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.