mcdowell_precis of mind and world, 1996

Dr. Enrique VillanuevaRidgeview Publishing Company

Prcis of "Mind and World"Author(s): John McDowellSource: Philosophical Issues, Vol. 7, Perception (1996), pp. 231-239Published by: Ridgeview Publishing CompanyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1522909 .Accessed: 27/07/2014 14:53

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22,) PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES, 7 f22 ',Perception, 1995

Precis of Mind and World1

John McDowell

1. The idea of world-directedness -that is, content in one sense- is intelligible only in terms of a normative context that is its primary home. We must be able to work with the notion of a posture or stance that is correctly or incorrectly adopted according to whether or not things are thus and so. Only so can we understand the posture or stance as a judgement or belief to the effect that things are thus and so. (If we can make sense of judgement or belief as directed at the world in that way, we need have no trouble with other kinds of content-bearing postures or stances.)

We might express the point like this: thinking that aims at judgement, or at the fixation of belief, is answerable to the world for whether or not it is correctly executed. And now a small step away from that abstract formulation takes us to a minimal, and one might think undisputable, empiricism: in the sorts of case that must come first for reflection on the very idea of directedness at the world, the world's verdict, to which thinking must be answerable if it is to be

1Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1994. I restrict myself here to those aspects of the book that are relevant to the topic of the SOFIA conference; and, with a view to capturing the gist of the book in a much smaller space, I allow myself to approach its themes in different ways.


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232 JOHN MCDOWELL

thinking at all, is delivered by way of a pronouncement from (in Quine's phrase) "the tribunal of experience".2

Minimal empiricism promises to cast light on certain sorts of philosophical anxiety. If there is an obstacle in the way of seeing how experience could serve as a tribunal, then by the same token that obstacle will seem to render urgent the question: how is empirical content (as we might put it) so much as possible? And only our small step separates that question from the question how content -world-directedness- is possible at all.

When one thinks about philosophical anxieties that arise in the neighbourhood of empiricism, that may not be the first question that comes to mind. Such anxieties are more familiar in the shape of questions like this: how is empirical knowledge possible? That is, in terms of the juridical metaphor: how can experience, sitting in judgement on, say, a belief, return a verdict sufficiently favourable for the belief to count as a case of knowledge? But suppose we find it puzzling how experience can be such as to return any verdicts on our thinking at all. Such puzzlement would clearly be prior to any question about how experience can return a verdict that reaches some high level of favourableness. I think it is helpful to see the problems about knowledge in particular that pervade modern philosophy as more or less inept expressions of a deeper anxiety -an inchoately felt threat that a way of thinking we find ourselves falling into leaves minds simply out of touch with the rest of reality, not just question- ably capable of getting to know about it. This underlying anxiety is not well captured by questions about knowledge, but it is well captured by asking how content is possible -which is achieved, in the context of minimal empiricism, by asking how empirical content is possible.

2. I am suggesting that if we can find something that makes it hard to see how experience could serve as a tribunal, then, given the attractiveness of minimal empiricism, we shall be able to see that as the origin of the characteristic anxieties of modern philosophy. The prospect is that we can trace those anxieties to a single source, so that in principle they can be exorcized together. And the source I want to point to can be brought to light by considering Sellars's attack on the Given.

2 "Two Dogmas of Empiricism", in W.V. Quine, From a Logical Point of View (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1961; 1st ed. 1953), pp. 20-46, at p. 41.



22. PRECIS OF MIND AND WORLD

Sellars insists that the concept of knowledge belongs in a normative context, and it is an implication of something I have urged that we should take him to be stressing just one aspect of the normative context that is necessary for the idea of being in touch with the world at all, whether knowledgeably or not. Focusing, as he does, on knowledge in particular, Sellars writes: "In characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says."3

One way of putting what Sellars is driving at is to say that epistemology -or, in the more general version of the thought that I have insisted on, reflection about world-directedness as such- is vulner- able to a naturalistic fallacy.4 If we put the thought like that, we are identifying the natural, as indeed Sellars sometimes does, with the subject matter of empirical description as he conceives it in the pas- sage I have quoted, where he contrasts empirical description with placing something in the normative framework constituted by the logical space of reasons. Sellars, then, draws a distinction between, on the one hand, concepts that are intelligible only in terms of how they serve to place things in the logical space of reasons and, on the other hand, concepts that can be employed in empirical description. And we can equate empirical description, as Sellars conceives it, with placing things in the logical space of nature, to coin a phrase that is Sellarsian at least in spirit.

Putting things this way, we can achieve the effect Sellars is after by identifying the logical space of nature with the logical space in which the natural sciences function, as we have been enabled to conceive them by a well-charted, and in itself admirable, development of modern thought. Positively, we can say that to place something in nature, on the relevant conception, is to place it in the realm of law. But what is really important is not such positive characteri- zations, but the negative point that the relations between elements of nature, on the relevant conception, are not the normative relations that constitute the logical space of reasons. The relations that constitute the logical space of nature on this conception (in the way spatial relations constitute space literally so called) do not include

3"Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind", in Herbert Feigl and Michael Scriven, eds., Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 1 (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1956), pp. 253-329, at pp. 298-9.

4See p. 257 of "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" for a formulation on these lines.

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relations such as one thing's being warranted, or -for the general case- correct, in the light of another.

Now, given this framework, which logical space would be the primary home of the concept of experience? Experience, we can plau- sibly say, is made up of impressions, effects of impacts made by the world on a subject's sensory equipment. Surely talk of impacts of the world on the senses is empirical description; or, to put the point in the variant terms I have introduced, the idea of receiving an impression is the idea of a transaction in nature. On Sellars's principles, then, talk of impressions does not operate in the logical space in which talk of knowledge -or, to keep the general case in view, talk of world-directedness- operates. The logical space in which talk of impressions primarily belongs is not one in which things are con- nected by relations such as one thing's being warranted or correct in the light of another. So experience, conceived as made up of impressions, cannot serve as a tribunal, something to which empirical thinking is answerable. In fact the idea that it can is exactly what Sellars rejects as the Myth of the Given.

I should mention that in Mind and World my main representa- tive of this kind of thinking is Davidson rather than Sellars. Either would have served my purpose. There is a correspondence between Sellars's attack on the Given and Davidson's attack on "the third dogma of empiricism" -the dualism of conceptual scheme and (in a sense other than the one I have used here) empirical content. And Davidson explicitly takes it that the thought dislodges even a minimal empiricism; he claims that the third dogma of empiricism is "perhaps the last, for if we give it up it is not clear that there is anything distinctive left to call empiricism".5

3. So far I have suggested that we can trace the distinctive anxieties of modern philosophy to a tension between two temptations that our thinking is subject to. One is a minimal empiricism, which links empirical content with the idea that empirical thinking is answerable to the tribunal of experience. The other is a tendency, which I have exploited Sellars in trying to make intelligible, for it to seem impossible that experience could be a tribunal; the idea of experience evidently belongs in a logical space of natural connections, and that can easily be made to seem alien to a logical space in which one thing is warranted or correct in the light of another.

5 "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme", in Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1984), pp. 183-98, at p. 189.




The exorcism I have projected would require resolving the tension, and the description I have given leaves various options for doing that. I shall describe three.

One course, which Sellars and Davidson follow, is to discard the linkage of empirical content with answerability to impressions; that is, to renounce minimal empiricism, at least with experience con- strued in terms of impressions. But I do not believe a position on these lines can be genuinely comfortable. It is true that the Sellars- Davidson option leaves room for minimal empiricism on a different construal; according to the principles that govern this option, though empirical thinking cannot be answerable to impressions, it can be answerable to appearings. But if there is no such thing as answerability to impressions, I think that ought to make it just as problematic how appearings are possible as how any other mode of possession of empirical content is possible.

Sellars and Davidson make it seem that the tension amounts to an incompatibility by insisting that the logical space of reasons is sui generis, as compared with the logical space in which Sellars sees "empirical description" as functioning, which I have identified on Sellars's behalf with the logical space of nature.6 This points to a second possible way to resolve the tension: namely rejecting that insistence. On this second option, we are to accept that the concept of experience has its primary home in the logical space of nature, conceived in the way that figures in Sellars and Davidson on the other side of a contrast with the logical space of reasons. But on this option, we are to reject the contrast; we are to deny that the logical space of reasons is sui generis in the way Sellars and Davidson claim. This denial is what figures in Mind and World as "bald naturalism". Bald naturalism is a programmatic conviction to this effect: the normative relations that constitute the logical space of reasons can be reconstructed out of conceptual materials whose primary home is the logical space in which empirical description, as Sellars conceives it, functions. (The label "naturalism" is appropriate just to the extent that it is appropriate to identify that logical space as the logical space of nature.) Suppose the bald naturalist programme were executed. That would vindicate moves of the kind that, according to Sellars, commit a naturalistic fallacy in epistemology, and it would vindicate

6Davidson's counterpart to what figures in Sellars as the sui generis character of the logical space of reasons is the sui generis character of what Davidson calls "the constitutive ideal of rationality". See especially "Mental Events", in Don- ald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980), pp. 207-25; the quoted phrase is from p. 223.

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counterparts to those moves in reflection about world-directedness in general. In particular, it would vindicate talk of answerability to experience, even conceived in terms of impressions. Such talk would be naturalistic, by all means, but an execution of the bald naturalist programme would undermine the imputation of a naturalistic fallacy, perpetrated by combining the naturalistic idea of impressions with the normative idea of answerability.

I shall say a little more about bald naturalism in a moment, but first I want to outline the different way of resolving the tension that I recommend, the third of the three options I undertook to distinguish.

My alternative aims at the same overall effect bald naturalism would achieve: that, without fear of a naturalistic fallacy, we can understand empirical thinking as answerable to experience, even conceived in terms of impressions, impacts from the world on a subject's receptive capacities. But I aim to make room for this without deny- ing, as bald naturalism does, that the structure of the logical space of reasons is sui generis, as compared with the logical space within which the natural sciences confer their distinctive kind of intelligibility on things.

The modern scientific revolution made possible a clear conception of that distinctive kind of intelligibility, with the clarity consisting largely, I claim, in something close to Sellars's basic or structural thought: namely, an understanding that natural-scientific intelligibility must be held separate from the kind of intelligibility something acquires when we place it in relation to other things in the logical space of reasons. But we do not need to equate the very idea of nature or the natural with the idea of instantiations of concepts whose primary home is the logical space in which natural-scientific intelligibility emerges. Sellars is right, then, that there is a logical space that is alien to the logical space of reasons; indeed that is a fun- damental insight, a prime lesson from the development of modern science. But to equate that logical space with the logical space of nature, as Sellars at least implicitly does, is to forget that nature includes second nature. The natural, in the sense of second nature, embraces concepts that function in the logical space of reasons, sui generis though that logical space is. This makes it unthreatening to acknowledge that the idea of receiving an impression is the idea of a transaction in nature. If we resist the conception of nature that is implicit in Sellars, we undermine the inference to the Sellarsian conclusion, that the idea of receiving an impression is foreign to the logical space in which concepts like that of answerability function. We make room for impressions to be appearings, even as Sellars conceives appearings. Conceptual capacities, talk of which belongs in




the sui generis logical space of reasons, can be operative not just in judgements -results of a subject's actively making up her mind about something- but already in the transactions in nature that are constituted by the world's impacts on the receptive propensities of a subject who possesses the relevant concepts. Receiving impressions can be a matter of being open to the way things manifestly are, and that yields a satisfying interpretation for the image of postures that are answerable to the world through being answerable to experience.

4. In Mind and World, I concern myself with bald naturalism only as a potential competitor with the outlook I have just sketched, in the project of exorcizing certain philosophical anxieties. I align myself with bald naturalism in the conviction that the project is a good one. Philosophy is forced into some peculiar and unattractive shapes, if we suppose it needs to answer the questions that express those anxieties -which I have suggested we can collect into the question "How is empirical content possible?". It would be better not to seem obliged to engage in that familiar activity, and that yields a philosophical motivation for bald naturalism that, as far as it goes, I respect.7

But my alternative seems to me a more satisfying response to that motivation than faith in the bald naturalist programme -faith that we can domesticate the logical space of reasons within the logical space in which the natural sciences confer their distinctive kind of intelligibility on things. I have tried to make it plausible that what underlies the anxieties is a sense -often no doubt only inchoate- that the structure of the logical space of reasons is sui generis, as compared with the logical framework in which natural-scientific understanding is achieved. This allows us to see it as non-acciden- tal that the period in which dealing with these supposed difficulties came to seem the dominant obligation of philosophy coincides with the period in which natural-scientific understanding, as we are now equipped to conceive it, was being separated out from a hitherto un- differentiated conception of understanding in general. I claim that the separation was effected largely by way of an increasingly firm grasp of what is in effect Sellars's basic structural insight: that natural-scientific understanding must be held separate from the kind

7The label "bald naturalism" is perhaps infelicitous for a position with a sophisticated motivation on these lines; that is what I acknowledge in the footnote on pp. 88-9. I took myself to be stuck with the label even so, since I had given it a thematic prominence in the lectures of which the book is a version. (For the same reason, I felt unable to accede to a plea for less discriminatory terminology made by Nicholas Rescher.)

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of understanding that is achieved by placing what is understood in relation to other things in the logical space of reasons. Now according to bald naturalism, that perhaps inchoate sense of a conceptual divide was simply wrong, and the execution of the programme would reveal it as such. My alternative, by contrast, gives modern philosophy more credit, even while, no less than bald naturalism, it enables us to disown those supposed intellectual obligations. (I also give, in one way, more credit to the development of modern science for the conceptual revolution it effected.) According to me, people who think philosophy must centre on problems about how minds can be in touch with the world are not wrong in the thought they take to pose those problems -the thought that is crystallized in Sellars's thesis that the logical space of reasons is sui generis. They are wrong -and the mistake is quite intelligible- only in supposing that if we endorse that thought, we are stuck with the intellectual obligations that modern philosophy characteristically, and unsatisfactorily, sets for itself.

I do not pretend to have an argument that the bald naturalist programme cannot be executed.8 The point is rather this: the line of thought I have just indicated undercuts the only motivation I consider in my book for supposing the programme must be feasible. As far as that motivation goes, my attitude to the programme can be, not "I know it cannot be carried through" but rather "Given that the motivation is better fulfilled by a different way of thinking, why bother?"

Of course that invites alternative motivations. The invitation might initiate a discussion, which would be potentially open-ended; but this further discussion is not my concern in Mind and World. However, I shall end by allowing myself a brief foray into it.

It is not a contribution to the discussion I have in mind to say something like this: "Natural-scientific truth is the only truth there is."9 That is not an argument for bald naturalism, but a mere pro- fession of scientistic faith, the very thing about which the question of motivation arises. Of course we know better than to believe in para- matter as the stuff of minds, and we know better than to suppose

8Jerry Fodor insinuates that I aim to give "the unwary reader" this impression, in his review of Mind and World: "Encounters with Trees", London Review of Books, 20 April 1995.

9As Fodor in effect does. Outlining the position he wants to defend against me, he writes: "All that ever happens, our being rational included, is the conformity of natural things to natural laws." And later: "[I]f it's literally true that rationality, intentionality, normativity and the like belong to the mind essentially, then they must all be phenomena within the natural realm that scientists explore."



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that para-physical forces -forces not needed for explaining "merely material", or perhaps "merely biological", phenomena- are operative at the level of the material constitution of organisms with minds. Something on those lines seems to me to be unquestionable. It sets the agenda for a fine branch of science: to make the material constitution of living things with minds perspicuous, so as to render it intelligible that their lives exemplify mindedness. But it goes no distance towards showing that, if we are to give due honour to the way science has freed us from superstition, we must embrace the conceptual monism -at least about concepts that pull their weight in describing reality- on which bald naturalism insists.



Article Contentsp. [231]p. 232p. 233p. 234p. 235p. 236p. 237p. 238p. 239

Issue Table of ContentsPhilosophical Issues, Vol. 7, Perception (1996), pp. 1-366Front MatterPrefaceExplaining Objective Color in Terms of Subjective Reactions [pp. 1 - 17]Mental Paint and Mental Latex [pp. 19 - 49]Orgasms Again [pp. 51 - 54]Colors, Subjective Reactions, and Qualia [pp. 55 - 66]Is Color Psychological or Biological? Or Both? [pp. 67 - 74]Qualia and Color Concepts [pp. 75 - 79]Layered Perceptual Representation [pp. 81 - 100]On a Defense of the Hegemony of Representation [pp. 101 - 108]Perception and Possibilia [pp. 109 - 115]Perceptual Experience Is a Many-Layered Thing [pp. 117 - 126]Replies to Tomberlin, Tye, Stalnaker and Block [pp. 127 - 142]Phenomenal Externalism or If Meanings Ain't in the Head, Where Are Qualia? [pp. 143 - 158]Dretske's Qualia Externalism [pp. 159 - 165]Comment on Dretske [pp. 167 - 170]Dretske on Phenomenal Externalism [pp. 171 - 178]Reply to Commentators: [Horwich, Biro, Kim, Lara] [pp. 179 - 183]Is the External World Invisible? [pp. 185 - 198]Visible Properties of Human Interest Only [pp. 199 - 208]Getting Acquainted with Perception [pp. 209 - 214]Would More Acquaintance with the External World Relieve Epistemic Anxiety? [pp. 215 - 218]A Mind-Body Problem at the Surface of Objects [pp. 219 - 229]Prcis of "Mind and World" [pp. 231 - 239]Perception and Rational Constraint: McDowell's "Mind and World" [pp. 241 - 259]Spin Control Comment on John McDowell's "Mind and World" [pp. 261 - 273]McDowell's Direct Realism and Platonic Naturalism [pp. 275 - 281]Reply to Gibson, Byrne, and Brandom [pp. 283 - 300]Molyneux's Question [pp. 301 - 318]Comments on John Campbell, "Molyneux's Question" [pp. 319 - 324]Shape Properties and Perception [pp. 325 - 350]Shape Properties, Experience of Shape and Shape Concepts [pp. 351 - 363]Back Matter [pp. 365 - 366]

mcdowell_precis of mind and world, 1996

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