell are at odds in fundamental ways, and their differences spring ultimately from deeply divergent conceptions of the task of philosophy in our time.

Kenneth Westphal

Contemporary Epistemology: Kant, Hegel, McDowell

McDowell and I agree that (1) we need a socio-historically grounded epistemological realism; (2) Kant’s and Hegel’s theories of knowledge are of extraordinary contemporary importance because they contribute so much to understanding how a realist account of human knowledge can recognize the deep and pervasive socio-historical dimensions of human knowledge; and (3) twentieth century epistemology has greatly impoverished itself by neglecting or misunderstanding Kant’s and Hegel’s epistemologies. Recently McDowell (2003) revisited Kant’s and Hegel’s views in order to ‘retrace, more carefully’ some of his remarks about them in Mind and World. I focus on McDowell’s recent statement. I argue that McDowell has not yet plumbed the core issues and views of Kant’s and Hegel’s epistemologies, and consequently has not yet recognized those aspects of their views that are most important for his own epistemological project. These include: The Co-extensiveness of Understanding and Sensibility (§2), Identity and Predication (§3), Objective Purport and Kant’s Transcendental Deduction (§4), and Proving Mental Content Externalism Transcendentally (§5).

Willem deVries

The Reflexive and the Sensory in Transcendental Empiricism

John McDowell is right to argue that, like himself, Wilfrid Sellars is also a transcendental empiricist (even if ‘transcendental empiricism' seems to be an oxymoron). McDowell locates the source of Sellars's transcendentalism in his rejection of atomism. I argue that in order to understand why rejecting atomism is not the same as rejecting empiricism itself, one must look closely at the specific character of Sellars's holism. This is principally determined by a set of reflexivity requirements on the linguistic, the conceptual, and the epistemic. These reflexivity requirements, in turn, are rooted in Sellars's conception of the normative. Finally, only against this background can we really see what is at stake in Sellars's and McDowell's differing treatments of the sensory.

Charles Travis

A Worldly Bearing

‘Representation in appearance’ is my name for this idea: for things to appear as they do in a visual experience is for things to appear as if they are a certain way; thus, for them to appear as they thus do is for it to be represented as so that things are that way—a case of truth-evaluable representation. That view is espoused in various places by John McDowell. Aside from reasons for supposing so, he has a motive: the idea is required if experience is to bear rationally on thought. (It is agreed on all hands that thought can be about the way our environment is—can have empirical content—only if experience does rationally so bear.) Against this I will argue two things. First, there is nothing in appearances of any sort to make for representation of anything as so; and there is no such representation in experience outside of our representing it to ourselves as so that such-and-such (our taking things to be so). Second, the rational bearing of experience on thought, or, more to the point, the rational bearing of the world, through our experience of it, on thought, in no way requires, nor is even facilitated by, representation in appearance. There is an idea behind this felt need for representation which can be put thus: only what is conceptually structured can bear rationally on something: rational relations are, in the nature of the case, between things conceptually structured. But that is just not so.

Naomi Eilan

Objectivity and Bifurcationism

On one view, what gives us a grip on the idea of a mind-independent world is our commitment to its describability from no point of view. On another, what gives us a grip on the idea of a mind-independent world is our capacity to employ a primitive theory of perception, in virtue of which we think of our perceptions as explained jointly by the way the world is and our own position in it. My question is: to what extent, and in what sense, is the latter a serious alternative to the former? Some of McDowell’s most powerful arguments against the possibility of an absolute conception are extensions of his arguments about the distorting effects of combining bifurcationism about ethical concepts with appeals to the absolute conception in framing questions about the reality of ethical value. I will be suggesting that when we try and extend these arguments to similarly structured debates about the location of consciousness in the world, we see that appeal to the primitive theory only provides a serious alternative to the absolute conception if we think of the demonstratives deployed in the theory as mediated by experiences that are both world-dependent and concept-independent.

Barry Smith

False Modesty

As part of his quietism, John McDowell has long advocated a certain modesty in the theory of meaning. It should not and need not explain what it is for words and sentences to have the meanings that they do. Instead, a theory of meaning for a language must take for granted its speakers' abilities to use sentences of the language with the meanings described. Michael Dummett has argued that as an account of what it is to grasp these meanings the account is circular, and his fundamental charge is that it offers us no insight into what it is to grasp the meanings of sentences. McDowell rejects his objections on grounds that Dummett wants, per impossible, an account of what it is to speak a language given from outside language and content. I show that without endorsing Dummett's demands one can still press his objections and that we can and should try to explain what it is for our words to have the meanings they do. The recommended modesty is false.

Bill Brewer

Perception and Content

It is close to current orthodoxy that perceptual experience is to be characterized, at least in part, by its representational content. I call this the Content View (CV). (CV) faces a dilemma concerning the relation between this content and the conscious nature of such experience - the fact that perception presents us directly with the constituents of the physical world themselves. I start with a paradigm case of representation in linguistic thought, and describe the ways in which McDowell qualifies it in order to capture this conscious presentation in perceptual experience. The resulting view retains two features of the starting paradigm, though, which I argue constitute a fatal obstacle to any version of (CV): first, the possibility of falsity; second the involvement of generality. Although the former is often thought to be an advantage in providing a natural description of perceptual illusion, I argue that it is neither necessary nor satisfactory in this regard. The latter involvement of generality is the source of the former possibility of falsity. I argue that it constitutes the fundamental error in (CV), by importing into the account what is rightly to be regarded as an intellectual response to what is strictly presented in perception, rather than anything essential to its basic nature.

Jennifer Hornsby

Knowledge and Action

I'll claim that it is to the detriment of much recent philosophy of action that it fails to treat human agents as possessing knowledge. I'll connect this claim with themes in McDowell.

condensed summary of putnam's "Brains in a Vat"

This summary is only tangentially related to Mind and World, but McDowell does say in "Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space" and in "Putnam on Mind and Meaning" that Putnam's discussion and rejection of the assumed magical connection between mental representations and the world both inspired McD. Ultimately, McD thinks that Putnam did not take this view far enough. It should also be noticed that in "Putnam on Mind and Meaning," McDowell offers a criticism of Putnam's narrowly conceived notion of conceptual abilities: Putnam's account "obliterates a perfectly workable conception according to which exercises of concepts are, for instance, acts of judgment, intrinsically possessed of referential bearing on the world" (1998: 289n22).

Putnam’s response to the skeptic is generated by a form of semantic externalism. His rejection of the skeptic’s skeptical alternative relies upon the notion that the existence of meanings and concepts rules out the possibility that SK presents. Really, he is ruling out that such possible-SK can be meaningfully formulated. Putnam argues against the skeptical possibilities by arguing that if they obtained, then our concepts would be different, and thereby our beliefs would be different. Suppose, the possible-SK is that we are Brains in a Vat (BIV). If BIV is true, then I can “say” and “think” “I am a brain in a vat.” But, my words do not mean the same thing as they do if BIV is false. If BIV is false, then “I am a brain in a vat” has concepts which may have an external relation to objects in the world, for if the statement is to be false, it must be meaningful. If BIV is true, then my mental terms only refer to the images or appearances of such objects, not the objects themselves. So, if BIV is true, then when we say, “We are BIV” we are not brains in the image. If BIV is false, it is epistemically impossible that we are BIV. The claim that Putnam is making is that the hypothesis BIV is self-refuting. The self-refutation derives from the fact that the claims that people make in BIV cases, e.g., “I am an envatted brain” do not refer. This is supported by Putnam’s arguments that no piece of representation intrinsically refers, partly supported by the idea that “meanings aint in the head” or there are no intrinsically representational mental representations. if there were intrinsically referential mental representations, then the skeptic could argue that the claims made in the vat do not refer to the image or the appearances in the vat, but to actual vats, in which case the BIV cases would not be self-refuting. Putnam notes that “If we are brains in a vat, then “We are brains in a vat” is false. So it is (necessarily) false” that we are brains in a vat. So, skepticism cannot get off the ground. Possible-SK are not possibilities at all, since it is necessary that SK is false.

idealism as anthropocentrism

McDowell considers an objection that his view is a form of idealism because it commits him to anthropocentrism. This is only a form of idealism if the claim that the world is within the reach of OUR human concepts is coupled with the idea that there is an “end of inquiry." But McD thinks that there is no end of inquiry. Instead, we have a perpetual obligation to reflect “on the credentials of the putatively rational linkages that, at any time, one takes to govern the active business of adjusting one’s world-view in response to experience” (40). Our exercise of spontaneity requires ongoing and arduous work. Does this really answer the charge? After all, the claim is not that McD's view is a idealism because he implies that humans can possess infinite conceptual reach. Instead, the charge is that there is a difference between on the one hand, the battery of concepts available to humans and therefore the world available to humans, and on the other hand, the battery of concepts available to non-humans and therefore the world available to non-humans. The intuition of the charge of anthropocentrism is that fashioning a systematic view of the world in which humans' conceptual facility is prior to any other view, whether that of cats or of scientific martians, leaves talk of the world as talk of the human world, which slights the independence of reality as radically non-human-involving.

demonstrations and the little 'g'

In L2§7, McDowell discusses appeal to a bare presence. In the recent literature on demonstratives, there is a tendency to take demonstrations for granted, as if demonstrations can be understood independently of interpretation of their significance. For McDowell, demonstrations can count as reasons, but we fall into the Myth of the Given if we suppose that they are appeals to something “outside the sphere of thought.” It is likely that demonstrations need to be articulated to possess conceptual content or even that the action itself has a conceptual structure. But, I cannot make sense of what that conceptual structure would be. I suppose pointing or ostension does have a certain structure. According to McDowell, justifications can perfectly well include “pointing out from the sphere of thinking, at features of the world” (39). In this respect, McDowell is comfortable with the idea of the little 'g' given. We just shouldn’t think that the pointing reaches out “through a boundary that encloses the sphere of thinkable content” (39).

experience and secondary qualities

It can seem difficult to make sense of the passivity of experience for experiences which are defined in terms of our inner awareness of them. The hardest case is secondary qualities: “what it is for something to be red, say is not intelligible unless packaged with an understanding of what it is for something to look red” (30). But, McDowell offers a transcendental argument for the dependence of “inner experience” on “outer experience” (30-34). What exactly are secondary qualities? There is a Lockean distinction between secondary qualities and primary qualities that needs to be explained. If we assess Locke’s view of primary and secondary qualities, then we might understand how McDowell uses this notion. Ultimately, Locke thought that primary qualities were real, mind-independent objects, e.g., solidity, figure, motion/rest, and secondary qualities were unreal, mind-dependent objects. McDowell argues that there is a way of making sense of secondary qualities in which they are a product of human sensibility, but NEVERTHELESS real. Primary Qualities (real): What cause ideas in our minds, e.g., solidity, extension, figure, mobility. Secondary Qualities (not-real): The sensual qualities produced by primary qualities, e.g., colors, sounds, tastes, smells, textures. Powers to Produce or Tertiary Qualities: Primary qualities have the powers or dispositions to produce secondary qualities in our minds, e.g., fire turns wood black or porphyry causes eyes to see white. Are Tertiary qualities as real as Pq or Sq? McDowell ultimately takes this dispositional notion to define his notion of secondary qualities: “a subjective property, in the relevant sense, is one such that no adequate conception of what it is for a thing to possess it is available except in terms of how the thing would, in suitable circumstances, affect a subject– a sentient being” (1998: 113) or “a secondary quality is a property the ascription of which to an object is not adequately understood except as true, if it is true, in virtue of the object’s disposition to present a certain sort of perceptual appearance: specifically, an appearance characterizable by using a word for the property itself to say how the object perceptually appears” (1998: 133). According to Locke, primary qualities remain in objects despite division, and are mind-independent: “really in them, whether we take notice of them or not” (II.23.ix). Examples are solidity, extension, figure, motion/rest and number. Secondary Qualities are “...ideas [that] are not in the things themselves otherwise than as anything is in its cause” (II.23.ix) and are Mind-Dependent. Examples are colors, sounds, tastes, etc. McDowell defines secondary qualities as non-erroneous dispositions of objects to appear a certain way perceptually. On one interpretation of Locke’s view secondary qualities represent primary qualities, but are strictly speaking false. For McDowell, “what it is to be, say, red is not adequately conceived independently of the idea of looking red” but looking red need not install the veil of perception between secondary qualities and primary qualities. That colors are not intelligible apart from a standpoint independent of certain forms of (human) sensibility is no indication that colors, and other secondary qualities aren’t real. Colors are properties to which suitably educated concept-users can be privy to. Is this true even for the application of color concepts in inner sense, or in the stage of “mental images”? Take the following examples of things we say: “He was so angry at Joe Torre, that he saw red”; “She was so depressed about the Yankees’ losing that she felt blue” In these cases, we’re operating with a concept in inner sense, which is roughly synonomous with the realm of “mental images.” These concepts can only get a grip in inner sense, if the person has an outer sense use for “red” and “blue.” McDowell offers a transcendental argument from some fact of experience, e.g., the application of concepts in inner sense to a condition or presupposition of that experience, e.g., the application of concepts in outer sense. The wrong view runs the explanation the other way round. It assumes that inner experience is autonomously intelligible and then projects this experience onto the world. So, for instance, it assumes that redness is a property of inner experience that requires no explanation from outer experience. But, this leads us to think that secondary qualities are projected upon an independently existing world made of primary qualities. But, we have to make sense of the possibility of sensory objectivism without falling into projectivism or bald naturalism. One way to read McD’s account of secondary qualities is to read him as making sense of objectivism with projectionism. Evans says that making the leap from subjective to objective requires making “sense of the idea of a property of redness which is both an abiding property of the object, both perceived and unperceived, and yet ‘exactly as we experience redness to be’” But, McDowell thinks that the notion of an abiding property of an object is unnecessary, since such things cannot be made sense of as being brutely there—independently of our sensibility. Such sensibility is dependent upon the application of concepts in experience, which cannot be understood apart from the activity of adjusting to the space of color concepts. In outer experience, a subject is “passively saddled with conceptual contents, drawing into operation capacities seamlessly integrated into a conceptual repertoire that she employs in the continuing activity of adjusting her worldview” (31). Operations of inner sense, no matter how “subjective” depend upon spontaneity at large. Spontaneity-at-Large is a system of concept users, conceptual abilities, and concepts which is “medium within which one engages in active thought that is rationally responsive to the deliverances of experience” (34). Making sense of how empirical content is possible requires making sense of the the dynamic place that self-critical activity of spontaneity-at-large plays in the construction of a worldview out of what impinges on our senses. But, this cannot be explained by a “sideways on” view. The causal theory of content suggests that coming to understand or interpret another speaker/thinker involves adopting the sideways-on view: the system of spontaneity-at-large within a boundary and the world outside it. “When the specific character of her thinking starts to come into view for us, we are not filling in blanks in a pre-existing sideways-on picture of how her thought bears on the world, but coming to share with her a standpoint within a system of concepts” (35-36). According to McDowell, “inner experience” which is just a content which does not have existence independently of the awareness that the experience constitutes, e.g., “I have a headache,” needs to meet an objectivity condition. “What that requires is that the subject must understand her being in pain as a particular case of a general type of state of affairs, someone’s being in pain” (37). In order for a concept to meet the generality constraint it needs to meet the following condition: S possesses P only if S can apply P to a, b, c...and S can apply other concepts, for instance Q to a, b, and c. So, even such limiting case applications of concepts in inner experience need to meet the generality constraint.

davidson's "coherence theory of truth and knowledge"

Davidson’s argument in this essay is lodged against skepticism. But, also against Rorty’s pragmatist account of anti-skepticism: Davidson defends a coherence theory of truth that is not incompatible with Rorty’s but in fact yields a minimal correspondence theory that ties intentional content to truth. He argues that the common ground for the theories are considerations of meaning and the objective truth-conditions that state when meanings are given. Coherence, then, is supposed to be a test for both truth and the judgement that objective truth-conditions are justified, yielding what Davidson calls a ‘non-confrontational’ correspondence and a realist stance in all departments involved. We will discuss skepticism in terms of a skeptical possibility, e.g., that I am a brain-in-a-vat. Call this skeptical possibility, SK. The argument against SK is motivated by what Davidson takes to be certain facts about meaning, i.e., that meaning is best understood in terms of radical interpretation, what it would involve to translate a radically different language into your home language, or vice versa. Davidson suggests that what brings truth and knowledge together is meaning. For D., meaning is defined in terms of truth-conditions, such that the meaning of a sentence S is the objective truth-conditions that make S true. The difficulty is making sense of what the truth-makers of S. D also thinks that truth-conditions are specified by the coherence of beliefs. What gives a sentence S, e.g., “the earth is spherical” its truth is (mostly) the fact that S coheres with our other beliefs. The skeptic would like to argue that “all of one’s beliefs could hang together and yet all be false about the actual world.” That’s what the brain-in-a-vat scenario is supposed to suggest. Davidson argues that from the nature of beliefs that each of our beliefs may be false (local fallibilism), but that it is impossible that all of our beliefs could be false (global infallibilism). This is a transcendental argument of the following form: we possess beliefs, e.g., “the earth is spherical.” (S) The condition of believing S is possessing many other beliefs, “some objects are spherical” (S1), “the earth exists” (S2), and many others. It is possible that one or another of these believes is false, but, we could not make sense of having beliefs at all if all were false. So, not all our beliefs can be false. Davidson now needs to motivate the premise that one belief relies for its content on many other beliefs, or the coherence theory of knowledge. Only beliefs can serve to justify other beliefs. Epistemic justification requires appeals to reasons, and “nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief”. Davidson considers possibilities for “below the line” accounts of justification, accounts that attempt to appeal to something non-epistemic to justify beliefs, i.e., causal accounts of beliefs. He argues that all we have are causal, i.e., non-epistemic relations between “sensation, perception, the given, experience, sense-data, the passing show.” Beliefs about such epistemic intermediaries cannot serve to justify beliefs. Why not? Davidson points out that the issue of justification of our beliefs could be dealt with within the framework of semantic inquiry. D takes the skeptical problem or challenge SK to be countered by the following claim: “someone with a (more or less) coherent set of beliefs has a reason to suppose his beliefs are not mistaken in the main.” Notice that this is a deflationary strategy: the skeptic says, “All your beliefs could be false.” One response is to guarantee the skeptic is wrong by proceeding piecemeal to justify one’s beliefs. This one is true. This one is true. etc. But, Davidson counters the claim by saying, it is not the case that all your beliefs could be false, because the nature of belief suggest that most of our beliefs are true. The argument has two parts. First, consider the following principle: the principle of charity: in interpreting an other’s propositional attitudes, we DO assume that the other’s beliefs are mostly TRUE. Second, for anyone to ask for justification of beliefs or to ask whether her own or someone else’s beliefs are true is to ALREADY know (at least) something about beliefs and the idea that beliefs are in their nature veridical. Davidson claims that if what he says about the connection between belief and meaning is true, then from the perspective of the interpreter most of a speaker’s beliefs are true. As interpreters, we must take the objects of beliefs to be the cause of the beliefs. The skeptic might object that this only shows that the sentences that the speaker believes to be true are true according to the interpreter. But if we imagine an omniscient interpreter that is all-knowing about the causes of a speakers beliefs, the omniscient interpreter would find the speaker to be largely correct and since the omniscient interpreter’s standards are objective and support the fallible interpreter’s attributions to the speaker, the fallible interpreter, e.g., you and I, cannot be completely wrong in our assessments of others or our own beliefs. When we ask the question about whether our beliefs are justified, we need to already have a notion or concept of “belief” that involves the possibility or not of our beliefs jibing with reality. Beliefs just are identified by interpreters by comparing beliefs with causes. A reflection on the notion of belief will show that most of one’s beliefs are true “simply because beliefs are by nature generally true” This goes against the standard form of SK which states that all our beliefs could be false as a corporate body.

the charge of idealism

In lecture 2 of mind and world, McD attempts to obviate the charge of idealism. The motivation for this charge clearly comes from the felt need for rational constraints on thinking and judging, which in the case of the Given, seems to be immediately gratified and in the case of Coherentism, seems to accept that such rational constraints can only be found within the sphere of thinking and judging. Davidson's account illustrates that he thinks we can make do with a causal account of empirical content. What is a causal theory of content? A causal theory of content explains intentional content in terms of the causes of that content. E.g., if my thought has the content that this is a chocolate bunny, and my thought is veridical, then the cause of my thought is the chocolate bunny.
What is wrong with the causal theory of content? Does McDowell think that it is a form of the Myth of the Given? One clear proponent of the causal theory of content is Jerry Fodor. For Fodor, the meaning or content of mental states is based on the causal theory of meaning and reference. The effects, i.e., mental states carry information about their causes. So, if I think that is a chocolate bunny, that is because my thought is caused by the presence of a chocolate bunny. But, causal theories of content cannot account for a basic aspect of mental content: the normativity of mental content. There are occasions which all the proper cause-and-effect relationships are in place, but the reason that the mental content fails to represent its target are correctness conditions, or normative connections and requirements, which are beyond explanation in terms of causes/effects. One especially good discussion is in Evans' "The Causal Theory of Names" in which he argues that cause/effect relationships might be widely unrelated and unreliable, but nevertheless, by that the causal theory of content, the mental state would still hit its target. This ignores contextual features that determine meaning and reference, and makes reference into a bald naturalists appeal to a magic trick. One should also notice that both McD and Evans stress that the initial "revolution" brought on by Kripke's Naming and Necessity in which the causal theory of reference for names is elucidated, Kripke says that the causal theory isn't really a theory just a picture of how we think reference might work. So, how does McD construe content? In terms of things being thus and so. As a past commenter, Michael, pointed out, content is understood in terms of lining up with facts or states of affairs: "the 'empirical content' of any particular perceptual experience will be a fact, or state of affairs that obtains." Does McD think this that facts and states of affairs are the empirical content for all experiences? What about my experience of a pain? Or my experience of a symphony? Or my inference from if A, then B and A to B? These may not seem to have the content "that things are thus and so." In §2, McDowell presents that the content of experience is conceptual. “That things are thus and so is the content of the experience, it can also be the content of a judgment: it becomes the content of a judgment if the subject decides to take the experience at face value. So it is a conceptual content.” (26). Is this a good argument? It doesn't become clear until lecture 3 what is ultimately behind this argument, but notice that deciding plays a pivotal role in determining how we understand what a judgment is. A judgment needs to be something a subject can decide to accept or reject. The content of experience, if it is to enter into a judgment, needs to be something a subject can decide to accept or reject. So, that content must be conceptual. The missing premise is that non-conceptual content is not something a subject can decide to accept or reject, partly because it is a passive move of receptivity to be saddled with non-conceptual content. More certainly needs to be said about Evans' notion of non-conceptual content, outlined in "Varieties of Reference" (esp. Chs. 5, 6, and 7). But, the way that McD conceives of non-conceptual content in this argument is that it doesn't allow us to engage in an open way with the layout of reality.
We might call this the thesis of ontological openness (following De Gaynesford): ontological openness is the view that experience (when veridical) can be not merely “about” or “as of” or “representative of” or “directed towards” how things are, but it can BE how things are. “Experience enables the layout of reality itself to exert a rational influence on what a subject thinks” (26). If idealism is defined as “slighting the independence of reality”, then this could be seen as a form of idealism. Does this view of content that enables the openness of the world to the mind slight the independence of reality? You would only think so if you understood mental states or the contents of mental states in such a way that there nature was to be out of touch with the world. But, what motivation, other than Cartesian assumptions about the mind, do we have to make this assumption? McDowell thinks that if we keep in mind Wittgenstein's (LW) remark that “When we say, and mean, that such-and-such is the case, we—and our meaning—do not stop anywhere short of the fact; but we mean: this–is–so" we might relieve ourselves of the assumptions that are generated by a baleful Cartesian conception of content. As McD suggests LW's remark has “the form of a truism” which suggests that ontological openness is not a theory/account but a reminder that removes philosophical anxieties. This was pointed out recently by Duck here. The focus should be on the nature of content. It is McDowell's criticism of Davidson that he views content as having a dual aspect: on the one hand, the contribution from causal interactions from the world, i.e., the Quinean notion of "empirical significance" and on the other hand, the contribution from rational relations between contents. I think the difficulty that McD has with this notion is that while both stories are operable in Davidson's account, we can never make sense of how either story illuminates the other. McD wants to obviate the dual view, which Davidson says he wants to obviate too in "the Very idea", but ultimately the resolution can only be found through assessing Davidson's view of triangulation. It's not that I don't think Davidson has an answer to McD, I just think his answer is buried in this notion, which so far I am befuddled by... But, for McD the notion of content allows mental content to overlap with reality, so that the causal inputs, while certainly necessary, for after all receptivity is a factor in all contents, is not sufficient since mental content must reach out to the world, and be such that it can BE the content of facts or states of affairs. E.g., think that fall has begun, and that very same thing, that fall has begun, can be the case. I read McD's comments about content as evincing a No-Priority Reminder. There are two poles of concern: Thoughts and Facts. Some theories of content make one prior to the other. The causal theorists makes facts prior, in that they assume that mental contents have information about their causes. Bad idealists makes thoughts prior, in that they assume that mental contents determine the nature of objects. The No-Priority reminder comes in to remind us that there is an harmful ambiguity in the concept of “Thought”:
(1) thought might be understood as an act of thinking
(2) thought might be understood as the content of thinking, i.e., what someone thinks
If “thinkable contents” are substituted for (2), then the independence of reality is not slighted. For what would it mean to point outside thinkable contents, except a bare pointing to a bit of the Given.

how i sometimes feel about mcdowell's use of metaphorical language

mcdowell's priorities

In Lecture III, McDowell summarizes his synthesis of receptivity and spontaneity as follows: “Experiences are impressions made by the world on our senses, products of receptivity; but those impressions themselves already have conceptual content” (46). For McD, experiencing involves free activity of conceptual capacities. McD also separates the use of conceptual capacities from the act of judging, which is more obviously and thoroughly conceptual (cf. the quick argument at pg. 26 ending "So it is a conceptual content") What McD means by “conceptual” is that which is employed in active thinking, i.e., thinking that is open to reflection. In a footnote, McD admits that awareness (consciousness) implies self-consciousness, because all thinking is self-reflective thinking, thinking about what one is thinking. This implies that consciousness is always consciousness that such and such is the case for one. This tells us something about McDowell's priorities viz. intentionality and consciousness: intentionality is cashed out in terms of concept-world relations that are in some sense prior “S is conscious of x” relations, so intentionality is explanatorily prior to consciousness. From the following positions, McDowell likely would choose 'a':

1. Consciousness is explanatorily derived from intentionality.
2. Consciousness is underived and separable from intentionality.
3. Consciousness is underived but also inseparable from intentionality.
4. Consciousness is underived from, inseparable from, and essential to intentionality. (SEP on "Consciousness and Intentionality").
   

mcdowell on the self

In Lecture V of Mind and World (M&W), John McDowell (McD) discusses difficulties that face a Kant’s “merely formal” notion of spontaneity and the self. McD suggests that in order to avoid the implication that intentional action springs from a Cartesian interior realm and that conscious experiences arise from the causal impacts of bare particulars, we need to personify, socialize, historize Kant’s notion of individualistic reason.
McD takes Kant’s (and Wittgenstein’s) off-stage transcendental mind (M&W: L. 5 §4) to pose difficulties for the harmonizing of spontaneity and receptivity, of subject and object, of mind and world. The problem for McD is attempting to situate the subject of experience (both passive and active) in an objective context that provides rational constraint on the subject rather than merely empirical-cum-causal constraint.
On Kant’s model the subject of experience is a formal point outside space-time that is transcendentally affected in receptivity by a supersensible reality, i.e., the noumenal realm (or in unfettered Platonistic realm of reasons/meanings).
To remedy the Kantian deficiency, McD provides a notion of the self that incorporates the following (likely non-exhaustive) features— a self is:
1) a bodily presence in the world (M&W: 91n5 & 103);
2) acquired through Bildung and part of one’s second nature (M&W: 95);
3) a commonsense, ordinary object (M&W: 99);
4) a being that has some form of diachronic identity (M&W: 99);
5) a being that is substantial, i.e., has a non-consciousness-bound persistence (M&W: 101);
6) specified in largely third person terms (M&W: 102);
7) connected to a form of life (M&W: 103 & 2002: 297);
8) more than a merely formal or subjective point of view (101).
McD wants us to recognize that if the self is conceived to have these features the pseudo-problems that the Kantian transcendental framework engenders may be allowed to wither away. What can McD’s notion of spontaneity and the self hope to resolve and are his resolutions successful?
McD wants to minimize the problem by blending three historically rich notions of the self: (1) an Aristotelian conception of a developed practical being with phronesis (constructed in some vague sense by the acquisition of second nature through Bildung, or the cultural formation of the image for one of such a being); (2) a Wittgensteinian naturalistic appeal to biological forms of life (in the externalist-holist spirit of the private language considerations) as a means to situate conceptual and/or linguistic behavior (and for McD, therefore self-consciousness); (3) a Kantian notion of spontaneity (as rational activity), however revised in light of the formality objection, to create a subject that becomes an historicized practical agent, a person or human being rather than a transcendental self. We will elucidate each attempt at resolution (elimination? deflation?) and see that McD’s attempts at resolution cultivate problems.
McD’s first hope for resolution comes as an addendum to Kant’s notion of the subject of experience. McD offers “a pregnant notion of second nature”(M&W: 97) to supply the deficiency— “if we could equip Kant with the idea of second nature, that would not only free his insight about experience from the distorting effect of the framework he tries to express it in; it would also allow the connection between self-consciousness and consciousness of the world, which figures in an equivocal way in his thinking, to take satisfactory shape” (M&W: 99). McD takes Kant’s insight about experience to be captured in the significance dictum, i.e., “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” (CI: A51/B75). McD hopes to preserve the transcendental point about experience, but would rather discard Kant’s formal-logical-transcendental function of the self for an “ordinary self” (M&W: 99). We might read this as an attempt to splice spontaneity (as the realm of concepts) and receptivity (as the realm of objects) and forge a real connection between concepts and intuitions. The remedy of the Kantian lack is of a piece with McD’s description of the onset of conceptual capacities implying the existence of self-consciousness— a necessary condition for one’s possessing concepts (the capacity for rational reflection upon one’s active thought). McD implies that we acquire the faculty of spontaneity (2002: 297)). This acquisition comes through a process of cultural formation (Bildung) in which one becomes an individual-in-a-community rather than (on Kant’s model) a transcendental unity “prior” to experience— “our nature is largely second nature” (87). But, then the problem arises: How does the acquisition of second nature through enculturation provide us with a concept of the self or with the actual status as an embodied self in the world? As critics of McD have shown, the concept of second nature has not given birth to much of a solution. Even when considered as a reminder, if offers only a vague resolution.
McD’s second means of resolution seeks a remedy for the Cartesian inference from a thinking subject to a Cartesian ego. The Cartesian inference provides, McD thinks, the only possible substratum, if we remain within “the flow of “consciousness” itself” (M&W: 101). So, McD’s solution is that we must (sounds programmatic, no?) provide a substantial, objective, “third personal” continuant “with which the subject of a continuous “consciousness” can identify itself” (M&W: 101, my emphasis). McD’s individual, then, is a substantial and persistent presence in an objective world; accordingly, the continuing referent for the “I” in the “I think” should be explicated in solely third-personal terms. The desire to find ordinary material correlates for consciousness and self-consciousness is admirable (even scientifically necessary), but McD’s brusque resolution exhibits a flaw. Notice that McD says, “can identify itself.” Is it up to me? Or my context? Or neuroscientists? McD suggests only that consciousness and self-consciousness needs to have a substantial realization and needs to be understood in third-personal terms. But, that our experience is dispositionally unified is, according to Kant, only a reason to think that something X unites our experience. But, from this claim about a function of consciousness, McD makes the move to pre-established ontological ground for self-consciousness and consciousness. In Kant’s terms, then, McD may commit a paralogism, i.e., an inference to the existence of an object from a mere functional role of a concept— a type of Meta-rule of the mind. One suggestion may be that McD needs to specify the role of the self and self-consciousness in our thought first, and then attempt an adequate program of a wholesale reduction to a bodily continuant— simply claiming that the self is the body does not achieve an adequate instantiation of the Ur-concept . A related point is that any minimal notion of self-consciousness will involve awareness of (one)self. And it’s hard to see how such awareness could fail to be specified initially in first personal mental terms. Simply having intentional states about one’s body is not sufficient for self-consciousness, in a way that thinking about my cat’s body doesn’t make me self-conscious of my cat (or even, necessarily conscious of my cat). So, the hopes of achieving a self-body identity in McD’s terms is problematic. There may be a better way to reject the Cartesian inference without losing the distinctively mental connotation of the concepts and .
The third resolution that McD seeks is an attempt to allow for a subject that possesses a type of diachronic identity, a persisting continuant as a “singled out tract of life” (M&W: 103). McD suggests (rightly) that Kant’s formal notion of the self does not allow us to keep track of a persisting continuant. For McD, this shows that the “I” of the “I-think” is in some sense insufficient in meeting our common-sense notion of our selves as beings with lives that begin at birth and end at death. One of McD’s motivations for holding this ideal is to preserve “the conception of the inner I who is a genuine agent” (1994: 140). The point may be put that Kant (in the First Critique) and Strawson (1966: 72-117, 162-174) are merely providing necessary conditions for a self and self-consciousness, whereas McD attempts to provide sufficient conditions for one’s representations to hang together, i.e., that they inhere in some persistence continuant taken up in a form of life. The third resolution suffers problems. McD seems to confuse the need to provide a notion of self-hood, self-experience, and self-consciousness, on the one hand, and on the other hand, an adequate notion of personal identity through time. It is not clear that McD, in advance, needs to identify the self with a being which continues through time. This confusion is not only methodologically unclear, but it also provides for conflicts within McD’s view. He frames the discussion about the self and self-consciousness in terms of that to which the “I” refers. McD wants to maintain that self-reference is identification-free (following Evans, Strawson (and Kant?)), i.e., there is no need to rely upon criterion of identity when using “I” (M&W: 100: n20 and 102n21). But, if McD’s ordinary self is a persistent embodied object specified in third person terms, then how is such “identification-freedom” preserved? There would be as much immune self-reference as there would be for my reference to my arm (which I take it is within the extension of the “I-as-object” concept). As such, it seems that McD cannot get a foothold for this ID-free self-reference in a singled-out, embodied agent. So, McD mixes issues and hopes to find a ground for the self in a person, but as he admits (1994: 131), the topic of personal identity is far from well-understood and it seems unlikely that we could resolve concerns about the self and personal identity with the same theoretical brushstroke.
McD’s claim that the self should be something that is an embodied and embedded living subject evinces a hope for resolution of the difficulties that a transcendental notion of spontaneity and the self provide a naturalism of second nature. I have tried to show that McD’s resolutions provide new problems, i.e., they are no resolutions at all. To resolve McD’s new problems we might attempt a clearer exposition of how second nature and Bildung lead to the onset of self-consciousness and the possessing of a self— a merely embryonic notion of second nature will not do. Also, resolution may require explication of the self and self-consciousness without a hasty attempt at identification with a substantial human being— we can avoid the Cartesian inference without committing a similar inference to a substantial being. Further, there may be reason to separate our concerns with the self and self-consciousness from our concerns for a public and practical criterion of personal identity. It is seems likely that the best means of achieving this is through examination of the practical nature of the judging self-conscious subject, but regardless of our tack in this sea of problems, it may better suit our purposes to keep hasty metaphysics at bay.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

McDowell, J. (2002). “Responses” In Reading McDowell. Ed. Nicholas Smith. New York: Routledge p. 269–305
McDowell, J. (1994). “Referring to Oneself” In The Philosophy of P.F. Strawson. Ed. Lewis Hahn. Peru, IL: Open Court
McDowell, J. (M&W). Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1994
McDowell, J. (1998). “Having the World in View: Sellars, Kant, and Intentionality” Journal of Philosophy. 65.9: 431–491.
Strawson, P. F. (1966). The Bounds of Sense. London: Methuen.

inside/outside experience

...we are left with a picture in which reality is not located outside a boundary that encloses the conceptual." Reality is inside a boundary "that encloses the conceptual." Later he writes about the conceptual as: "...the conceptual is unbounded; there is nothing outside it."

One (underdiscussed) goal of Mind and World but present in other of McDowell's writings is to do away with (or at least seriously temper) our tendency to use the concepts of inside and outside, interiority and exteriority, internal and external when talking about the mind. To comment on the McDowell quotes above, notice that the space of concepts and the space of the real overlap or are coextensive.

These might be taken to suggest that McD thinks that there is no "inner" and "outer" with respect to the mind. One thing that might be beneficial for readers is to go through McD's use of "inner"/"outer" and "inner sense"/"outer sense" to see how he's using these concepts.

The key sections are: I.7; II; III.3; V.5; VI.5. Another helpful source is McDowell's paper on interiority and Wittgenstein.

Experience is the most important concept in mind and world, and deserves a lot of care. First, experience involves both spontaneity (the exercise of concepts) and receptivity (or the passive intake of sensations). For McDowell, 'experience' is generally used called a success term, meaning that in order for E to count as an experience, the object must be experienced. But, it really has a deeper structure than that. Experiences really have a disjunctive structure, e.g., when I experience a reflection of my face in a pool the structure/content is "that's my face OR I'm hallucinating, it's an illusion, or it's my twin."

One might ask what is the limit to our experience, meaning is there any outer boundary to what can be experienced? To go directly at the question of a limit, what "we" experience is generally determined by a form of life of the species, so in that sense there is a limit. As far as what limits are placed on conceptualizing, there are a few: (1) if something is to count as empirical thought, then intuitions are necessary given the Kantian dictum; (2) language limits what we can conceptualize; (3) we need to make sense of some notion of nonsense as a limit too, which is probably for McDowell cashed out in terms of understanding.

One might also wonder whether reality is there already, but our access (or lack of access) to it is a matter of our limitation. One might wonder this because we abstract our concepts from reality and what we can think is what is real. These are interesting wonderings.

To answer the first part of the question. That the real (facts or states of affairs) is coextensive with the conceptual or that perceptual experience is experience of the world is not to acknowledge the Given, but rather the given (with a small 'g'). (Cf. Mind and World p. 10 at which McD acknowledges a role for givenness.) To acknowledge that thought need not be out of touch with reality is what's required to make sense of how conceptualized (thoughtful) perceptual experience can be in touch with reality.

To answer the second part of the question, concepts are not "taken" from perception, i.e., are not abstracted from the senses. McDowell agrees with Geach that not all concepts can be abstracted from sensory experience. His account of concepts is tied closely to the idea that the use of concepts is paradigmatically the exercise of a linguistic ability. I will outline Geach's argument against abstractionism in another post. For now, it is useful to try to think about the classic abstractionist account of concepts (say in Hume, Mill or Russell) from sensory experience and try to explain how we come to the concepts of numbers, logical constants such as "if" or "or" relying on our senses.

What does McDowell take from Kant?

There are three general considerations that are helpful when talking about what McDowell takes from Kant: (1) the general transcendental strategy; (2) the concepts of spontaneity (and the conception of concepts) and receptivity (and the transcendental empiricist conception of experience); (3) skepticism about the viability of metaphysics (or constructive philosophy).
The first point is captured by McDowell in his discussion in the Intro §9, in which he discusses “How possible?” questions. The general question of “How is empirical content possible?” that pervades Mind and World might be historically related to Kant’s question “How are apriori synthetic cognitions possible?” [Take the example: “A spot in my visual field cannot be two incompatible colors, e.g., red and green, at the same place at the same time.”]
Just like an answer in “engineering terms” (xxi) would not have helped for Kant, a similar answer does not help for McDowell. An answer for synthetic apriori cognition of the incompatibility of colors example in engineering terms would be something that referred to the particles/waves involved in red/green, the composition of the spectrum, our sense organs, visual processing, etc.
An answer for “How is empirical content possible?” might be some account of the “material constitution of...perceivers” (xxi), an account of sensation, etc. I’ve had discussions with many people about McDowell’s account of perception. The most common objection is: How does McDowell provide a theory of perception without accounting for sensation?
It is clear from the transcendental strategy that though it is necessary (and ultimately not very interesting...), an account of sensation is not sufficient to account for the content of perceptual experience. Compare to Kant: an empirical (sensibilist) account of concepts is not sufficient to account for synthetic apriori cognition.
McDowell also borrows from Kant the terminology/jargon that describes empirical cognition: spontaneity and receptivity; understanding and sensibility; concepts and intuitions. The distinction between intuitions and concepts was first introduced in Kant’s Inaugural Dissertation of 1770. Kant also introduces the distinction between sensation and the intellect and the distinction between phenomena (things as they appear) and noumena (things as they are).
In Kant’s “Letter to Herz” (1772): claims that the whole secret of metaphysics is to explain how intellectual concepts which neither produce their objects nor are produced by their objects nevertheless necessarily apply to such objects. Intuitions are defined as our ability to receive representations, i.e., our receptivity in experience; intuitions are products of sensibility and the sensible grounds of empirical knowledge. Concepts are defined as our ability to cognize an object through these representations, i.e., our spontaneity in experience; concepts are rules of the understanding.
McDowell borrows what he calls the Kantian Dictum: “Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind” (A51/B75). It might be useful to compare both Kant and McDowell’s account of the mind to what Aristotle says in De Anima: The mind which is actively thinking is the objects which it thinks. Intuitions relate to objects as singular terms to objects; intuitions “relate immediately to the object and is singular” An interpretative question might be addressed: Are intuitions directly referential non-conceptual representations? Kant suggests that intuitions are phenomenal presentations of objects in sensibility, but nota bene the dictum at A51/B75.
Concepts relate to objects as general terms to objects.
‘Concept’ “refers to [the object] mediately by means of a feature [or marks] which several things may have in common” An interpretive question might be addressed: Are concepts purely descriptive non-sensible representations? Kant suggests that concepts are rules for the application of general terms to objects, but nota bene the dictum at A51/B75.
It would be helpful to our discussion to outline a principle to discuss the Kantian Dictum: The Togetherness Principle (TP): intuitions and concepts are interdependent. The togetherness principle may show that intuitions are not independent of concepts (and concepts are not independent of intuitions).
But, other passages can contradict this:
“objects can indeed appear to us without necessarily having to be related to functions of the understanding” (A89/B122); “appearances can certainly be given in intuition without functions of the understanding” (A90/B1222); “the manifold for intuition must already be given prior to the synthesis of the understanding and independently from it” (B145).
Some have argued that these passages are consistent with the Kantian Dictum because the Kantian Dictum applies only to objectively valid judgments.
Objectively validity is what furnishes the “conditions of the possibility of all knowledge of objects” (A89/B122).
This would suggest that Kant thought there where empty concepts and blind intuitions that were not objectively valid (Bermudez (2003)). But, Kant might argue that such non-conceptual intuitions and non-intuitional concepts may be theoretically problematic and empirically useless. Further, McDowell argues in Lecture III that non-conceptual content is problematic on several grounds. This debate about conceptual and non-conceptual content still continues and is probably the most rigorous debate emerging out of Mind and World.

mcdowell and the identity theory of truth

In mind and world, Mcdowell writes: “there is no ontological gap between the sort of thing that one can mean, or generally the sort of thing that one can think, and the sort of thing that can be the case. When one thinks truly, what one thinks is what is the case. So since the world is everything that is the case (as [Wittgenstein, Tractatus §1] once wrote), there is no gap between thought, as such, and the world. Of course thought can be distanced from the world by being false, but there is no distance from the world implicit in the very idea of thought” (27). There are various theories or accounts of truth. My question about this section is whether the account of truth with which McDowell is operating is the identity theory of truth. If so, what variety? If not, what account of truth is McDowell operating with? Consider this article on the identity theory of truth:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-identity/
written by
Stewart Candlish.
McDowell is not mentioned in the article, except in the title of Dodd’s article, “McDowell and Identity Theories of Truth.” But, notice the following quote by Candlish: “One such pressure is the wish that there should be no gap between mind and world: that when we think truly, we think what is the case.” Also, consider Dodd’s article. Does McDowell hold a robust theory or a modest theory of truth? Is McDowell's account of truth ultimately deflationary?

somewhat helpful stanford articles for mind and world

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-metaphysics/

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sellars/

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/davidson/

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/indexicals/

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justep-foundational/

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justep-coherence/

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism/

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/content-nonconceptual/

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/concepts/

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/content-externalism/

the intolerable oscillation

myth of the mental

myth of the mental

McDowell has published in article in the journal Inquiry call “What Myth?” Here is the abstract:
“In previous work I urged that the perceptual experience we rational animals enjoy is informed by capacities that belong to our rationality, and - in passing - that something similar holds for our intentional action. In his Presidential Address, Hubert Dreyfus argued that I thereby embraced a myth, "the Myth of the Mental". According to Dreyfus, I cannot accommodate the phenomenology of unreflective bodily coping, and its importance as a background for the conceptual capacities exercised in reflective intellectual activity. My paper responds to this accusation. Dreyfus misreads my invocation of Aristotle, and is thereby led to suppose, wrongly, that I conceive rationality as detached, brought to bear on practical predicaments from a standpoint other than one of immersion in them. I urge that even unreflective bodily coping, on the part of rational animals, is informed by their rationality. Dreyfus mentions Heidegger's distinction, which is picked up by Gadamer, between being oriented towards the world and merely inhabiting an environment. But he sets it aside, whereas it is crucial for the issue between us. Engaged bodily coping involves responsiveness to affordances, and responsiveness to affordances on the part of rational animals belongs to their relation to the world. I explain how the idea that conceptual capacities are actualized in our perceptual experience is connected with the thought that our perceptual experience opens us to the world. Finally, I suggest that the real myth in this area is the conception of rationality underlying Dreyfus's resistance to my picture.”

Dreyfus’ article is also included in the journal. Here is the abstract:
“McDowell's claim that "in mature human beings, embodied coping is permeated with mindedness", suggests a new version of the mentalist myth which, like the others, is untrue to the phenomenon. The phenomena show that embodied skills, when we are fully absorbed in enacting them, have a kind of non-mental content that is non-conceptual, non-propositional, non-rational and non-linguistic.
This is not to deny that we can monitor our activity while performing it. For solving problems, learning a new skill, receiving coaching, and so forth, such monitoring is invaluable. But monitoring what we are doing as we are doing it degrades performance to at best competence. On McDowell's view, there is no way to account for such a degradation in performance since the same sort of content would be involved whether we were fully absorbed in or paying attention to what we were doing.
McDowell claims that it is an advantage of his conceptualism that it avoids any foundationalist attempt to build up the objective world on the basis of an indubitable Given or any other ground-floor experience. And, indeed, if the world is all that is the case and our minds are unproblematically open to it, all experience is on the same footing. But one must distinguish motor intentionality, and the interrelated solicitations our coping body is intertwined with, from conceptual intentionality and the world of propositional structures it opens onto. The existential phenomenologist can then agree with McDowell in rejecting traditional foundationalisms, while yet affirming and describing the ground-floor role of motor intentionality in providing the support on which all forms of conceptual intentionality are based.”

There are responses by McDowell and Dreyfus. When I get the full-text articles, I will post on the debate between them. For now, it should be noted that McDowell’s employment of the “Gibsonian” concept of an affordance is interesting once that concept is read into what McDowell says in Lecture V of Mind and World. I’ve noted in some of my work on McDowell’s account of perception the parallels between McDowell and Gibson’s work. For more on Gibson, see his “The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.”
link for Inquiry:
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=g781666167~db=all

hiatus

i apologize for the lengthy hiatus. i was cruising the caribbean with my family. here are some pictures. i will return to blogging shortly...

critical notice of mind and world

Paul M. Pietroski published a critical notice of mind and world in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy...

http://www.wam.umd.edu/~pietro/research/papers/mcdowell.pdf

abstract for paper based (loosely) on McDowell (1992)

self-consciousness ain’t in the head

There has been a resurgence of interest in arguments for and against externalism about meaning and content. Much of this trend is inspired by Putnam’s argument for the conclusion: “cut the pie any way you like, ‘meanings’ just ain’t in the head!” (Mind, Language and Reality, p. 227). It is my contention that this interest should extend to certain areas of philosophy of mind, specifically self-consciousness. The argument proceeds as follows: (P1) self-consciousness has the content of being aware of oneself as oneself; (P2) the content “being aware of oneself as oneself” is environmentally and socially constituted; (P3) if a content is environmentally and socially constituted, then self-consciousness ain’t in the head; therefore, (C) self-consciousness ain’t in the head.
In defense of (P1), we look at definitions of self-consciousness. Simply being aware of oneself is not sufficient; being aware of oneself as such is necessary. We might construe the “as oneself” locution in the definition in a few different ways: (a) as discriminated from the world; (b) as possessing diverging properties from objects in one’s environment; (c) as located in a spatiotemporal matrix or field; (d) as one’s body; (e) as a unified or synthesized locus of consciousness; (f) as the subject of ascription of properties; (g) as reflexively referred to; (h) as the mental object of introspection; (i) as a self-conception. For each of these renderings of the “as oneself,” I argue that “as oneself” involves what I call “conceptual ascent.” Conceptual ascent suggests that the content of self-consciousness is externally constituted in specific ways.
In defense of (P2), I offer two parallel arguments— one conceptual and one empirical. The conceptual argument considers a thought experiment: could an individual possess self-consciousness without environmental and social interaction? It is unlikely that if a creature was in no way aware of the others in its environment that that creature could develop self-consciousness in any of the senses of (P1). This argument suggests that external factors are necessary for the constitution of the content of self-consciousness. The empirical argument considers the sufficiency question and asks, “What determines that a creature becomes self-conscious?” I argue that ecological and social interaction determine the content of self-consciousness. Specifically, joint attention, social referencing, inciting of pride and shame, and inclusive reference, for instance, use of “you” and “we,” are all features of one’s ecological and social environment which constitute one’s ability to become self-conscious.
In defense of (P3), I argue for a minimal dependency relation between the content and the vehicle of self-consciousness. One might object that my argument commits the content/vehicle conflation. I argue that insofar as self-consciousness is externally constituted, its vehicle is only minimally individual, by which I mean it might be realized as skills and abilities of the individual. This goes against the hypothesis that self-consciousness is realized in representations in the individual, e.g., in the individual’s brain or body. I will suggest that skills or abilities that constitute self-consciousness are dispositionally realized and plastic, rather than occurently realized and static. I argue that all of the representational content of self-consciousness is realized in relations (functions) external to the individual self-conscious creature, while some of the dispositional abilities of self-consciousness are realized in relations (functions) internal to that individual.
The conclusion follows that self-consciousness ain’t in the head. The externalists arguments for self-consciousness have import for both the history of philosophy, contemporary philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. I will close with an exposition of predecessor arguments of such figures as J.G. Fichte, G.H. Mead, and John McDowell (1998: 275-291).

reflections on mcdowell on content

McD mentions at Ch. 3 §2 that the notion of content has two uses. (1) The notion of “empirical content,” i.e., that which gives our perceptual experiences significance or bearing on the world. (2) The notion of “mental content,” i.e., that which corresponds to meaning in the mental realm.

Mental content is that by which mind is related to the world. We might ask: For McD, is there an overlap between these two uses? If McD is correct in this chapter, then all empirical content is conceptual and all mental content is conceptual. Then are empirical content and mental content (insofar as it such contents are conceptually structured) identical, isomorphic, or fundamentally connected? In what way?

In this context, it might be beneficial to consider the historical connection between the concepts of meaning and content. In McDowell, because he is in the Sellarsian tradition, there is a very close relation (for other reasons too). It pays to read the sections that concern McD’s reaction to Quine’s notion of “empirical significance.” For McD, does a theory of meaning account for the same phenomena as a theory of content?

Cassam and McDowell on "conceiving (of) itself"

When I was reading Cassam's "Self and World" I noticed an interesting mistake. At page 9, Cassam quotes McDowell: "While acknowledging the depth and importance of the Strawsonian contribution to our understanding of the nature of self-consciousness, it will be argued that there are serious difficulties with the idea that a self-conscious subject must, as John McDowell puts it, 'conceive of itself, the subject of its experience, as a bodily element in objective reality-- as a bodily presence in the world'(1994: 103)" (Cassam's italics; my bold). Cassam misquotes McDowell here, as it should read, "conceive itself" rather than "conceive of itself." There are occasions in philosophical works where it does not matter, because for instance it's "just a matter of speaking." But, this matters because I would argue there is a difference between "conceiving of itself" and "conceiving itself." The former suggests that there is something "the itself" there that is conceived of and logically prior to the conception; the latter does not have this implication, and could (and should) be read to suggest that the conceiving "brings into being" the subject or self. It is more likely that the latter is what McDowell has in mind.

seminar syllabus

This seminar will provide an in-depth assessment of John McDowell’s Mind and World, a set of lectures whose goal is to “propose an account, in a diagnostic spirit, of some characteristic anxieties of modern philosophy— anxieties that centre on the relation between mind and world.” The goal of the course is to assess McDowell’s position on the mediation of mind and world.
In Mind and World, John McDowell articulates a minimal empiricism which obviates two anxiety-provoking views: on the one hand, the Myth of the Given, which assumes that the content of conscious perception or experience is non-conceptual or Given and on the other hand Coherentism, which leaves our beliefs and justification of our beliefs out of touch with the world.
In Mind and World, McDowell discusses six topics in six lectures: (1) a defense of the Kantian dictum that thoughts without content are empty and intuitions without concepts are blind; (2) a justification of the merits of absolute idealism in which the conceptual realm is unbounded; (3) an argument that the content of perception is thoroughly conceptual; (4) an explanation of how rationality and the use of concepts are a joint product of norms and nature; (5) an articulation of the notion of a self as an embodied agent embedded in the social sphere; and (6) a means of sensibly demarcating between human and non-human animals.
Throughout this course, we will cover some of McDowell’s influences: Immanuel Kant (with some discussion of the Romantics and Hegel), Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wilfrid Sellars, Donald Davidson, and Gareth Evans. We will address those aspects of these thinkers that influenced McDowell to gain a better understanding of McDowell’s Mind and World. We will also discuss pivotal essays written by McDowell that assist our understanding of Mind and World. Throughout we will assess critiques of his lectures and responses, with one final lecture on the major problems of Mind and World.
This course will be concerned with a variety of topics in contemporary philosophy that are not normally studied together: In the area of meta-philosophy, we will discuss theory-building vs. quietism or deconstructivism. In the area of metaphysics, we will raise issues of ontology (especially the motivations for a fact ontology), the concepts of nature and naturalism, the demarcation between human persons and non-human animals, and the realism/anti-realism debate. In the area of epistemology, we will discuss perception and the concept of the Given in experience, skepticism about “the external world”, debates about foundationalism/coherentism, the internalism/externalism debate, and rationality. Our main focus will, however, be in the Philosophy of Language/Mind, especially debates about the nature and origin of intentionality, theories of mental content, concepts, theories of action, the self and self-consciousness.

Required Texts

John McDowell (1996) Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
“Mind and World Course Materials” compiled by J. M. C. Dow

Recommended Texts


John McDowell (1998) Meaning, Knowledge, & Reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
John McDowell (1998) Mind, Value, & Reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Nicholas H. Smith (Ed.) (2002) Reading McDowell: On Mind and World. London: Routledge
Maximilian de GaynesFord (2004) John McDowell. Cambridge: Polity Press
Cynthia and Graham MacDonald (Eds.) (2006) McDowell and his Critics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing