Self and World: From Analytic Philosophy to Phenomenology

Self and World − From Analytic Philosophy to Phenomenology by

Carleton B. Christensen

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

Carleton B. Christensen Self and World − From Analytic Philosophy to Phenomenology

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Quellen und Studien zur Philosophie Herausgegeben von Jens Halfwassen, Dominik Perler, Michael Quante

Band 89

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York

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This study is dedicated to my friend and colleague, Dr. Luciana O’Dwyer, who for many years has represented the claim and spirit of phenomenology in an environment uncongenial to it.

Preface In articles written over the past fifteen years I have sought to interpret the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in ways which demonstrate the accomplishment of both thinkers to a contemporary Anglo-American audience. This effort has been guided by the conviction that the many insights to be found in the thought of both are genuinely distinctive of them, hence cannot be construed simply as anticipations of positions reached independently either by analytic philosophy, American pragmatism or certain strands of cognitive psychology. The work at hand continues, but also extends, this effort. Specifically, it seeks to intimate, in generally intelligible fashion, the intrinsic connection both between philosophy and its history; and between philosophy and the philosophy of philosophy, i. e., meta-philosophy. In particular, it is underwritten by the contention that the phenomenological tradition of Husserl and Heidegger understands these interrelated interconnections much better than the analytic tradition, hence provides much better resources for elaborating them. The nett result of this elaboration is a critique of metaphysics in that sense of the term ‘metaphysics’ to which much analytic philosophy is still beholden, even as, indeed precisely when it proclaims its anti-Cartesianism, anti-mentalism and anti-subjectivism. For advice and support I would like to thank Rick Benitez, Carrol Besseling, Bob Brandom, Brian Garrett, Axel Honneth, David Macarthur, John McDowell, Will McNeill, Robert Pippin, Philip Quadrio, Paul Redding and Dan Zahavi. Naturally, the errors are mine alone. I am also very grateful to the editors of „Quellen und Studien zur Philosophie“ for taking this work up into their fine series. Finally, I would like to thank the production team at Walter De Gruyter Verlag and Christoph Schirmer in particular for his sound advice and hard work in preparing the manuscript for publication. I owe more than I can say to Edith, who has also had to endure the writing of this work. Nor may I forget the consolations unwittingly provided by Cora and Knuckle, now no longer with us, and by Sophie and Ernest.

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter One: Escaping the Oscillation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . § 1: Thought’s Bearing on Reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . § 2: The Myth of the Given . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . § 3: Davidson’s Conception of Perceptual Experience . . . . . . . . . . § 4: Davidson’s Coherentism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . § 5: What Recoil from Coherentism? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1 13 14 17 23 28 35

Chapter Two: Regaining the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 § 1: Two Ways to the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 § 2: Getting (to) the World the Wrong Way round . . . . . . . . . . . 86 § 3: Thought’s Bearing on Reality Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 Chapter Three: Perceptual Appearance and Perceptual World . . . . § 1: Perception as a Unity of Receptivity and Spontaneity . . . . . . § 2: Perception as Rationalising rather than Justifying . . . . . . . . . § 3: The Right Kind of Confinement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . § 4: Reality as a Rational Constraint on Empirical Thinking . . . .

124 127 156 160 165

Chapter Four: The View from Sideways-on, Common Factors and Other Loose Ends . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . § 1: McDowell contra Rorty on Davidson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . § 2: Disjuncts and Conjuncts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . § 3: Scepticism and Externalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . § 4: The Results of Reconstruction Thus Far . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

171 172 175 190 200

Chapter Five: Two Senses of Nature? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . § 1: Reason and Nature – Roots of an Antinomy? . . . . . . . . . . . . § 2: What Good is Second Nature? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . § 3: Origins of Ontological Naturalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . § 4: Pictures of Thinking, Concepts of Nature and Realms of Law § 5: Ontological Naturalism and Perceptual Experience . . . . . . . .

205 205 217 224 235 248

Chapter Six: From Nature to World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265 § 1: Naturalism – Science, Philosophy or Both? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265

X § 2: § 3: § 4: § 5:

Contents

Does Science need Naturalism? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How Not to be Unnaturally Naturalistic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ‘The Outer’ as the Metaphysically Unencumbered World . . . Intimations of a Phenomenological Concept of World . . . . .

268 281 297 307

Chapter Seven: On the Brink of Phenomenology . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313 § 1: Ideas Concerning a Phenomenological Philosophy . . . . . . . . 313 § 2: Quiet but not Silent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347 Conclusion: From McDowell to Husserl and Beyond . . . . . . . . . . Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Author Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Subject Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

362 380 389 391

Introduction Roughly speaking, two different styles of Heidegger interpretation are prevalent in Anglo-America: on the one hand, the tendency displayed by an enlightened kind of analytic or post-analytic philosophy to make sense of Heidegger by mapping his concerns onto those assumed to be Wittgenstein’s, or of pragmatism (James and Dewey) and neo-Pragmatism (Sellars, Rorty and Brandom) or some combination thereof; on the other, a more scholarly kind of interpretation which, although more historically informed, does not attempt in any systematic way to interpret Heidegger in a manner which brings out his relevance for independently specifiable issues in contemporary (analytic) philosophy. Representatives of the first style of interpretation include Brandom, Dreyfus, Haugeland, Mulhall, Polt, Rorty, Taylor and others. Representatives of the second include Caputo, Kisiel, Sheehan, van Buren, to mention just a few. Of course, the boundaries between these two styles are not clear, and there are many differences of degree and kind within them. Moreover, it would be a mistake to describe either of them as exclusively Anglo-American.1 Both styles are unsatisfactory in different, complementary ways. The first is superficially intelligible and relates Heidegger to live issues in the philosophy of mind, of psychology, of language and indeed of philosophy itself. This is a commendable achievement which has secured a wider audience for Heidegger and the tradition he represents, thereby helping to keep interest in both alive. Yet anyone more familiar with Heidegger’s texts and times than its exponents typically are will find it hard to see how he really could be saying many of the things this style of interpretation puts into his mouth. For the views attributed to Heidegger by this style of interpretation – views which typically its exponents themselves endorse – were hardly new in Heidegger’s day. Surely it cannot be Heidegger’s concern simply to reheat such standard fare – as if his only originality were the novelty, not to say obscurity, of the language in which he serves this fare up. 1

See Sandbothe 1998 for an example of a German effort to read Heidegger in the first style of interpretation.

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Introduction

By contrast, the second style, while displaying considerably more textual and historical erudition, often takes textual interpretation so seriously that one can barely see just what independently specifiable philosophical issues, whether of his own time or ours, Heidegger is addressing. Interpretation thus moves within an inward-looking jargon to which it is hard to give clear sense and whose relevance for wider issues is hard to discern. Evidently, a style of interpretation is needed which combines the virtues of both while overcoming their respective vices. One must be both historically reconstructive and reconstructively historical enough neither to map Heidegger naively onto selected heroes and issues from traditions foreign to him and his times; nor simply to refuse to undertake any such mapping at all. Just this is the larger project of the work at hand and of which it constitutes a topical, hence hopefully strategically wellconceived first part. All hands are agreed that one major task which Heidegger has set himself is to criticise and refashion the very concept of the self-conscious, ‘I’-thinking and -saying subject. But what is he attacking and what is he putting in its place? Precisely here a more sophisticated style of reconstructive interpretation is needed if we are to avoid attributing to Heidegger views which, however novel and path-breaking they may seem to contemporary Anglo-American philosophers, were already fairly standard in Heidegger’s day. Hostility to notions of self-consciousness as a Cartesian theatre, indeed anti-Cartesianism in general, would not have appeared particularly novel to Heidegger and others of his time. Critiques of introspection as a reliable source of data for empirically psychological inquiry were standard fare, as indeed were attacks on empiricist notions of perception as mere sensation or the viewing of mental pictures. Last but not least, critiques of empiricist notions of the Given were common, and even what Davidson calls the third dogma of empiricism – the doctrine of the mind as imposing a conceptual schema on the deliverances of sense – had already come under attack.2 Nor is there anything particular novel in the anti-foundationalism typically endorsed by those today who read Heidegger as a forerunner of contemporary insights. Fallibilist rejection of the search for secure foundations was certainly not a hallmark of American pragmatism alone, but was characteristic of neo-Kantianism and Lebensphilosophie as well. Nor were the pragmatists alone in their rejection of the so-called 2

See Scheler 1926 (1960), p. 328. Scheler refers to Oswald Klpe as making the same criticisms in 1907.

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‘spectator’ conception of knowing3 – knowing as passive contemplatio. Indeed, the neo-Kantians and Lebensphilosophen were clearer in this regard than the pragmatists since they showed no tendency to conflate the distinction between knowing as active rather than passive with the distinction between knowing as engaged and driven by practical interests rather than the ‘value-free’ pursuit of a pure theoretical interest. The neo-Kantians, of course, endorsed the first disjunct of the former distinction while bitterly opposing the first disjunct of the latter. Nietzsche, by contrast, endorsed both first disjuncts while Dilthey struggled incoherently to avoid any such construal of knowing as conditioned in its very content by essentially local practical interests and affectivities. Furthermore, the whole period is characterised by an anti-speculative spirit which was hostile to a priori philosophising: insofar as any thinkers of note endorsed ‘certainty’, e. g., the neo-Kantians, the certainty endorsed was an entirely fallible, procedural ‘certainty’ secured by the norms and practices which constituted theoretical knowing as inquiry (Forschung), the cumulative process of knowledge acquisition in which practitioners attained consensus on one set of problems in order to move collectively over to solve the next (‘normal’ science in Kuhn’s sense).4 Nor was it uncommon in and before Heidegger’s time emphatically to reject early modern individualism. It had become entirely commonplace to seek “… to steer clear of the assumption that human life goes on primarily inside a private, “mental” space, a psyche that can be considered in isolation from its surrounding culture.“5 From idealism and pragmatism through neo-Kantianism to Lebensphilosophie, celebrations of the essentially social, historical and indeed linguistic character of self-conscious subjectivity were stock in trade. Furthermore, Nietzsche, many Lebensphilosophen and neo-Kantians would have agreed with American pragmatism that the content of a belief is given by the difference it makes to an essentially intersubjective practical life, that much everyday life is habit, routine and knowing-how sustained by the commendation or critique of others rather than by one’s own explicit rule-following and reflective knowing-that. Nietzsche would no doubt have agreed with Rorty that the only real goals of inquiry are essentially concrete 3 4 5

See, e. g., Rickert 1909, p. 192. For an account of how the neo-Kantians sought to render philosophy scientific by recasting it as Erkenntnistheorie, and what concept of certainty this entailed, see Christensen 2007b. Polt 1999, p. 64.

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ones like winning the Nobel Prize or finding a cure for cancer rather than discovering the Truth. Lebensphilosophen would have endorsed the view that judgements of what is and is not rational are and must be shaped by ‘local’ feeling and affectivity, etc. Neo-Kantians such as Rickert would not, of course, have gone as far – certainly not as far as Nietzsche, but also not as far as the Lebensphilosophen. Rickert and others like him believed that such things as truth have to be seen as transcendentally necessary ‘values’ which give direction and thereby a defining ‘point’, such that speaking the truth would be akin to winning, to practices of distinctively theoretical inquiry. Yet they vehemently rejected, in favour of a view of truth as a simple, indefinable primitive, the correspondence-theoretic view of truth foisted upon them by Rorty. Indeed unlike Rorty, Ernst Cassirer, once a neo-Kantian himself, admittedly of the Marburg variety, fully appreciated that the correspondence theory of truth was neither essential to, nor the real thrust of, Descartes’ position.6 Nor was it unconventional to reject Aristotelian notions of substance and accident. The Marburg neo-Kantians railed vociferously against concepts of substance (Substanzbegriffe) while celebrating functional concepts (Funktionsbegriffe) as embodying a truly ‘scientific’ understanding of empirically theoretical inquiry. This attitude suggests that they would have been favourably disposed to the view that the category of cause-and-effect is to be explicated with reference to the concept of causal explanation, understood as subsumption under ever more comprehensive, unified causal law, rather the other way around. If so, they would also have been welldisposed towards Davidson’s view according to which those properties and relations are causally efficacious reference to which yields the more explanatory account, and not conversely. Finally, recent interest in the normative, shared by many who see Heidegger as a natural ally, would have seemed to Heidegger himself merely an unexpected splutter of life from something long pronounced dead. Had not much neo-Kantianism insisted on the essentially ‘normative’ character of empirical thinking and subjectivity? Had it not seen in a dualism of the ‘natural’ and the ‘normative’ the metaphysically harmless kernel of truth in Descartes’ ‘ontogical’ dualism? Is this not the real point underlying Lotze’s insistence on the distinction between Sein (being)

6

See Cassirer 1995, p. 14, and Rorty 1979, esp. Chapter 1 and 2.

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and Geltung (being-in-force, holding-good7)? Indeed, distinctions between justification and explanation, different language games, different constitutive ideals, different kinds of intelligibility, different stances taken towards the same subject matter, etc., all echo neo-Kantian responses to Dilthey’s insistence on a radical, ontological difference of kind between the object domains of the natural and human sciences. Crucially, their insistence on the normative led the neo-Kantians to regard what distinguished distinctively rational animals from merely natural ones as lying in the former’s capacity to give an account, in judgements, of themselves, their beliefs and their actions. In fact, views sometimes held to be distinctively Fregean, for example, that the judgement (Urteil) is the primary and most basic bearer of conceptual content, such that words only have meaning in the context of a sentence, are already central neo-Kantian tenets.8 And so a picture of rational subjectivity emerged which tended so radically to reject crude empiricist notions of empirical thinking as the processing of sense data that reason itself came to be seen as nothing more or less than a process of raising, evaluating and either accepting or rejecting claims to truth and other kinds of ‘validity’ (Geltung) according to norms of correct inference and warranted performance. This encouraged the objectively rather than transcendentally idealist thought that thinking is essentially unbounded: it must be a fundamental mistake to think of it as something essentially taking place within its own inner sphere, with an external reality lying beyond its outer periphery – unless, of course, one means by empirical thinking simply something materially realised in the brain which interacts causally with the rest of material reality lying beyond that outer periphery which is the cranium. Herman Cohen is simply giving voice to this classically neo-Kantian focus on the doxastic and apophantic, hence on this conception of reason itself, when, having rejected the Kantian precedent of letting one’s account of thinking (transcendental logic) follow upon an account of sensuous receptivity (transcendental aesthetic), he declares, “We begin with thinking. Thinking may have no origin outside of itself if its purity is to be unbounded and unadulterated.” (Cohen 1914, p. 12) Precisely this conception of reason, as essentially the norm governed process of un7 8

It is somewhat misleading to translate Geltung as validity (Gltigkeit) since validity is, or can be understood as, a property of things like arguments, whereas the Geltung of something is its holding good for one. See, e. g., Rickert, op. cit., esp. pp. 200 – 201; see also Gabriel 1986.

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dertaking, acknowledging and assessing commitments and entitlements, broke in two ways with the past: (a) with the assumption characteristic of early modernity up to and including Kant that reason was essentially the process of an individual self-conscious subject; and (b) with the postKantian absolute idealist tendency to think of this process as a general structure instantiated, not just by the individual self-conscious subject in the ordinary sense, but by larger wholes encompassing this subject, right up to its maximally adequate instantiation as absolute Spirit (der absolute Geist).9 For Cohen, reason is essentially an intersubjective process of raising and evaluating validity claims which grounds, hence cannot be modelled on, the rational activity of one single subject. Because it is in this sense ‘subjectless’, it could just as well be the process, hence the community, of inquiry itself. And so it could just as well be any norm-governed linguistic practice in which reasons are given and taken, deontic statuses conferred and tracked.10 In general, the views on mind, self, language, nature, causation and many other things endorsed by those today who, without too much scholarly ado, align Heidegger with Dewey, Wittgenstein, Ryle and Davidson already constituted, in Heidegger’s times, if not consensus positions, then certainly mainstream, orthodox ones. Yet as these interpreters themselves would agree, Heidegger sought to undercut a tradition of thinking about mind, self and subjectivity whose final and most degenerate forms Heidegger sees precisely as mainstream – as is shown by his hostility to the neo-Kantianism, pragmatism and Lebensphilosophie of his day. At first sight, proponents of this style of interpretation have an easy response to the criticism that Heidegger sought to move beyond, and indeed occasionally to reject outright, the kinds of view they read into him and typically themselves endorse. For does not Heidegger famously say, in a letter of December 26th, 1926, to Karl Jaspers, that Being and Time was written, “if … ‘against’ anyone, then against Husserl, who also recognised this straight off but from the outset stuck to what is positive [in the work]”? 9 See Natorp 1902 (1994), p. 4, where Natorp interestingly speaks of k|cor and k]ceim in a fashion which suggests both the character of subjectivity as constituted in, rather than preceding, discourse, and an inferentialist conception of content. 10 Paul Natorp, Cohen’s friend and co-founder of Marburg neo-Kantianism alongside Cohen, gives the notion of the subject a greater role. One wonders whether this might not have something to do with his recognising the consequences of the idea that the subject is the ‘source’ of, hence unavoidably presupposed by, the unity of reality. This idea of the subject as the ‘source’ of unity may constitute a certain similarity to Davidson – see Chapter Two, p. 103, note 31.

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(Heidegger/Jaspers 1990, p. 71) And did not Husserl seek precisely to restore philosophy to the status of an epistemologically oriented first philosophy in a manner not dissimilar to Descartes? The question is, however, just what Heidegger is writing against when he writes against Husserl. What is it about Husserl’s philosophy which makes it, as Heidegger in the same letter terms it, Scheinphilosophie – pseudo-philosophy, the illusion of philosophy, hence inauthentic philosophy? That there is no easy answer to this question becomes apparent once close scrutiny of Husserl’s views has made one suspicious of the Cartesian caricature of them presupposed by this line of defence, and by this style of Heidegger interpretation generally11 – as if Husserl were some kind of throwback to a philosophical past already overcome in neo-Kantianism and pragmatism. If this were really how things were with Husserl, then why would Heidegger find more in him than in these other currents of his philosophical mainstream? Why, indeed, would he ever bother to write against Husserl? Finally, why does he dismiss pragmatism as confused12 and criticise Husserl on the grounds that this latter had let himself be led astray by (Natorp’s brand of ) Marburg neo-Kantianism?13 Answering these questions is made all the more difficult when one realises in addition just how much, precisely at some of the most decisive moments in Being and Time, Heidegger relies on Husserl, for example, in discussing the concept of truth. 11 This kind of account is represented by Dreyfus and Haugeland – see Dreyfus 1991 and Dreyfus and Haugeland 1978. See in particular p. 10 of Dreyfus and Hall 1982, where Dreyfus assimilates Husserl’s account of perceptual intentionality to a quasi-cognitive scientific view not dissimilar to the view found, as we shall see in Part II, in Helmholtz. 12 See, e. g., Heidegger 1993a, § 2, H 10. 13 See Heidegger 1969, H 47. Note that in this very late work Heidegger associates the idea of transcendental phenomenology with the turn to the pure ego (reines Ich) which Husserl, under the influence of neo-Kantianism, or rather, Natorp, gives phenomenology. As is shown by Husserl’s inaugural lecture of 1907, Die Idee der Phnomenologie, in which Husserl introduces an idea of transcendental phenomenology involving no appeal to a distinctively pure, transcendental ego, it would be wrong to associate the former idea intrinsically with the latter – see Rinofner-Kreidl 2000, pp. 35 – 36. Nor is Heidegger really making this mistake: he is not attacking either the idea of the transcendental or indeed the ‘egological’ character of philosophy as transcendental phenomenology, but rather the ‘pureness’ which Husserl sees transcendental phenomenology as having and which is immediately acquired by the ego once Husserl later introduces it as something transcendental phenomenology cannot do without.

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A more historically reconstructive and reconstructively historical interpretation of Heidegger cannot, therefore, be one’s first move. First must come the reappropriation of Husserl’s conception of philosophy as phenomenology and the notion of intentionality he developed as the key concept in the realisation of this conception of philosophy. For only by getting clear about just what is distinctive in Husserl’s conception of philosophy and reason, and about the role he gave the phenomenological description and explication of intentionality in motivating this conception of philosophy and reason, can one hope to understand how Heidegger positions himself not just vis--vis Husserl, but also vis--vis those conceptions of mind, self, reason and philosophy which, although orthodox in Heidegger’s day, are promoted by those in our day who see in Heidegger a central ally. Fortunately, this need not be undertaken as a mere preliminary, with no immediate topicality of its own. In his book Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), John McDowell has claimed that analytic philosophy stands so much in the thrall of a certain conception of ‘nature’ that it persistently fails adequately to comprehend the nature of self-conscious, rational subjectivity. According to McDowell, this concept of nature sets two essential characteristics of such subjectivity – what McDowell calls, rather too restrictively, as we shall see, empirical thinking – at odds with one another: on the one hand, its character as ‘receptive’, that is, responsive to a reality beyond it, and on the other, its character as ‘spontaneous’, that is, responsive to norms of correct inference and warranted performance. In consequence, as long as one works under the constraints set by this concept of nature, one can, according to McDowell, jump in one of two ways only: either one plays up the dimension of receptivity in the manner of what Sellars once called the Myth of the Given (which move McDowell associates, no doubt contentiously, with the position of Gareth Evans – see McDowell 1994b, pp. 51 – 52); or one plays up the dimension of spontaneity (in which case one adopts a coherentist conception of truth and knowledge of the kind McDowell finds in Donald Davidson). But either way one remains unable to do justice to the one character of empirical thinking without doing injustice to the other. And so these two moves constitute an antinomy between whose poles we must ceaselessly oscillate. Now there are inaccuracies in McDowell’s ideology-critical analysis. Yet McDowell has a powerful philosophical nose: in Mind and World he makes two central claims, namely, that the so-called ‘coherentism’ of Davidson, because it conceives empirical reality as merely causally con-

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straining empirical thinking, fails to accommodate this latter’s “bearing on reality” (p. 16), and that in order to accommodate such bearing one must conceive perceptual experience as a co-operation between receptivity and spontaneity in which the former “does not make an even notionally separable contribution to the co-operation” (p. 9; see also p. 51). It can be shown that these claims contain within them insights of fundamental importance although McDowell himself is unable to elaborate them adequately; his efforts to do so end up, as Crispin Wright has also noted,14 securing no fundamental difference to Davidson’s position. As we shall see, McDowell’s inability in this regard has to do with the fact that he remains committed to the traditional conviction that to be conceptually contentful is to be propositionally contentful (in the sense of conforming to the schema ‘that p’). It can be shown that this conviction leads one either to distort the sensually or qualitatively impressional character of perceptual experience – what Peirce associated with his category of ‘firstness’15 and what Husserl called perceptual fullness (Flle) – by construing it as separable ‘sensation’ (sense data, raw feels, qualia and the like) or to dismiss it as epistemically irrelevant (or both). Either way, perceptual experience gets assimilated to belief and judgement, aisthesis to doxa and apophansis. It can then be shown that under these presuppositions perceptual experience can neither be the kind of co-operation McDowell calls for nor secure what he calls “thought’s bearing on reality.” But the situation changes radically when, for the sake of salvaging what McDowell sees through a glass but darkly, one reconstructs the argument of Mind and World in the light of the following speculative thought: that the co-operation between receptivity and spontaneity at which McDowell should have been aiming in Mind and World is one in which a sensually impressional and conceptual dimension are so integrated with one another that they constitute distinguishable but inseparable moments of the one distinctively perceptual intentional experience. Only then, or so it will be argued, can one secure “thought’s bearing on reality,” indeed properly understand what this is. Only then does one secure a real difference to Davidson and clearly see just what McDowell is objecting to in his critique of Davidsonian coherentism. Finally, only then can one truly accomplish McDowell’s professed goal of show14 See Wright 1996, p. 240, and Wright 1998, p. 397 f. 15 Whether this is accurate as an account of Peirce’s doctrines, in particular, of the three categories, is not relevant here – see Chapter One, p. 26, note 13.

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ing that, pace Davidson,16 empirical reality must rationally, and not merely causally, constrain empirical thinking. Crucially, when one reconstructs McDowell’s argument along these lines, a conception of perceptual intentionality and its essential worldliness emerges which displays striking resemblance to the views of the mature Husserl. Consequently, the reconstruction of McDowell provides a uniquely topical opportunity for setting the stage for an equally reconstructive, hence contemporising account of Husserl’s philosophical position and indeed of the path from Husserl to Heidegger. For the reconstruction of McDowell in effect shows that and how McDowell’s efforts to identify the ideological constraints under which much contemporary Anglo-American and analytic philosophy works force him, admittedly only nolens volens, towards phenomenological conceptions of perception, self and world. The one reconstructive endeavour can thus profit from the other: the effort to clarify Husserl’s position and the path to Heidegger can only be facilitated by interpreting it in the terms of a tradition far less tolerant of obscurity than the phenomenogical tradition, while the position of McDowell can be clarified and corrected by appeal to a philosophical tradition which has always demonstrated a greater capacity than his own to recognise and interpret the historical dynamic of philosophy. The task of reconstruction thus falls into two parts. Part I (“From Analytic Philosophy to Phenomenology”) takes Mind and World as foil in order to trace out a dialectical path from McDowell and other representative figures of recent analytic philosophy to the phenomenological position of Husserl. At the end of this reconstruction a position will have emerged which can serve as the point of departure for Part II (“From Husserl to Heidegger”), which reconstructs the evolution of Husserl’s account of perception from the Logischen Untersuchungen to the position of the Ideen I and beyond. In this second part, the account of perception as an ‘aesthetic’ rather than ‘apophantic’ kind of ‘synthesis’ (predication) articulated in comparatively simple form in Part I is elaborated in some detail in order to reveal something which the phenomenological tradition has always taken far more seriously, as far more significant, than the an16 “The relation between a sensation and a belief cannot be logical, since sensations are not beliefs or other propositional attitudes. What then is the relation? The answer is, I think, obvious: the relation is causal. Sensations cause some beliefs and in this sense are the basis or ground of those beliefs. But causal explanation of a belief does not show how or why the belief is justified.” (Davidson 1986, p. 311)

Introduction

11

alytic tradition: the essentially ‘temporal’ character of self-conscious, rationally self-regulating empirical thinking. By this is meant not simply the more or less commonplace point that such thinking essentially involves a ‘streaming’ – which is not to say a ‘stream’! – of potentially conscious intentional states and experiences. Rather, by this is meant (a) that at least some of these intentional states and experiences are contentful in a uniquely and irreducibly temporal manner; and (b) that only because and insofar as this is so can there be a coherent process of thinking to which any kind of intentional state or experience can belong at all. In this sense, time is indeed, as Kant said, the ‘form’ of ‘inner sense’. This account of the nature of intentional, in particular, perceptual content then leads on to a reconstructive account of what is only very misleadingly called the phenomenological concept of truth and from there to the central plank of Heidegger’s critique of Husserl, namely, that phenomenology must start with the ‘historical’ (das geschichtliche Ich) rather than with Husserl’s ‘pure’ ego (reines Ich). With this, the task of laying the ground for the reconstructive interpretation of Being and Time itself is accomplished. But the interpretation to be undertaken here is reconstructive in a further, more ambitious sense. The goal is not simply to align certain views from the past with representative views of the present, and vice versa. The goal is rather to show that the past reconstructed – crucial aspects of Husserl’s phenomenology and those problems in Husserl’s position which Heidegger identifies – is in many ways an advance on the present used to reconstruct it. Yet this must not be understood as a call to return to the past – as if it made sense simply to go back to either Husserl or Heidegger and pick up where they had left off. Indeed, one would fail to intimate a sense in which the positions of Husserl and Heidegger represented an advance on those of the present did one seek simply to turn the clock back, or rather, to recommend an older, somewhat different clock. The goal is to reconstruct past and present in such even-handed reciprocity that what emerges points positively to how one might proceed from here – the here of the philosophical present, of course. If such a fusion of past and present can be accomplished, then it will itself show that the process of letting past and present so illuminate one another that future possibilities are opened up is, as the Second Division of Being and Time suggests, the movement of philosophy itself. These remarks indicate that the study to be undertaken here seeks to integrate philosophy with its own history in a sense richer than that apparently intended by Wilfrid Sellars when he said that “(p)hilosophy without the history of philosophy, if not empty or blind, is at least

12

Introduction

dumb.” (Sellars 1967, p. 1) By this he presumably meant simply that not to know the history of philosophy is to deny oneself an important source of insight and critique, a point with which one can hardly disagree. Underpinning this study is the conviction that simply to complement philosophy with the ‘history of philosophy’ in this sense is not enough. Arguably, unless one positively integrates the latter into the former, one is not really (eigentlich) doing philosophy at all, but something so halfbaked as to stand constantly under threat of sterility. The practice of science rightly occludes the historical movement and background which fixes the identity of its problems. In philosophy, by contrast, the very identity of its problems is itself at issue. When, therefore, philosophy models itself on science, it fails to understand what its problems and its problem are. Discourse (Rede) then becomes idle (Gerede) in the sense that it lacks any real point, any real goal, against which to measure itself. And so, without ever being really able to thematise the ideological presuppositions under which their ‘problems’ arise, practitioners wile their time away with ever zanier thought-experiments and counterexamples until finally, bored, they move on to another set of issues arising one knows not whence or why. This fate is not avoided simply by complementing ahistorically problem-oriented philosophical discourse with strictly historical research into philosophy’s history.17 Sellars thus does not do sufficient justice to the importance of knowing the history of philosophy when he calls upon philosophers to read a circle wider than those they have met at conferences or who have recently published in the journals to which they themselves have contributed. One meta-philosophical objective of the interpretation to be given here is to illustrate this point. Admittedly, this conception of philosophy presupposes a strong, hence controversial sense in which the texts and history of philosophy are meaningful – precisely that sense which underlies Gadamer’s notion of the fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung). But to this kind of post-modern or post-analytic worry one can only reply that the proof is in the pudding.

17 Which is not in the least to deny the crucial importance of such strictly historical research, which stands to philosophy into which reflection on its own history is truly integrated as experimental physics stands to theoretical physics.

Chapter One: Escaping the Oscillation In some sense it must be correct to say that truth-claiming and reasoning about empirical reality – what John McDowell calls empirical thinking – is constrained by the empirical reality it seeks to know; the philosophically interesting questions begin when one asks what this sense is. In Mind and World McDowell claims that the philosophical tradition has given two different kinds of answer to this question. On the one side there stands what McDowell, following Wilfrid Sellars (in Sellars 1963c), calls the Myth of the Given, on the other what he terms coherentism.1 These positions share a certain picture of empirical thinking. Firstly, for both, empirical thinking, because it is a ‘rational’ activity, is also a ‘normative’ one in the sense that it is guided by considerations of when moves made within it are correct and incorrect. Secondly, both see empirical thinking as an activity which takes place within its own internal domain beyond the outer boundary of which external empirical reality lies, causally impinging upon its operations via perceptual experience. Crucially, both positions construe the most immediate impacts of external empirical reality upon empirical thinking – that which constitutes the sensually impressional, qualitative dimension of perceptual experience – as thoroughly non-conceptual in character. According to McDowell, precisely because they both construe the sensually impressional, qualitative dimension of perceptual experience as non-conceptual, the Myth of the Given and coherentism constitute the poles of an antinomy between which one must ceaselessly oscillate. In order to escape this antimony, we must break with the common presupposition of its poles, more precisely, with that part of this presupposition which consists in a picture of empirical thinking as responding to completely non-conceptual items caused on the margins of consciousness by an external empirical reality lying beyond the outer periphery. To break with this presupposition is, thinks McDowell, to overcome the “confinement imagery” (McDowell 1994b, p. 16) to which both the Myth of the Given and coherentism are ineluctably wedded by the pic1

The term ‘coherentism’ also appears to come from Sellars – see Sellars 1963d, p. 197.

14

Chapter One: Escaping the Oscillation

ture they draw of the causal transaction between the inner and the outer. In order to expose as spurious the sceptical worries to which such “confinement imagery” gives rise, we must, says McDowell, somehow “erase the boundary” which symbolises, more precisely, to the extent that it symbolises, “a gulf between thought and the world … .” (McDowell 1994b, p. 146) And this requires us to revise what lies at the core of such imagery, namely, a conception of perceptual experience which construes the sensually impressional non-conceptual and the epistemically relevant, conceptual dimensions of perceptual experience as indifferently sitting alongside one another. Once one has understood what McDowell means by the Myth of the Given, one readily sees why one might want to abandon it in favour of coherentism. But McDowell is unable to make any convincing case for the opposite claim, namely, that there is an equally ineluctable return from coherentism back to the Myth of the Given. In consequence, he fails to make good his claim of ceaseless oscillation between the two positions. In order to determine, then, whether there is anything to McDowell’s claims, we must, in this and the following chapter, engage in a sustained reconstruction of the first two lectures of Mind and World.

§ 1: Thought’s Bearing on Reality Before we can understand what McDowell means by the Myth of the Given, coherentism and their ostensibly antinomic relation to one another, we must first understand a notion which plays a central role throughout Mind and World, that, namely, of thought’s bearing on reality. This notion is pivotal in virtue of the structural role McDowell gives it: ability to secure or preserve such bearing is taken as the criterion of success to which any account of perceptual experience, empirical thinking and empirical reality must appeal, hence the standard against which it is to be measured. Indeed, the antimony which McDowell claims to find between the Myth of the Given and coherentism only arises because each position fails to secure thought’s bearing on reality in different but complementary ways. McDowell speaks, without distinguishing clearly between them, of thought’s bearing on reality in two interrelated senses: in the first instance, it connotes what he calls, at least in his Woodbridge lectures, the “objective purport” (McDowell 1998a, p. 445, p. 464, p. 490) of empirically contentful cognitive intentional states and experiences. This ap-

§ 1: Thought’s Bearing on Reality

15

pears to be the character of such states and experiences as not just ‘about things’ (since even a fictional story is in some sense about things) but as genuine truth claimings, which purport to be evaluable with regard to truth or falsity, hence rationally revisable in the light of such evaluation, by the subject whose truth claimings they are. In Mind and World the term is most unambiguously understood in this way on p. 68 and p. 143 but see also p. 15, pp. 17 – 18, p. 50, pp. 67 – 68 and pp. 141 – 142. In the second instance, however, McDowell’s talk of thought’s bearing on reality sometimes has a wider, more dynamic and processual sense. By the term ‘thought’ one can mean not just an act of judging or a state of belief, nor even the content of such acts and states, but the whole process of thinking into which such acts and states, and thereby their contents, enter. McDowell seems to have some such dynamic rather than static sense in mind whenever he couples talk of thought’s bearing on reality with talk of empirical thought, or rather empirical thinking, as rationally responsive to the reality upon which it bears – see, e. g., McDowell 1994b, p. 16, p. 25, p. 66, p. 141, p. 143 and elsewhere. Obviously, ‘thought’ in the sense of something which rationally responds to an independent reality, regulating and revising itself in the light (of its evaluations) thereof, can be neither an individual intentional content nor an individual state or experience with intentional content. It can only be a temporal process in which such standing states and occurrent experiences are caught up. Precisely in this dynamic, processual sense thought bears on reality in a way which distinguishes it from that equally dynamic, processual affair which is a game. For empirical thinking, unlike a game, is essentially open to instruction from outside as to whether and in what way it should revise its moves, or even the very ‘rules’ according to which it makes them. So when McDowell speaks of thought’s bearing on reality as a matter of rational responsiveness, he means the character of the whole process of empirical knowing as genuinely responding to, i. e., critically evaluating and, where necessary, revising itself in the light of, how reality objectively is. At one point, for example, McDowell glosses what it is for the exercise of conceptual capacities, in other words, for thinking, to bear on the empirical world as consisting in its “taking a stand on how things are, a posture correctly or incorrectly adopted according to how the world is arranged.” (McDowell 1994b, pp. 141 – 142) Of course, it is not hard to see what the connection might be between the two senses in which McDowell speaks of thought’s bearing on reality.

16

Chapter One: Escaping the Oscillation

As McDowell himself says, our picture of ‘understanding’, i. e., of empirical thinking, could not be what it needs to be, a picture of a system of concepts and conceptions with substantial empirical content, if it were not already part of the picture that the system is the medium within which one engages in active thought that is rationally responsive to the deliverances of experience. To understand empirical content in general, we need to see it in its dynamic place in a self-critical activity, the activity by which we aim to comprehend the world as it impinges on our senses. (McDowell 1994b, pp. 33 – 34)

This passage shows that McDowell regards the second, dynamic sense as the primary one. In the third section of chapter two, we will examine this second sense more closely in order to show (a) that thought’s bearing on reality in this sense already plays a fundamental role in Davidson’s account of interpretation and content; and crucially also (b) that Davidson in one respect understands it better than McDowell because he tacitly understands it generically, i. e., without McDowell’s restriction to the specifically epistemic or cognitive case. In the meantime, we will use the term “thought’s bearing on reality” more or less as McDowell does. That is, we will understand it as primarily, even mostly connoting the rational responsiveness of empirical thinking, taken as a self-evaluating, potentially self-revising whole, to the reality upon which its individually contentful thoughts bear in the first sense without, however, clearly distinguishing this sense of the term from the first. With this vital clarification behind us, we may turn, in the next section (§ 2), to examine McDowell’s account of the Myth of the Given and his critique of the kind of attempt it represents to secure or preserve thought’s bearing on reality. Having uncovered what McDowell rightly sees as the inherent absurdity of the Myth of the Given, we shall then explore, in the section following (§ 3), Davidson’s coherentist conception of perceptual experience, which arises as a response to this absurdity. This exploration will serve as a basis for determining, in the section thereafter (§ 4), how, on a coherentist account of perceptual experience, empirical reality can be said to constrain empirical thinking. In other words, we will investigate in this fourth section how Davidson and coherentism generally seek to secure, preserve or accommodate thought’s bearing on reality. Finally, in the last and most important section of this chapter (§ 5), we attempt to make sense of McDowell’s claim that coherentism is weak where its opponent is strong, which weakness forces us back to the latter. We also attempt to make sense of the response McDowell recommends to

§ 2: The Myth of the Given

17

this invidious situation, namely, rejection of the picture of empirical thinking common to both the Myth of the Given and coherentism, and re-conception of the notion of perceptual experience itself. This results in the identification of two paths along which one could reconceive perceptual experience in conformity with a requirement placed by McDowell on the re-conception of perceptual experience at which he arrives by arguing that in order to escape the antimony we must negate the common presupposition of its poles. One of these paths is the one actually taken by McDowell. The other is the one, or so we shall argue, he should have taken.

§ 2: The Myth of the Given According to the Myth of the Given, experience in the cognitive sense of the German word Erfahrung 2 constitutes a peculiarly fundamental kind of justification for empirical knowing. Specifically, the Myth of the Given construes individual perceptual experiences as distinctively fundamental kinds of reason for judgement and belief. Often, perhaps even mostly, those who have endorsed the Myth have attempted to construe as absolute the sense in which such experiences constitute a distinctively fundamental kind of reason for judgement and belief: perceptual experiences are held to be, at least ideally, incontrovertible or infallible in the sense that the mere having of them is a guarantee of their veridicality or truth.3 But adherents of the Myth of the Given need not understand the peculiarly distinctive, foundational sense in which experiences are reasons for belief quite so radically. For at bottom the Myth of the Given is motivated by two interrelated intuitions: firstly, experiences are not just so many reasons for belief alongside others – as if they were indistinguishable in character from beliefs or judgements one has derived from prior 2 3

Rather than the sense in which, say, an African safari might be an experience. In German an experience in this sense one would call an Erlebnis. In other words, proponents of the Myth of the Given have often held experiences to be self-authenticating in Sellars’ distinctive sense of this term – see Sellars 1963c, p. 167. This extreme version of the Myth of the Given has led its adherents into a search for experiences with such radically foundational justificatory potential. The standard candidates for this role are sense impressions or sense data. Note that what Moritz Schlick called Konstatierungen – see Schlick 1934 (1959), p. 221 – would appear to be not only thoroughly conceptual but also to be foundational only in the sense of being non-theory-laden. Schlick does not appear to regard them as literally infallible or incorrigible.

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Chapter One: Escaping the Oscillation

inferences and is now using as premises for further inferences. Secondly, this difference from belief and judgement explains why perceptual experience constitutes our most basic contact with the world, that in which all (empirical) belief and judgement must originate. These considerations lead Gareth Evans, whose “view of experience” McDowell claims, not completely uncontroversially,4 to be “a version of the Myth of the Given” (McDowell 1994b, pp. 51 – 52), to recommend that we “take the notion of being-in-an-informational-state-with-such-andsuch content as a primitive notion” rather than attempting “to characterize it in terms of belief.” (Evans 1982, p. 123) For any attempted characterisation in terms of belief … could not be simple, because of a fundamental (almost defining) property of the states in the informational system, which I shall call their ‘belief-independence“: the subject’s being in an informational state is independent of whether or not he believes that the state is veridical. It is a well-known fact about perceptual illusions that it will continue to appear to us as though, say, one line is longer than the other (in the Mller-Lyer illusion) even when we are quite sure that it is not. Similarly, it may still seem to us as though such-and-such an episode took place in the past, even though we now believe our apparent experience of it to have been hallucinatory. And our being placed in the appropriate informational state by someone telling us a story does not depend upon our believing the story to be true. (Evans 1982, p. 123)

What Evans calls belief-independence would seem to be bound up with another distinctive, indeed definitive feature of perceptual experience. Unlike belief and judgement, perceptual experience has what one might call an inherent credibility in the sense that not believing anything which speaks against its veridicality is reason enough for accepting it as veridical. (This inherent credibility explains why one can ground the assertion that Joe was at work yesterday by asserting that one had perceived 4

McDowell acknowledges that, given Evans’ lack of interest in “the epistemological obsessions that are usually operative in motivating the Myth of the Given”, “(i)t may be hard to believe that Evans’s view of experience is a version of the Myth of the Given.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 51) For McDowell’s and indeed our purposes, a position counts as a version of the Myth of the Given if it (a) endorses a picture of empirical thinking as enclosed within its own internal sphere, receiving the causal impingements of an external empirical reality lying beyond its outer boundary; (b) regards these impingements as lacking conceptual content; and yet (c) also regards these impingements as constituting, perhaps only under certain conditions, i. e., for certain kinds of subject, reasons for belief and judgement. Evans’ position surely fulfils these three conditions.

§ 2: The Myth of the Given

19

Joe at work yesterday.) Certainly, taken together, both belief-independence and inherent credibility5 would seem to motivate descriptions of perceptual experience as – to use the terms preferred by McDowell and others – a matter of its appearing, seeming or looking to someone (a perceiver) that such and such is the case.6 Perceptual experience retains this character as an appearing or seeming even when one has acquired the knowledge, or at least the sufficiently well-grounded belief, that the things it shows as thus and so are not in fact thus and so. Looking out of the window one dark night, I see what I take to be a man moving about in the garden. I investigate and discover that what I saw – for I did see something – was in fact a bush moving in the wind. Yet when I look out the window again, I can certainly see (understand) how the bush tossed about by the wind there in the garden might be seen as a man moving about there in the garden. No strictly discursive judgement, whether linguistically formulated or not, has any comparable property. Perceptual experiences would therefore seem not to be just so many judgements or beliefs more, alongside all others. Furthermore, the inherent credibility of perceptual experience must also be what underpins descriptions of it as our most basic epistemic contact with the world, as that with which all empirical belief and judgement must begin. It seems at least plausible to say that its originating in perceptual experience explains why distinctively empirical believing, judging and asserting, that is, empirical thinking, is no mere game. A mere game is, after all, precisely not sensitive to, or evaluable in terms of, how empirical reality itself is, however much a game might be regulated by notions of correct and incorrect performance internal to it. This inherent credibility evidently secures what McDowell calls, as we have seen, thought’s bearing on reality or, as he sometimes also says, the world – see, e. g., McDowell 1994b, p. 14, p. 16, p. 25, p. 66 and elsewhere. So the task of securing, preserving or accommodating at least empirical 5

6

Or what one might also call the self-authenticating character of perceptual experience. But this terminology is potentially misleading since self-authentication in the sense intended here is not self-authentication in the sense considered and rejected by Sellars (in Sellars, op. cit.). Self-authentication in Sellars’ sense appears to be incorrigibility. Or, to put matter in terms which, for reasons to be indicated later, are preferred here, belief independence and inherent credibility motivate descriptions of perceptual experience as a matter of something’s showing itself to someone as thus and so.

20

Chapter One: Escaping the Oscillation

thought’s bearing on reality must also involve accounting philosophically for this inherent credibility. The apparent ability of the Myth of the Given both to accommodate thought’s bearing on reality in the second sense distinguished in section one and to provide some philosophical elaboration of what this bearing is and how it is possible gives the Myth its considerable plausibility. We need, however, to note something to which McDowell regards the Myth as committed because of the distinctive way in which it attempts to accommodate thought’s bearing on reality: the Myth, most generically formulated, claims that experiences, although not themselves judgements or beliefs, nonetheless serve as reasons for judgement and belief. So according to the Myth of the Given, empirical reality does not simply or brutely exercise a causal constraint on empirical thinking. Rather, empirical reality constrains empirical thinking rationally in the sense that its most direct and immediate causal impingements upon empirical thinking, its first manifestations ‘in consciousness’,7 are reasons for belief and action. And so, McDowell concludes, all proponents of the Myth of the Given de facto acknowledge what he calls, in deliberate reference to Kant, the freedom, indeed the spontaneity, of thinking – see McDowell, Lecture I, p. 4 f. McDowell reaches this conclusion as follows: thinking, that is, what Kant called the ‘understanding’ (Verstand), is that capacity or ‘faculty’ (Vermçgen) of a self-conscious, rational subject which is exercised in discursive thinking, i. e., the wielding of concepts in judgements occurring either as premises or conclusions in inferences. The conceptual sphere in this strictly discursive, judgemental and inferential sense is thus “… constituted …”, as McDowell puts it, “… by rational relations.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 5) If, however, this is so, then, claims McDowell, the conceptual realm must be a realm of freedom since “… rational necessitation is not just compatible with freedom but constitutive of it.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 5) The Myth of the Given, in claiming that the most immediate effects empirical reality necessitates in us are reasons for belief and judgement, construes these effects as rationally (or normatively) evaluable, so that their subsequent necessitation of belief and judgement in us is free in the sense which Robert Brandom gives this term.8 7 8

Or, if one does not like the insinuations of first person introspection implicit in talk of being ‘in consciousness’, one might prefer the phrase ‘in the realm of the psychological’. See Brandom 1979, cited in McDowell, op. cit., p. 5, note 5.

§ 2: The Myth of the Given

21

Now Kant at least correlates, if not exactly identifies, the notion of freedom with the notion of spontaneity. Moreover, McDowell always assumes that the conception of freedom he finds in Brandom is also to be found in Kant.9 So according to McDowell, adherents of the Myth of the Given acknowledge a Kantian spontaneity of thinking. Indeed, once McDowell has extended to Kant the idea that freedom is the recognition of rational necessity, he can map Kant directly onto Sellars. Understanding or thinking in Kant’s sense is, he says, “…at least in part what Sellars calls “the space of reasons” … .“10 For Kant as well as Sellars and Brandom, “the space of reasons is the realm of freedom.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 5) From what McDowell has just claimed it follows that the conceptual sphere in the strictly discursive, judgemental and inferential sense of thinking or ‘the understanding’ must be entirely contained within the so-called space of reasons. This is not to say, however, that the conceptual sphere coincides with the space of reasons. And it is the very essence of the Myth of the Given, at least as McDowell construes it, to deny such coincidence. According to McDowell, the Myth of the Given distinguishes perceptual experience, understood as our most basic conscious and initial epistemic contact with the world, from belief or judgement. (The pre-philosophically ascertainable intuitive basis for this distinction is provided, of course, by the twin characters of inherent credibility and belief-independence distinguished above as displayed by perceptual experience but not by belief or judgement.) Yet it is precisely the distinguishing feature of the Myth of the Given that according to it perceptual experiences are nonetheless reasons for belief or judgement. There can be reasons for belief which are not themselves either judgements or beliefs, hence do not fall within the conceptual sphere in the strictly discursive, judgement- and inference-oriented sense marked by the Kantian term ‘understanding’ (Verstand). At this point, the Myth of the Given, as least as McDowell portrays it, shows itself to be underpinned by a crucial assumption. McDowell writes, 9 But is this assumption right? The very fact that Kant correlates freedom with spontaneity suggests that it might not be. For surely the notion of spontaneity suggests the novel and emergent, hence sits ill with the notion of necessitation, no matter how rational. One wonders whether McDowell’s (and Brandom’s) quasi-Hegelian notion of freedom is not a neo-Kantian domestication of Kant, along the lines of Windelband 1924, rather than truly Kantian in spirit. 10 For Sellars’ introduction of the term ‘the space of reasons’, see Sellars, op. cit., p. 169.

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Chapter One: Escaping the Oscillation

Suppose we are tracing the ground, the justification, for a belief or judgement. The idea [to which the Myth of the Given is now led] is that when we have exhausted all the available moves within the space of concepts, all the available moves from one conceptually organized item to another, there is still one more step we can take: namely, pointing to something that is simply received in experience. It can only be pointing, because ex hypothesi this last move in a justification comes after we have exhausted the possibilities of tracing grounds from one conceptually organized, and so articulable, item to another. (McDowell 1994b, p. 6)

In other words, when the Myth of the Given goes in search of those reasons for belief which, because of their distinctively experiential, “beliefindependent” character, lie beyond the “conceptual sphere” of judgement, belief and inference (der Verstand), it believes it has moved beyond conceptual content altogether. The reasons for belief it is seeking, because they do not belong to the “conceptual sphere” in the sense of the realm of judgement, belief and inference, do not belong to the “conceptual sphere” in the sense of the realm of all items with a conceptually differentiated, hence linguistically articulable structure. They are thus items at which one can only point. In its efforts to spell out what is meant by a reason for judgement or belief which is neither apophantic (judgemental) nor doxastic (belief-like), the Myth tacitly treats as co-extensive two slightly different understandings of the term “conceptual sphere” (and thus of other cognate terms, e. g., “the space of concepts”). From the outset, the Myth of the Given, at least as McDowell understands it, assumes that something is a conceptually contentful, hence linguistically articulable epistemic state or act if and only if it is itself a belief or judgement.11 Of course, precisely because the Myth of the Given makes this assumption, thereby committing itself to regarding as co-extensive two slightly different senses of the term “conceptual sphere” – on the one hand, the realm of apophansis and doxa, on the other, the realm of all conceptually contentful, hence linguistically articulable items – , it becomes very easy to show that the Myth is a myth:

11 Strictly speaking, this should be weakened to read “then it is itself either judgement or belief, or some (possibly merely potential) part thereof.” At this point the possibility is not being ruled out that there are such things as Husserlian nominal representations and Sellarsian intuitions, i. e., intentional states or acts that have an object-directed content. There is no reason why an advocate of the Myth of the Given as McDowell understands it could not embrace such things (if there are such things).

§ 3: Davidson’s Conception of Perceptual Experience

23

The idea of the Given is the idea that the space of reasons, the space of justifications or warrants, extends more widely than the conceptual sphere. The extra extent of the space of reasons is supposed to allow it to incorporate non-conceptual impacts from outside the realm of thought. But we cannot really understand the relations in virtue of which a judgement is warranted except as relations within the space of concepts: relations such as implication or probabilification, which hold between potential exercises of conceptual capacities. The attempt to extend the scope of justificatory relations outside the conceptual sphere cannot do what it is supposed to do. (McDowell 1994b, p. 7)

Evidently, the argument McDowell presents here recapitulates one to be found in Sellars’ famous critique of the Myth of the Given. Sellars had argued that the defining tenets of classical empiricism were absurd. Classical empiricism regarded the immediate causal impacts of external empirical reality upon internal cognitive processes as not merely causing, but also justifying empirical knowing – this notwithstanding its conviction that such sense data were devoid of all conceptual differentiation and linguistic articulability. In short, classical empiricism absurdly maintained that the completely non-conceptual impingements of external reality upon consciousness could serve as lowest-level premises for cognitive processes occurring deeper inside, in the truly conceptual sphere of empirical thinking. For Sellars, this idea was nothing but a “mongrel” born of the muddled attempt to construe as inhering in the same thing two properties which excluded one another, namely, an absence of conceptual differentiation and structure on the one hand, and the capacity to serve as a premise in inferences on the other – see Sellars 1963c, p. 132.12

§ 3: Davidson’s Conception of Perceptual Experience Insight into Sellars’ point has encouraged some to reject the very idea of a reason for belief which does not belong to the “conceptual sphere” in the discursive, judgement- and inference-oriented sense identified by McDo12 Sellars in fact describes the second property in rather more elaborate terms, namely, as being a non-inferentially derived knowing which provides evidence, that is, constitutes a premise for, all further empirical belief – see Sellars, op. cit., p. 132. But clearly what conflicts with the first property is the capacity to provide evidence for further knowing, in other words, to be a premise from which the latter is derived.

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Chapter One: Escaping the Oscillation

well with Kant’s notion of the understanding: any reason for judgement or belief must, they say, be itself a judgement or belief. Donald Davidson is a case in point; he sees clearly that if we conceive experience in terms of impacts on sensibility that occur outside the space of concepts, we must not think we can appeal to experience to justify judgements or beliefs. … The space of reasons does not extend further than the space of concepts, to take in a bare reception of the Given. (McDowell 1994b, p. 14)

But Davidson, no less than those who endorse McDowell’s Myth of the Given, believes that if anything is a cognitive, hence conceptually contentful state, experience or act, then it is itself a judgement, belief or, mutatis mutandis, a linguistic assertion. And so, from his endorsement of Sellars’ claim that if anything is a reason for judgement or belief, it is itself a conceptually contentful, hence linguistically articulable state or act, and no mere brute causal impact of external reality on our perceptual apparatus, Davidson moves by hypothetical syllogism to reject the very idea that, beyond the realm of apophansis and doxa, there could be reasons for belief. “(N)othing can count,” he says, “as a reason for holding a belief except another belief.” (Davidson 1986, p. 310) Consequently, insofar as one refuses to identify ‘experience’ in the sense of the most immediate causal impacts had ‘in consciousness’ by external things outside us, with belief or judgement, a perceptual experience cannot itself be a reason for belief. Experience in this sense must be outside the space of reasons. According to Davidson, experience is causally relevant to a subject’s beliefs and judgements, but it has no bearing on their status as justified or warranted. (McDowell 1994b, p. 14)

The relation of experience in the sense appealed to in this passage – what Davidson calls sensation – to belief cannot, according to Davidson, … be logical, since sensations are not beliefs or other propositional attitudes. What then is the relation? The answer is, I think, obvious: the relation is causal. Sensations cause some beliefs and in this sense are the basis or ground of those beliefs. But causal explanation of a belief does not show how or why the belief is justified.” (Davidson 1986, p. 311)

It is clear enough why Davidson uses the word ‘sensation’ here, rather than the word McDowell prefers, namely, ‘experience’. For by regimenting things this way Davidson is allowing for the fact that we do use the word ‘experience’ to connote something not just of causal but also of epistemic relevance for our empirical beliefs and judgements. Experience in this epistemically relevant sense then becomes for Davidson simply a mat-

§ 3: Davidson’s Conception of Perceptual Experience

25

ter of coming to believe something non-inferentially, in particular, as a result of things outside us causing sensations inside us, which latter in turn cause belief. Perceptual experience in the epistemically relevant sense thus consists simply in non-conceptually structured sensations (which can, of course, be called ‘experiences’ in another, merely causal sense) causing, directly and immediately, without any intervening process of inference, belief about their cause. Davidson retains this view, with hardly any change, throughout the remainder of his life. Thus, as late as 2001 we find him saying, To perceive that it is snowing is, under appropriate circumstances, to be caused (in the right way) by one’s senses to believe that it is snowing by the actually falling snow. Sensations no doubt play their role, but that role is not that of providing evidence for the belief. (Davidson 2001a, p. xvi)

Given this, it is fair to say that for Davidson perceptual experience is an aggregative whole. That is, he de facto understands it as a whole which is external to the identity of its parts in the sense that these parts can exist independently of one another. Indeed, since in Davidson’s case the whole is question is a purely external relation (causality), these parts can exist independently of the whole to which they belong. On the one hand, the impressional and in particular sensual dimension which we pre-philosophically recognise perceptual experience to have, and which is clearly bound up in some way with the phenomenon of belief-independence, is construed as the presence of ‘sensations’, which lack all intentionality and direct epistemic relevance and are capable of occurring apart from the experiential whole to which they belong. On the other hand, the conceptually differentiated, hence linguistically articulable dimension which accounts for the functional role of perceptual experience in empirical knowing is construed as the occurrence of an act of (very low-level) perceptual or empirical judgement, which, too, can in principle stand alone. We may sum Davidson’s conception of perceptual experience up in a manner suggested by what he says on p. xvi of Davidson 2001a: perceptual experience consists in the causal coupling of something non-conceptual and impressional with something conceptual and non-impressional, hence of items which are distinct existences in Hume’s sense, namely, sensations and perceptual belief or judgement respectively. Naturally, even with this merely aggretative conception of perceptual experience, Davidson is still able to distinguish between having (epistemically relevant) perceptual experience and being struck by a thought or premonition, say, that someone is staring at one from behind or that

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one will be run down by a lorry tomorrow. For on Davidson’s account, in perceptual experience, the external object which causes one’s perceptual judgement or belief is not merely judged or believed about, it is also sensed: a genuinely perceptual belief or judgement does not come from out of the blue, but in a process which is itself experienced in the sense of the German word ‘erlebt’. This shows that Davidson’s appeal to the notion of ‘sensation’, understood as the first introspectively available causal impact of the object perceived upon the perceiving subject, is not gratuitous: he needs it in order to distinguish those kinds of non-inferential low-level comings-to-believe or judgings which are genuinely perceptual from premonitions and those kinds of case in which “one is, as we say, struck by a thought.” (McDowell 1998a, p. 441) The phenomenon of belief-independence might encourage a more serious objection to Davidson’s account. Surely explaining this requires one to understand in an epistemically relevant fashion inconsistent with Davidson’s account that feature of perceptual experience which led Peirce to speak of the phenomenal quality or firstness of experience in contrast to its causally impressional secondness and the conceptual thirdness of belief and judgement, and which led Davidson to speak of sensation?13 After all, what underlies and makes this belief-independence possible is the character of perceptual experience as the appearing of things as thus and so, that is, its character as showing things as thus and so in a certain subjectively, objectively and contextually conditioned way. 13 Passages which legitimate this appropriation of Peirce’s terminology are CP 1.302 – 303, 1.418 and 1.424 – 425, 5.66, 5.81, esp. 5.122 and 5.194, and finally, 7.530 and esp. 7.625. But it must always be borne in mind that we are simply borrowing Peirce’s terminology of firstness, secondness and thirdness in order to have some non-tendentious terms for denoting certain characters or dimensions of perceptual experience. We are thus not claiming, or in any way presupposing, that the use to which this terminology is put here constitutes an adequate interpretation or reflection of Peirce’s own views. Nor could we claim or presuppose this: at the end of 5.194 Peirce denies that thirdness can be present in perception; see also 7.625 – 626 and 7.630. And he rejects the idea that the dimension of firstness is not even notionally separable from that of secondness and thirdness, even as he insists that thirdness is not even notionally separable from secondness, and secondness not even notionally separable from firstness – see CP 1.353! Finally, we are not in any way endorsing the further move made by Peirce of associating the qualitative, causal and conceptual characters or dimensions of perceptual experience with three kinds of sign (or possibly with three characters or dimensions of signhood), viz., icons, indexes and symbols (predicates) – see, e. g., CP 5.72 – 76.

§ 3: Davidson’s Conception of Perceptual Experience

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If, for example, I reflect upon my seeing a uniformly red-coloured ball lying there on the table in front of me, I will realise that, because in the particular circumstances the ball is illuminated from one side only, its objectively uniform redness is presented to me in a darker hue here, a lighter hue there. This differential presentation of the one uniform red colour is an objective fact – not, of course, of the ball itself, but of how I perceive it. And although I cannot, perhaps, describe this feature particularly well, I can certainly show it, as when I paint a piece of paper with objectively different shades of red in order to represent in two dimensions how the ball perceptually appeared to me as red all over its three dimensional surface. Indeed, such showing of what it is or was like for me to perceive from here the ball there as red all over is the way in which I would be typically expected to be able to communicate this objective feature of my perception to others. The same thing applies, of course, in the case of aural perception, as when I imitate, by increasing and then decreasing pitch, how I heard a train’s whistle blowing as the train first approached and then receded from me.14 And the point can be readily extended to other kinds of perception. This pre-philosophically ascertainable character of perceptual experience as not just causally but also sensually impressional motivates talk of such experience as a matter of things appearing to one as thus and so. This is surely what underlies and makes possible the phenomenon of belief-independence. One might now argue that Davidson’s account of the (epistemically relevant) notion of perceptual experience must fail to capture and explain the character of perceptual experiences as appearings in this sense – in which case it must also fail to explain belief-independence. For all his hostility to the idea that sensations cause perceptual judgement or belief by being interpreted – as Davidson would put it, by being brought under a conceptual scheme – , he retains the generic conception of perceptual experience implicit in this traditional idea: for Davidson perception is and remains a matter of sensations causing belief, the difference being that sensations no longer cause belief by being interpreted. But is not the traditional idea only able to explain the character of perceptual experience as an appearing of something as thus and so, hence able to explain belief-independence, because it accords sensations the residually epistemic role of being targets of interpretation? Sensations can only be interpretable if they can be understood as demanding some interpretations and not others, and surely this, and only this, permits the traditional idea to explain 14 See Peirce, CP 1.304 and 1.336.

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belief-independence. By dropping this aspect of the traditional idea, Davidson surely finds himself unable to explain this phenomenon. Davidson would dispute the claim that by assimilating perceptual experience in any epistemically relevant sense to belief and judgement, thereby sidelining, if not eliminating the role of sensation, he fails to capture the character of perceptual experience as a matter of things showing themselves to be thus and so, of its appearing, seeming or looking to a perceiver that p. Consequently, he would reject the suggestion that he cannot accommodate the belief-independence of perceptual experience. In order to accommodate belief-independence, or rather, what underpins it, he will, of course, have make the familiar move of connecting perceptual experience to belief “… via some such phrase as ‘prima facie inclination to believe’” (Evans 1982, p. 124).15 In other words, properly elaborated, talk of perceptual experience has a harmlessly ambiguous sense. On the one hand, it is a matter simply of sensation causing perceptual belief or judgement. On the other, it is simply a matter of having certain sensations, which sensations incline the subject to make a certain perceptual judgement, or form a certain perceptual belief, in the sense that they will brutely cause this judgement or belief unless the subject has background beliefs which speak against allowing the sensations this efficacy. The latter ‘cut-down’ sense in which one can speak of perceptual experience explains the phenomenon of belief-independence, which can now be understood as the presence in perceptual experience (in either sense) of sensations which incline belief-formation in a certain direction. Crucially, the latter ‘cut-down’ sense is conceptually dependent upon the first, hence is derivative. All in all, Davidson seems just as able as anyone else to accommodate the phenomenon of belief-independence.

§ 4: Davidson’s Coherentism Once one has acknowledged the absurdity inherent in the Myth of the Given and the sceptical dangers lurking in the idea of conceptual schemes, once indeed one has seen how Davidson could reply to objections of the kind just considered, how could one not be satisfied with his account of perceptual experience? Yet McDowell is not satisfied. He thinks that because Davidson construes perceptual experience in a 15 Evans is referring at this point to a notion found in Armstrong 1968, Chapter 10.

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way which prevents it, hence empirical reality itself, from rationally constraining empirical thinking, he is danger of being unable to explain how empirical knowing differs from a self-contained game, in which moves, while rationally constrained internally by the rules governing it, are not rationally constrained by how things are beyond it, in the empirical reality enclosing it. McDowell agrees, of course, with the Sellarsian point that insofar as one means by experience the extra-conceptual impact of external things upon us, experience can only be a cause of empirical belief and judgement, and not its ground. Even so, he finds Davidson’s final conclusion “quite unsatisfying”: Davidson recoils from the Myth of the Given all the way to denying experience any justificatory role … . Davidson’s picture depicts our empirical thinking as engaged in with no rational constraint, but only causal influence, from outside. This just raises a worry as to whether the picture can accommodate the sort of bearing on reality [that distinguishes empirical thinking from a self-contained game], and that is just the kind of worry that can make an appeal to the Given seem necessary. And Davidson does nothing to allay the worry. (McDowell 1994b, pp. 14 – 15)

Davidson, of course, would deny that he does nothing to allay the worry that, given his picture of perceptual experience, he is unable to explain how empirical knowing can be more than just a self-contained game. According to him, when the nature of empirical thinking, that is to say, of assertion, belief and judgement, is properly understood, one sees that it needs nothing more than causal constraint from outside in order to be genuinely, that is to say, cognitively engaged with reality. His reasons for maintaining this are bound up with his conception of the contentfulness both of linguistic acts and of intentional states and experiences: Tarski has, thinks Davidson, provided us with the means of showing why, and indeed in a certain sense how, the concept of truth is the key to understanding the distinctive contentfulness of linguistic acts and, by extension, intentional states and experiences of all kinds. If, namely, we can construct, for an arbitrary natural language, a Tarskian theory of truth which assigns to the semantically primitive linguistic expressions of the language objects, classes of objects and truth-functional properties in such a way that the T-sentences entailed by the theory specify the truth conditions actually possessed by sentences in the language, then we will have shown that for an expression to have linguistic meaning is for it to be mentioned in the axioms of a Tarskian theory of truth for a certain language. To construct such a Tarskian theory of truth is thus what it is to provide a theory of meaning for a natural language.

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In effect, Davidson is recommending that we invert the order of explanation or explication intended by Tarski himself: whereas Tarski presupposed the meaningfulness of the expressions in a (formal) language in order to show what it is to be true (or rather, true-in-a-formal-language), Davidson suggests that we presuppose the notion of truth-in-a-naturallanguage in order to exhibit through successful construction of a correct Tarskian theory of truth what it is for something to be a meaningful expression in a natural language. As Davidson only realised comparatively late in the piece, this requires us to accept the notion of truth as an undefinable primitive; we must not think that our Tarskian truth-theoretic constructions also illuminate or explicate the notion of truth itself – see Davidson 1984a, p. xiv, and Davidson 1984d, p. 216. Of course, this strategy for accomplishing the primary goal of a philosophical theory of meaning requires some demonstration that it is in fact possible to construct a Tarskian theory of truth for a natural language simply by presupposing the notion of truth, that is, without questionbeggingly presupposing an understanding of the linguistic meaning of expressions in the language. In principle, one can construct infinitely many Tarskian theories of truth for the expressions of an arbitrary natural language, but only one or, if we allow for vagueness in the meaning of expressions, at most a few, of these theories will be correct. That is, only one or at least a few will be theories which assign those truth conditions to sentences which these sentences actually have, i. e., are used by speakers of the language as having. In order to show that it is indeed possible to construct a correct theory of truth for any natural language without question-beggingly presupposing any knowledge of the meanings actually possessed by expressions in the language, Davidson introduces the device of radical interpretation. This consists in attempting to determine, on the basis of observations as to what causes a speaker or group of speakers to make various utterances, the truth conditions possessed by these utterances. The idea is that if the radical interpreter can garner sufficiently many of such rudimentary T-sentences, he will be able to make initial hypotheses as to subsentential structure of the utterances mentioned in them, and in particular, about the semantic axioms governing the subsentential parts they contain. This initial set of hypotheses can then be evaluated, revised and refined by seeing whether they permit one to engage in at least rudimentary communication with native speakers of the language. Naturally, since linguistic behaviour only ever occurs as embedded in larger stretches of purposive behaviour towards the successful realisation of which it contributes,

§ 4: Davidson’s Coherentism

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the interpreter will only be able to develop this initial set of hypotheses as part and parcel of developing an initial set of hypotheses as to what in general the interpretee believes and desires, and what in particular in the interpreter’s perceptually available environment is causing the interpretee to behave and judge as it does. In other words, construction of a theory of meaning for the interpretee’s language can only occur as part and parcel of constructing a comprehensive account of the interpretee as such, in effect, an account of its psychology sufficiently rich to permit explanation and prediction of observable behaviour, whether linguistic or non-linguistic. But if this process of radical interpretation is iterated sufficiently often and skilfully enough, the radical interpreter will, thinks Davidson, eventually construct a Tarskian truth theory sufficiently elaborate and accurate to permit identification of the truth conditions actually possessed by sentences in the language under interpretation.16 It is not hard to see that radical interpretation of an interpretee’s language, behaviour and psychology will only succeed if the radical interpreter assumes, at least initially, that the interpretee is rational to some sufficient degree, that is, brings the interpretee under the constitutive ideal of rationality.17 This assumption merely reflects the fact that gross, inexplicable inconsistency and irrationality in the beliefs and desires one is putatively ascribing to an entity makes it impossible to regard it as displaying a coherent pattern of intentional life and behaviour, hence as genuinely being a subject of belief and desire at all – see Davidson 1984b, p. 137. In addition to this, however, Davidson maintains that 16 In this iterative process of evaluation, revision and refinement, the radical interpreter will of course have to rely on knowledge of meanings already garnered. This is, however, perfectly acceptable since this semantic knowledge, while prior to the particular cycle of evaluation, revision and refinement in which it is appealed to, is not prior to the process of radical interpretation as a whole, having been gained in a prior cycle. 17 Note that this is not to assume that our interpretees are massively or even significantly rational. Nor is this assumption set in stone; it is made for methodological reasons and is as such something we may have to revise downwards. That is, in the course of interpretation, we may find ourselves having to credit our interpretee with less rationality than initially assumed. It is not that we can only interpret if we assume our interpretee to be rational to some specific, in particular, some considerable degree. Rather, we must assume our interpretee to be sufficiently rational to be by and large intelligible to us as a subject of belief and desire and then, should it prove necessary, revise downwards, possibly to the point where interpretation becomes so difficult that we might have to declare our putative interpretee to be in fact no genuine subject of belief and desire at all.

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as interpreters we must assume that, as it is often misleadingly put, most of our interpretee’s beliefs are true. Less misleadingly put, we must assume, in the absence of compelling reasons to the contrary, that if our interpretee believes or asserts that p, then p. For this assumption, otherwise known as the principle of charity, enables us so to speak to mask the causal role of the interpretee’s beliefs. Thereby it enables us to pick out actually obtaining states of affairs in the world as truth conditions of our interpretee’s beliefs and assertions. It thus permits us to form initial hypotheses as to the correct T-sentences for the sentences uttered by the interpretee and for its beliefs without necessarily knowing just what propositional content these utterances express or these beliefs possess. But why should we think that the principle of charity is true? Because, thinks Davidson, it is guaranteed by the very nature of assertoric and doxastic, hence apophantic content. As Davidson himself puts it, we must, in the plainest and methodologically most basic cases, take the objects of a belief to be the causes of that belief. And what we, as interpreters, must take them to be is what they in fact are. Communication begins where causes converge: your utterance means what mine does if belief in its truth is systematically caused by the same events and objects. (Davidson 1986, pp. 317 – 318)

In short, what according to Davidson underlies and explains the principle of charity is a causally externalist conception of content – externalist in the sense that the content of an assertion, belief or judgement is held to be fixed by certain relations in which the assertion, belief or judgement stands to things external to it; and specifically causal in that the content-defining relations to external things of which it speaks are relations of effect to cause. “(T)he basic connection between words and things, or between thoughts and things is established … by causal interactions between people and parts and aspects of the world.” (Davidson 2001b, p. 29) As radical interpreters, then, we presuppose and work with a causally externalist conception of assertoric, doxastic and apophantic contentfulness according to which two assertions, beliefs or judgements have the same propositional content if and only if they are systematically caused by the same events and objects. Indeed, even as interpreters in the non-radical, domestic sense of interpreting utterances made in our mother tongue, we presuppose and work with such a conception of content. For Davidson’s causal externalism is not simply or solely the biconditional claim that, necessarily, two assertions, beliefs or judgements have the same propositional content if and only if they are systematically caused by the

§ 4: Davidson’s Coherentism

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same events and objects. One could, after all, quite coherently agree with this biconditional claim without endorsing Davidson’s causal externalism. As Davidson understands it, this biconditional claim is tacitly underwritten by the much stronger thesis that it is part of our pre-philosophical notion of assertoric, doxastic and apophantic content that such content be fixed by the causal relations in which assertion, belief or judgement stands. In other words, Davidson wants us not just to acknowledge the biconditional as true, but to understand it as indicating a certain order of being, hence explication: sameness of causal origin ontologically underpins, hence explicates sameness of propositional content. Precisely in order to maintain this Davidson must insist that the task radical interpretation addresses is “the problem of interpretation” as such, which then permits him to say that radical interpretation begins at home – see Davidson 1984b, p. 125. Davidson can only claim that our pre-philosophical notion of assertoric, doxastic and apophantic contentfulness is causally externalist in character if he can show it to be the only notion of content needed in any kind of interpretation, radical or not. If, however, our pre-philosophical notion of assertoric, doxastic and apophantic content is causally externalist in character, then, as interpreters, we may indeed assume, with regard to the person whose linguistic and psychological acts we are seeking to interpret, that, at least in the plainest and methodologically most basic cases, “the objects of a belief ” – the referents and truth conditions of belief – are the causes of this belief. Truth plus causality yields content: when interpreting, we assume truth, thereby assuming that in the most basic cases contents have objects. And these objects will be those actually obtaining states of affairs in the environment perceptually available to us interpreters which have caused the speech act, belief or mental judgement. We therefore look for the causes of the act, belief or judgement in this environment in order to identify its content, that is, in order to interpret it. Evidently, the causally externalist conception underpinning this process, namely, that, in the plainest and methodologically most basic cases, “the objects of a belief ” are the causes of this belief, yields a correspondingly causally externalist formulation of the principle of charity: what causes a belief makes it true. And so, by assuming that, at least in the most basic cases, the objects of belief are the causes of belief, we are also assuming the principle of charity. Of course, if we now ask why we should take Davidson’s causally externalist conception of propositional content to be true, the answer can only be that its truth is demonstrated by showing that one can in principle come to understand one’s interpret-

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ee even when one starts from a situation in which radical interpretation is forced upon one, that is, a situation in which one knows so little of what one’s interpretee believes, desires and behaviourally responds to that one is initially forced to interpret by mapping its beliefs and judgements onto their causes. The causally externalist character of assertoric, doxastic and apophantic content thus ensures that assertion, belief and judgement are by nature veridical – see Davidson 1986, p. 314. And thereby it entitles the interpreter to assume that the interpretee ‘mostly’ gets things right. “Of course some beliefs are false.” Yet, says Davidson, “most of the beliefs in a coherent total set of beliefs are true.” Admittedly, … there is probably no useful way to count beliefs, and so no clear meaning to the idea that most of a person’s beliefs are true. A somewhat better way to put the point is to say that there is a presumption in favor of the truth of a belief that coheres with a significant mass of belief. Every belief in a coherent total set of beliefs is justified in the light of this presumption, much as every intentional action taken by a rational agent (one whose choices, beliefs and desires cohere in the sense of Bayesian decision theory) is justified. (Davidson 1986, p. 308)

With this, we see why Davidson would not be impressed by claims to the effect that his picture of empirical reality as constraining empirical thinking in an exclusively causal sense leaves us unable to distinguish the latter from a self-contained game. For once one has secured for assertion, belief and judgement a conception of their contentfulness which entails that they incline, on the whole, to truth, then the mere coherence of an assertion, belief or judgement with a person’s overall body of assertion and belief suffices to ensure that empirical thinking is genuinely responsive to, or in touch with, reality. At the same time, we also see that talk of empirical thinking as genuinely responsive to reality, hence more than a self-contained game, is only a metaphor whose literal sense comes simply to this: in thinking empirically, we systematically and rationally get at the truth. In particular, we see how potentially misleading it is to say that empirical thinking distinguishes itself from a mere game because it is evaluable not merely according to certain internal norms, but with reference to reality itself. For we have come to see not just “… that it is absurd to look for a justifying ground for the totality of beliefs, something outside this totality which we can use to test or compare with our beliefs …” (Davidson 1986, p. 314); we have also come to see that there is no need for any such external standard of evaluation or test of truth. Once we appreciate the in-

§ 5: What Recoil from Coherentism?

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herent tendency of empirical thinking to truth, we see that the only rule of the game, the only criterion or test of truth, we need is the perfectly internal standard of coherence – see Davidson 1986, p. 310. The thought that, given the nature of content and its concomitant tendency to truth, there is no need for external rational constraint and that the only rational constraint either possible or necessary is internal, namely, coherence: this thought is Davidsonian coherentism.

§ 5: What Recoil from Coherentism? Davidson makes an impressive case for being well able to secure the character of empirical knowing as genuinely bearing upon reality in a way in which a self-contained game does not. Yet the case he makes does not impress McDowell, at least not sufficiently. McDowell knows that Davidson believes he can allay McDowell’s worry by arguing for the thesis that assertion, belief and judgement are by nature veridical, which thesis he “argues for … by connecting belief with interpretation, and urging that it is in the nature of interpretation that an interpreter must find her subjects mostly right about the world with which she can observe them causally interacting.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 16) If, however, assertion, belief and judgement are by nature veridical, then, for all its self-containment and confinement to itself, empirical thinking only needs a purely internal criterion of coherence in order to arrive, and know itself to arrive, at the truth. But just this is McDowell’s worry. For Davidson retains the image of empirical thinking as working away within its own bounded domain, receiving and responding to merely causal inputs (in the shape of perceptual experience) from an external empirical reality enclosing it: Davidson does nothing to discourage us from taking his coherentist rhetoric in terms of confinement imagery. On the contrary, he positively encourages it. At one point he says, “Of course we can’t get outside our skins to find out what is causing the internal happenings of which we are aware” [Davidson 1986, p. 312]. This is, as it stands, a very unsatisfactory remark. Why should we suppose that to find out about external objects we would have to get outside our skins? … And why should we suppose that we are interested in finding out what is causing internal happenings of which we are aware, rather than that we are simply interested in the layout of the environment? Of course getting outside our skins is not the same as getting outside our thoughts. But perhaps we can understand how Davidson can be so casual in his remark if we take it that our literal confinement inside our skins strikes

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him as an analogue to a metaphorical confinement inside our beliefs, which he is happy to let his coherentism imply. Davidson’s picture is that we cannot get outside our beliefs. Of course Davidson knows that such confinement imagery tends to prompt recoil to the idea of the Given, the idea that truth and knowledge depend on rational relations to something outside the conceptual realm. He thinks he can allow free rein to confinement imagery, but pre-empt the recoil by arguing, within his coherentist framework, for the evidently reassuring thesis that “belief is in its nature veridical” [Davidson 1986, p. 314]. (McDowell 1994b, p. 16)

But, claims McDowell, it is not enough simply to ‘disarm’ such confinement imagery – this precisely because it tends to prompt recoil to the notion of the Given. And no sooner have we recoiled to this notion than we realise once again that it is wooden iron and are so thrown back into the arms of Davidsonian coherentism. “There is a danger of falling into an interminable oscillation.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 9) But why should there be any such tendency to recoil back into the Myth of the Given? McDowell does not directly pick fault with Davidson’s strategy of rendering “confinement imagery” harmless by arguing that belief is by nature veridical. Indeed, he seems to believe, or at least not to deny, that this strategy is effective since he does not want to dispute the success of Davidson’s argument – see McDowell 1994b, p. 16.18 So how could there be any further or residual worry, in particular, one of such force that one might be tempted back into the Myth of the Given? McDowell seems unable to state just what this worry is. His Sellars- and Davidson-derived critique of the Myth is plausible, so the claim that there is tendency to be thrown out of it into the arms of coherentism is clear. But the inverse claim of a tendency to recoil back to the Myth is supported only by appeal to feelings of dissatisfaction. Yet McDowell is, we maintain, right to think that there is something wrong with Davidsonian coherentism, that this fault leads to an inability to accommodate thought’s bearing on reality, and finally, that correcting this fault requires one to eradicate “confinement imagery” at least of the kind retained by Davidson, that is, a picture of the conceptual sphere of 18 Indeed, not only does he not dispute the success of this argument, at one point, McDowell even suggests that Davidson does not in fact endorse “confinement imagery”, at least of the apparently harmful kind he describes as a “sidewayson picture” – see McDowell op. cit., p. 35. He then goes on to claim that “(s)ome sideways-on picture must be innocuous … .” See also p. 146, where he speaks of deleting the boundary only insofar as it symbolises “a gulf between thought and the world … .”

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belief and judgement as properly contained within a sphere of ‘sensation’ which, as the epistemically irrelevant outer limits of consciousness, mediates causally between the conceptual sphere and empirical reality. But in order to show this, in order to liberate the insights implicit in Mind and World, one must look beyond McDowell’s expressions of dissatisfaction to certain key claims and phrases which give hints as to how one might so reconstruct McDowell’s account, in particular, his critique of Davidson, that arguments can be identified. Inevitably, the attempt to identify what McDowell might really be getting must be highly reconstructive, precisely because McDowell himself fails to make clear what problem remains unaddressed by the way Davidson seeks to render “confinement imagery” harmless. i. Receptivity as Inseparable from Spontaneity Let us grant McDowell that there is a tendency to move from the Myth of the Given to Davidsonian coherentism and back again, in other words, that these two positions constitute an antinomy. The classic response to antimony is to find and deny some presupposition shared by thesis and antithesis alike. What might this be in the case at hand? Davidson, no less than advocates of the Myth of the Given, assumes that the conceptual sphere qua sphere of belief and judgement is properly contained within the domain of “internal happenings of which we are aware” (McDowell 1994b, p. 16). Furthermore, no less than advocates of the Myth of the Given, he asssumes that the conceptual sphere in this sense is the only sense. In other words, he, too, identifies the extensions of the two senses of the term ‘conceptual sphere’ distinguished above, namely, the sphere of doxa and apophansis and the sphere of the conceptually contentful. Of course, unlike advocates of the Myth of the Given, he recognises that what occurs at the outer limits of consciousness, between the sphere of belief and judgement and the wider empirical reality lying beyond, because it does not belong to the conceptual sphere of belief and judgement, cannot be a reason for belief or judgement. Consequently, Davidson recognises that, pace the Myth of the Given, the causal role played by what occurs at the outer limits of consciousness – by the immediate impingements of empirical reality upon us – cannot be a rational one. Yet because he shares with advocates of the Myth of the Given the two assumptions just described, the “confinement imagery” he endorses remains basically the same.

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In this sense, then, Davidson does not radically transform, but simply corrects the Myth of the Given with respect to how the wider empirical reality within which empirical thinking occurs exercises constraint on the same. Both think of this constraint primarily in causal terms: the object (referent or truth condition) of empirical thinking causes, via certain intermediary events which the Myth calls experience, sense impression, sense data, qualia, etc., Davidson simply sensation, the very first moves in empirical thinking. Davidson then merely goes on to point out how the Myth distorts the picture by thinking that the intermediary events, which it has from the outset picked out and characterised in non-conceptual terms, could themselves be reasons for belief, thus themselves the very first moves in empirical thinking. This fundamental confusion comes out, of course, precisely in the way the Myth equivocates on the term ‘experience’ (and on related terms, e. g., ‘intuition’ in the Kantian sense of Anschauung): sometimes this denotes those non-conceptual, sensual inputs which cause the first moves in empirical thinking, at other times those lowest-level perceptual judgements and beliefs which constitute these first moves. Now we saw above that according to Davidson, perceptual experience (in the epistemically relevant or at least productive sense) consists in the causal coupling of something non-conceptual and impressional with something conceptual and non-impressional. It is thus an aggregatively unified whole consisting moreover of items which are distinct existences in Hume’s sense, viz., sensations on the one hand and perceptual belief or judgement on the other. Evidently, this conception of the sense in which perceptual experience is a whole goes hand in hand with the “confinement imagery” Davidson retains. Indeed, this conception of perceptual experience is his “confinement imagery”, at least when one takes care to emphasise that the causal relation between the non-conceptually impressional (sensation) and the non-impressionally conceptual (perceptual belief or judgement) is a merely causal one, and not a matter of rational necessitation, as the Myth of the Given would have it. So both Davidsonian coherentism and the Myth of the Given share the same generic conception of perceptual experience: for both, it is the merely aggretative coupling, in particular, in a causal relation, of something non-conceptual and impressional with something conceptual and non-impressional. Consequently, to overcome “confinement imagery” of the kind endorsed by both the Myth of the Given and Davidsonian coherentism would be to rethink this generic conception of perceptual experience. The oscillation between them would be overcome by negating their com-

§ 5: What Recoil from Coherentism?

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mon presupposition that perceptual experience is a merely aggregative coupling of the non-conceptually impressional and non-impressionally conceptual, specifically, in a causal relation. This thought suggests what McDowell might be getting when he says that it is not enough simply to render harmless “confinement imagery” of the kind Davidson retains and indeed that his residual worry concerns the concept of perceptual experience. Simply to render “confinement imagery” harmless as Davidson does is clearly to leave untouched the conception of perceptual experience he shares with the Myth of the Given. Perhaps, then, there is something fundamentally flawed in the idea that perceptual experience is adequately analysed as the merely aggregative, indeed causal coupling of those impressional and conceptual dimensions which we intuitively acknowledge at least some kinds of perceptual experience to have. Somehow, this common conception of perceptual experience must endanger thought’s bearing on reality, indeed must do so in a way which logically precedes the sceptical worries to which the Myth of the Given, at least as Davidson understands it, gives rise and which Davidson seeks to neutralise by appeal to a causally externalist conception of content. McDowell drapes this thought – that the antinomy between coherentism and the Myth of the Given can be resolved by rethinking the generic understanding of perceptual experience presupposed by both – in Kantian garb: The original Kantian thought was that empirical knowledge results from a co-operation between receptivity and spontaneity. (Here “spontaneity” can be simply a label for the involvement of conceptual capacities.) (McDowell 1994b, p. 9)

In order to escape from the interminable oscillation between the Myth of the Given and coherentism, we must take seriously this Kantian idea of a genuine co-operation between receptivity – the capacity of empirical thinking to be affected by empirical reality in epistemically relevant ways – and spontaneity, understood here to connote the capacity to wield concepts. In particular, says McDowell, we can escape from antinomy “if we can achieve a firm grip on this thought: receptivity does not make an even notionally separable contribution to the co-operation.”19 (McDowell 1994b, p. 9)

19 To be notionally separable is presumably to be conceptually, that is to say, possibly separable as opposed to actually so.

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That Davidson does not achieve a firm grip on this thought seems clear enough. He explicitly states that perceptual experience (in the epistemically relevant sense) is sensation causing low-level perceptual belief. And this is surely a causal coupling of sensation and perceptual judgement or belief in which the contribution of receptivity (sensation) could very well occur independently of any merely aggretative, contingent co-operation with spontaneity. It is not hard to see, however, that Gareth Evans agrees with him on this score. For Evans, perceptual experience either is, or is at least grounded in, (the process of ) being put into an informational state, and a being can be put into an informational state quite independently of the involvement of conceptual capacities. In fact, for Evans, the contribution of receptivity is not only notionally, it is actually separable, indeed sometimes actually separate from, the contribution made by spontaneity. Certain beings not only can be, they actually are, put into informational states without there being any conceptual capacities involved. According to Evans, animals less sophisticated than us, e. g., dogs and cats, can – to put the point somewhat crudely – perceive but not judge or believe, this because the latter notions are connected very closely with the notions of reason and inference – see Evans 1982, p. 123.20 At any rate, for Evans, perceptual experience of the kind we humans have, the kind which can serve as input to processes of empirical thinking, would appear to be a causal coupling of being in an informational state with coming-to-believe, or judging-to-be-true, a demonstratively singular thought, in effect, a perceptual belief or judgement. So for Evans as for Davidson, perceptual experience of the kind we humans have is a merely aggretative unity of the contributions of receptivity and spontaneity. McDowell therefore suggests that the key to overcoming the antinomy he claims to find between the Myth of the Given and coherentism lies in construing conceptual capacities as drawn upon in receptivity, and not independently of it. We must not think of these conceptual capacities as exercised on an extra-conceptual deliverance of receptivity. We should understand what Kant calls “intuition” – experiential intake – not as a bare getting of an extra-conceptual Given, but as a kind of occurrence or state that al20 Perhaps indeed it was the thought of Evans’ position which led McDowell to insist that receptivity be conceived as not contributing something even notionally separable to the co-operation with spontaneity, much less contributing something which in other beings actually is separate. See in this connection McDowell, op. cit., p. 51.

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ready has conceptual content. In experience one takes in, for instance sees, that things are thus and so. That is the sort of thing one can also, for instance, judge. (McDowell 1994b, p. 9; see also p. 18, p. 23, p. 24, p. 25, p. 34 and p. 47 for similar claims)

Yet in recommending that we understand “intuition” as always already having conceptual content, McDowell is not recommending that we regard it as just another species of belief or judgement. In extending the conceptual sphere outwards so as to embrace those immediate inputs to consciousness which both the Myth of the Given and coherentism had left bereft of conceptual content, we must recognise that we are extending this sphere beyond the sphere of belief and judgement. Thus, in Mind and World at least, McDowell describes those states or occurrences in which experiential intake (“intuition”) consists as perceptual appearings-to-one that p in order to distinguish them from beliefs and judgements that p: Its appearing to me that things are thus and so is not obviously to be equated with my believing something. Certainly not with my believing that things are thus and so. No doubt when it appears to me that things are thus and so, I usually (at least) believe that it appears to me that things are thus and so, but it is not obvious that the appearing is the belief … . (McDowell 1994b, p. 140)

Similarly, in his later Woodbridge lectures, he speaks of “being under the visual impression that such-and-such is the case” (McDowell 1998a, p. 442) in contrast to the beliefs and judgements which answer to such impressions. Evidently, McDowell is prising apart the extensions of two different senses of the term ‘conceptual sphere’, extensions which coherentism and the Myth of the Given had tacitly identified. The one is now properly contained in the other: on the one hand, the conceptual sphere in the now narrower sense of the realm of belief and judgement, and the conceptual sphere in the now wider sense of the totality of conceptually contentful items. ii. Perceptual Impression versus Perceptual Belief and Judgement With Davidson and against the Myth of the Given, McDowell endorses Sellars’ point that if something is a reason for belief, then it must be a conceptually, indeed propositionally contentful state or act. But McDowell disputes the claim which Davidson spins out of this point, namely, that “nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another

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belief.” (Davidson 1986, p. 310) This he can do precisely because he seeks to extend the conceptual sphere beyond the realm of belief and judgement to embrace the most immediate impingements of empirical reality upon us. These, too, are to have the kind of conceptual structure needed for something to count as a reason for holding a belief, and yet they are not themselves to be beliefs or judgements. Rather, they are perceptual appearings-to-one that such and such is the case – perceptual impressions that p rather than very low level perceptual beliefs or judgements that p. One may well feel puzzled by this introduction of states or at least occurrences which, in order to count as reasons for belief in the way beliefs and judgements do, must possess, indeed claim truth for, a propositional content yet are not themselves cases of belief or judgement. For one thing, no real reason or argument has been given for extending the conceptual sphere, hence the space of reasons, so as to include “products of receptivity”21 in the sense of “experiences”22 or “impressions on our senses”23 which are “already equipped with conceptual content”.24 At no point has any case been made against Davidson’s impressive argument to the effect that the whole idea of “rational constraint” from outside is unnecessary. So at no point has any case been made for the claim that there is something unsatisfactory in Davidsonian coherentism which pushes us back towards the Myth of the Given and which can only be overcome by negating the generic conception of perceptual experience common to both. In the absence of any such argument, McDowell’s extension of the conceptual sphere outwards to include non-doxastic and non-apophantic truth-claimings that p is at best unmotivated. But already at this stage one might suspect there to be something more seriously wrong with McDowell’s perceptual impressions or appearings-to-one that p. For in order to count as reasons for belief in the way in which ordinary beliefs and judgements do, such impressions or appearings must be truth-claiming in the manner of belief and judgement. Yet surely the very idea that there could be perceptual impressions or appearings which, while just as much cases of truth-claiming as believing or judging, were not themselves cases of believing or judging but rather a distinct species of truth-claiming alongside the latter, makes no sense. 21 22 23 24

McDowell, op. cit., p. 46. ibid., p. 25. ibid., p. 18; see also p. 34 and p. 46 ibid., p. 34; see also p. 18 and p. 46.

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Have we not simply exchanged the wooden iron promulgated by the Myth of the Given (non-conceptual reasons for belief ) for iron wood (propositionally contentful truth-claimings which are neither beliefs nor judgements)? If so, then McDowell’s putative separation of the extensions of the two senses of the term ‘conceptual sphere’ which both the Myth of the Given and Davidsonian coherentism assume to coincide must be spurious and there would seem to be nothing more than a verbal difference between McDowell and Davidson. McDowell would have done no more than introduce some distinctive terminology for those lowest-level perceptual beliefs or judgements which constitute the non-impressional, conceptual component of the causally aggretative whole in which perceptual experience consists. Clearly, McDowell must say more about what a perceptual impression or appearing-to-one that p is, and in particular, how it differs from a belief or judgement that p. The key to identifying whatever decisive difference there could be between a perceptual impression that p and a Davidsonian perceptual belief that p must lie in the idea that the former involves a not even notionally separable contribution from receptivity in a way in which the latter does not. What, however, is this contribution? Not the presence of ‘sensations’ since ‘sensations’, at least as traditionally understood, are separable. Whatever this contribution is, it must constitute the distinctive perceptual ‘impressionality’ of perceptual experience – that which distinguishes perceptual impressions from even the lowestlevel belief and judgement. Given this, there would appear to be, from a strictly formal point of view, two possible answers here: either we understand this ‘impressionality’ in an exclusively causal sense; or we understand it in a sense which also acknowledges the pre-philosophically ascertainable feature or dimension of perceptual experience traditionally explicated philosophically in doctrines of ‘sensations’, ‘sense data’, qualia, ‘raw feels’ and the like. That is, either one regards the contribution made by receptivity to its co-operation with spontaneity in such a way that perceptual experience would merely involve, in the terminology we have (mis)appropriated from Peirce, a causal dimension of secondness in addition to a conceptual dimension of thirdness.25 Or one understands it in such a way that perceptual experience would integrally involve all three, i. e., qualitative firstness, causal secondness and conceptual thirdness. 25 Once again it needs to be borne in mind that the accuracy of this as an account of Peirce’s doctrines, in particular, of the three categories, is not relevant here – see above, note 13.

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ii.(a) Thirdness + Secondness = Experiential Intake? McDowell regards the contribution made by spontaneity, that is, the conceptual dimension or thirdness of perceptual experience, as propositional. Given this, to regard the contribution made by receptivity to perceptual experience simply in terms of causal secondness would be to construe perceptual experience as simply a matter of a proposition’s impressing itself upon one as true. There is much in Mind and World and the later Woodbridge lectures to suggest such an exclusively causal reading of the contribution made by receptivity, hence an exclusively causal sense in which perceptual experience is impressional. Yet prima facie any such exclusively causal reading would seem unable to secure the decisive difference to Davidson which McDowell needs. Surely to conceive the contribution of receptivity in this merely causal way is to yield a sense in which perceptual experience is impressional that is not so fundamentally different from Davidson’s actual account that this latter could not in principle adopt it. True, Davidson permits sensations to mediate causally between perceptual belief and the world whereas this exclusively causal understanding of the contribution made by receptivity makes no mention of sensations and the like. But on Davidson’s account of perceptual experience, sensations play no epistemic role. So from a strictly epistemic point of view, it does not matter whether they are there or not, that is, whether one does or does not regard the receptivity of perceptual experience as a matter of a proposition’s being causally impressed upon one via sensation. For Davidson, too, the epistemically relevant characterisation of perceptual experience must be that it consists in a proposition’s being impressed upon one as true. There is thus at most a verbal difference between being, or coming to be, under the perceptual impression that p and being caused to form the perceptual belief or make the perceptual judgement that p. And of course being caused to form the perceptual belief or to make the perceptual judgement that p is the heart of Davidson’s position. McDowell certainly recognises the need to demonstrate a more than verbal difference between the account of perceptual experience he is seeking to develop and Davidson’s account. At times, it appears as if he believes this “disconnection between perceptual experience and judging” (McDowell 1998a, p.439) can be adequately accounted for in terms of a distinction between ‘involuntary’ and ‘voluntary’ or, as he puts it in Mind and World, between ‘passive’ and ‘active’ actualisations of conceptual capacities. Take, for example, visual experiences. These are, he says,

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… not as such cases of judging. Even if one does judge that things are as they look, having them look that way to one is not the same as judging that they are that way. In some cases, perhaps, one does judge that things are a certain way when they look that way – acquiring the belief that they are that way by freely making up one’s mind that they are that way. But more typically, perceptual belief acquisition is not a matter of judging, of actively exercising control over one’s cognitive life, at all. … … A free, responsible exercise of certain conceptual capacities … with a suitable mode of togetherness would be judging that there is a red cube in front of one. Now we can say that in an ostensible seeing that there is a red cube in front of one – an experience in which it looks to one as if there is a red cube in front of one – the same conceptual capacities would be actualized with the same mode of togetherness. This cashes out the idea that an experience so described “contains” [as Sellars maintains] a claim, whose content is just what one would be judging in the corresponding judgement. But this actualization of the relevant conceptual capacities, unlike the one that would be involved in the corresponding judgement, would be involuntary; that is why I say ‘actualization’ rather than ‘exercise’. (McDowell 1998a, pp.439 – 440; see also McDowell 1994b, § 5, pp.10 – 13)

So while perceptual impression is, like judging, a matter of coming-to-believe, of coming to be in a state of belief, perceptual impression is not to be construed as a matter of perceptual judging because it is ‘involuntary’ and ‘passive’ whereas judging is ‘voluntary’ and ‘active’. Davidson, by construing perceptual experience simply and undifferentiatingly as the acquisition of perceptual belief or judgement, wrongly assimilates perceptual experience to, or at least fails to distinguish it from, the ‘voluntary’ actualisation of conceptual capacities – as if perceptual experience were or could be a matter “of actively exercising control over one’s cognitive life … .” It is not hard to see that this distinction between active and passive, or again, between voluntary and involuntary actualisations of conceptual capacities in the acquisition of belief does not suffice. For the distinction is incorrect, both (a) in itself, and (b) as an interpretation of Davidson, hence (c) cannot explain how a conception of perceptual experience according to which the not even notionally separable contribution made by receptivity is merely causally impressional differs substantively from Davidson’s conception. With regard to (a): no doubt the judgements of self-conscious, hence no doubt linguistic beings are items to which the rhetoric of freedom, responsibility and responsiveness to reasons applies. In this sense, then, they are certainly ‘spontaneous’ and ‘active’. But this does not mean that each and every judgement must actually be ‘voluntary’ or even ‘active’ (when the latter adjective is taken to be synonymous

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with the former rather than to connote responsiveness to reasons, etc.). Of course, one could stipulate this to be how one understands the word ‘judgement’, and indeed McDowell seems to be doing just this. But the very need for some such stipulation only shows that on any standard understanding of the term, not even self-conscious judging need always be ‘voluntary’ in the sense McDowell has in mind here, viz., “acquiring … belief … by freely making up one’s mind …” (McDowell 1998a, p.439). To this extent, it is incorrect to imply that “making judgements” is always a matter of “deciding what to think about something.” (McDowell 1998a, p.462) With regard to (b): what Davidson understands by perceptual experience is precisely perceptual belief acquisition. According to Davidson, to perceive is to be caused non-inferentially to believe or even to judge; how precisely one comes to believe, how precisely one judges, is relevant only to the extent that one does so non-inferentially. So Davidson does not use the terms ‘judgement’ and ‘judging’ with the connotation McDowell gives them here, namely, the ‘voluntary’ actualisation of conceptual capacities. This obviously does not prevent Davidson from regarding all beliefs and judgements as ‘spontaneous’, hence ‘active’, in the sense of being responsive to reasons since the character of beliefs and judgements as ‘spontaneous’ or ‘active’ in this sense does not require that each and every belief or judgement be actually ‘voluntary’ (or ‘active’ in the sense of ‘voluntary’, ‘deliberate’ or ‘self-conscious’, etc.). In any case, in this sense of the terms, perceptual impressions are no more or less ‘spontaneous’ or ‘active’ than perceptual judgements and so this sense of the terms reveals no substantive difference between perceptual impressions and perceptual judgement.26 If, however, this is so, then (c) the recourse to this distinction fails to explain why McDowell’s perceptual impressions that p are not simply Davidsonian perceptual comings-to-believe by another name, indeed perceptual judgings that p as Davidson uses the word – as when one non-inferentially, yet possibly quite self-consciously, sees that someone has thoughtlessly left the gate open (thereby enabling the dogs to run out onto the busy street). In the final analysis, however, it only appears as if McDowell believes he can explicate the “disconnection between perceptual experience and judging” (McDowell 1998a, p.439) solely by appeal to notions of ‘passiv26 Perhaps an appreciation of this point explains why in the Woodbridge lectures McDowell talks of voluntariness and involuntariness rather than of activity and passivity, as he had done in Mind and World.

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ity’, ‘involuntarness’ or even ‘receptiveness’. His real position appears to be that perceptual experience is ‘passive’, ‘involuntary’ or ‘receptive’ in an irreducibly perceptual way. In other words, notions of ‘passivity’, ‘involuntarness’ or even ‘receptiveness’ are merely being used to delimit the class of impressional intentional states or experiences within which a certain subset is to be picked out, by some other means, as impressional in a distinctively perceptual way. What makes perceptual experience ‘passive’, ‘involuntary’ or ‘receptive’, hence impressional, in an irreducibly perceptual way, hence sets it apart from belief and judgement, is at least in part the distinctive way in which it is contentful. The conviction that perceptual experience is ‘passive’, ‘involuntary’ or ‘receptive’, hence impressional, in an irreducibly perceptual way made possible, at least in part, by a distinctive kind of contentfulness reflects the pervasive influence throughout both Mind and World and the later Woodbridge lectures of certain views on the nature of (the content of ) so-called singular thought. McDowell seems to rely on these views, which re-emerge in the Woodbridge lectures as the thesis that intentionality is ‘relational’, in order to secure, as he thinks, a sufficiently substantive difference between his perceptual impressions that p and Davidson’s perceptual beliefs that p. The original source for these views was McDowell himself,27 but they were subsequently elaborated more systematically by Gareth Evans. It is thus as an appropriation of “Evans’s main contentions … about perceptual demonstrative thought” (McDowell 1994, p.106) that these views have decisively shaped McDowell’s account of perceptual impressions and their distinctive ‘impressionality’. In Chapter Four, it will be argued that the conception of perceptual experience to which McDowell is led by this appropriation of Evans is simply not up to the task demanded of it. For the moment, however, it is enough to note that the conception of perceptual experience to which McDowell is led by his views on the nature of perceptual intentional content explains his conviction that he can secure a substantive difference between perceptual impressions that p and Davidsonian perceptual beliefs or judgements that p even though the inseparable contribution of receptivity to perceptual experience he envisages excludes, or at least does not explicitly include, the sensual quality or Peircean firstness of perceptual experience. Apparently, McDowell thinks that the distinctive way in which perceptual experience is contentful makes it possible to distinguish distinctively perceptual impression both from Davidsonian percep27 As Evans acknowledges – see Evans 1981, p. 280.

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tual belief and indeed from premonition and the like even as the general impressionality characteristic of all these phenomena is understood to be merely causal, a matter of a proposition’s impressing itself upon one as true. The conviction that perceptual experience is contentful in a manner which suffices to distinguish, within the class of impressional intentional states and experiences, a distinctively perceptual kind of ‘impressionality’ first makes its presence felt at the following point in Mind and World: having said that the content of a perceptual experience is that things are thus and so, McDowell now goes on to say, That things are thus and so … can also be the content of a judgement: it becomes the content of a judgement if the subject decides to take the experience at face value. But that things are thus and so is also, if one is not misled, an aspect of the layout of the world: it is how things are. (McDowell 1994b, p.26)28

Note what McDowell is saying here: a perceptual impression that p is propositionally contentful in such a fashion that when it is veridical, its content is literally identical with its object, with that bit of reality, that actually obtaining state of affairs, which makes it veridical. It now becomes clear how radically McDowell understands the extension he recommends of the conceptual beyond the sphere of belief and judgement to include the “products of receptivity”. (McDowell 1994b, p.46) He wishes to extend the conceptual sphere in the sense of the totality of conceptually contentful items so far out beyond the sphere of doxa and apophansis that it encompasses not just the most immediate causal effects ‘in consciousness’ of an empirical reality lying beyond consciousness but empirical reality itself. Reality is, says McDowell, independent of our thinking but “it is not to be pictured as outside an outer boundary that encloses the conceptual sphere.” (McDowell 1994b, p.26) Here we see what McDowell means when he speaks of overcoming the “confinement imagery” which Davidson retains: the outer boundary is to be deleted entirely – see McDowell 1994b, p.34.29 At this point, too, it becomes clear how McDowell sees his appeal to ‘active’ versus ‘passive’, or again, to ‘voluntary’ versus ‘involuntary’ actualisations of conceptual capacities as fitting into his overall argument. 28 This claim recalls a thesis once apparently endorsed by G. E. Moore, namely, that states of affairs simply are true propositions. 29 This is, of course, the unboundedness of the conceptual of which McDowell treats throughout Lecture II in McDowell, op. cit.

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These differences point, he thinks, to the distinctive nature of perceptual intentional content, reflecting as they do how the “joint involvement of receptivity and spontaneity” in experience makes it possible to say “that in experience one can [passively, that is to say, involuntarily] take in how things are” (McDowell 1994b, p.25) rather than actively in the sense of voluntarily judging how they are. Because he fails to appreciate the distinctive character of perceptual intentional content, Davidson fails to see the true depth of this difference. And so, thinks McDowell, he unwittingly assimilates genuinely impressional, receptive perceptual experience to the kind of intentionality which consists in “acquiring … belief … by freely making up one’s mind … .” (McDowell 1998a, p.439) Of course, at this point, some serious problems would also seem to emerge. McDowell is happy to speak of perceptual impressions as sharing their intentional content with beliefs and judgements. But then, one might object, these beliefs and judgements must surely be just as ‘impressional’ as the impressions, the impressions just as doxastic or apophantic as the beliefs and judgements. Perhaps this does not follow because McDowell is, it seems, appealing to the distinctive nature of perceptual intentional content merely in order to distinguish perceptual impressions from other kinds of impressional states and experiences, not from all other kinds of intentional state and experience as such. Yet even in this case McDowell would still be tacitly equivocating on the terms ‘belief ’ and ‘judgement’ by restricting them to that subset of the class of beliefs and judgements in the standard and Davidsonian sense which are acquired “… by freely making up one’s mind … .” (McDowell 1998a, p.439) That is, perceptual impressions would still not have been distinguished from perceptual beliefs or judgements in the standard and Davidsonian sense. So the effort to establish perceptual impressions that p as a distinctive kind of truth-claiming intentionality alongside standing states of belief and occurrent events of judgement or assertion would still come to nought. But surely the views we have just seen McDowell to endorse concerning the nature of perceptual content and experience must be fundamentally anti-Davidsonian, that is to say, fundamentally anti-coherentist? If the object of a veridical perceptual impression were the content of such a perceptual impression, then it, too, would have to be a reason for empirical belief since the perceptual impression is a reason for such belief. That bit of reality which constitutes the object of such a perception not only causes the latter, it does so, or at least can do so, by functioning as a reason. Empirical reality has now become a rational constraint on

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empirical thinking. Is this not something Davidson and coherentism must deny? No, it is not. When Davidson remonstrates against the idea that the constraint exercised from outside upon empirical thinking, in the first instance, by sensibility, and then, through the latter, by external reality, is anything more than (brutely) causal, he has in mind some quite specific claims. Firstly, he is rejecting the claim that the products of receptivity, which he always understands to be sensations existing outside the conceptual sphere of empirical thinking, could be reasons, hence exercise a rationally causal influence on empirical thinking. Secondly, Davidson is also rejecting the claim that the external causes of these products of receptivity could exercise a rationally causal influence on empirical thinking by offering themselves, through perceptual experience, to empirical thinking as that against which the latter could regulate and shape the products of spontaneity. And of course this regulating and shaping of the products of spontaneity is a regulating and shaping of them with regard to their contents. In other words, he is fundamentally rejecting the idea that empirical reality, through perceptual experience, confronts empirical thinking as that to which it must conform or correspond. This only underscores what for Davidson the issue of whether empirical reality might rationally constrain empirical thinking really comes to: whether securing thought’s bearing on reality requires one to conceive truth in traditionally correspondence-theoretic terms (or at least in terms stronger than Davidson’s). That McDowell’s underlying thought in no way disputes the first of these rejections is clear. Note, however, that the second of these rejections only assumes that the object of a veridical perception is not identical with the content of the same because its target, the traditional view that empirical thinking gets a grip on empirical reality by comparing its contents with the latter, must assume this. So here, too, McDowell’s underlying thought in no way calls back from question what Davidson had called into it. True, this thought makes empirical reality a rational constraint upon empirical thinking in a fashion which Davidson would reject as a matter of fact – this because he can see no good reason for endorsing it. But this does not mean that Davidson could not in principle embrace the thought without undermining the fundamental thrust of his coherentism. For coherentism insists only on this, that in order to be more than a mere game spinning frictionlessly in the void, empirical thinking need not deal with anything more than its own beliefs and their contents. And this remains true even though some of these contents happen to be bits of empirical reality as well. If, therefore, Davidson should fail ade-

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quately to grasp the true nature of perceptual content and experience, he could only be guilty of “a … superficial oversight” (McDowell 1994b, p.13) to which McDowell were supplying a corrective whose possibility Davidson could consistently embrace. Moreover, one might well wonder whether McDowell’s underlying thought does not point to a fundamental tension between different strands of his attempt to delineate a position beyond Davidsonian coherentism. McDowell wants to insist against Davidson both that empirical reality itself is a rational, as opposed to a brutely causal, constraint on empirical thinking; and that perceptual impression is not simply Davidsonian perceptual belief or judgement by another name. But does not the way he insists upon the one undermine the way he insists upon the other? In order to articulate the worry here, a preliminary clarification is needed. Davidson’s claim that “nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief ” (Davidson 1986, p. 310) is clearly loose. Beliefs (and, mutatis mutandis, assertions and judgements) cannot be reasons for belief (or judgement or assertion) in any primary, non-derivative sense since the primary and non-derivative sense of reason is that of being a premise in an inference. Not beliefs, but believed, hence conceptual contents are reasons for belief in the primary, non-derivative sense. Davidson should rather have said that to be a reason for belief is to be a believed (or judged or asserted) content, that is, a conceptual content for which truth is claimed. Of course, beliefs and, by extension, judgements and assertions, can themselves be reasons for belief, as when one says that the reason why the referee judged that the Italians should be given a penalty was that he believed Neill to have fouled Grosso in the penalty area. But this sense is evidently a secondary one – secondary because it presupposes the primary sense. Thus, a state of belief or, mutatis mutandis, an act of judgement or assertion, can be a reason for belief, but only in the sense that it is a state or act the content of which is at least believed by a subject S to stand in such inferential relations30 to other contents that it would be irrational to have this belief, to make this judgement or to perform this assertion, while believing the negations of these other contents. Now if the object of a veridical perceptual impression is identical with the content of the latter, then the object will of course inherit what30 These inferential relations may or may not be formal and deductive, rather than informal and probabilistic.

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ever character as a reason (in the primary sense) the content has. But a content of perceptual experience is or at least yields a reason for belief simply because it is the content of perception that it is; this is another way of articulating what was called above the inherent credibility or even self-authenticating character of perceptual experience. This distinctive character of perceptual experience explains why, in response to such questions as “Why do you claim that John played soccer yesterday?,” one may always reply, “Because I saw John playing soccer yesterday.” By contrast, a believed, judged or asserted content is never a reason for belief simply because it is believed, judged or asserted. Note now how this difference31 insinuates a subtle tension between the way McDowell apparently seeks to make empirical reality itself a rational constraint on empirical thinking; and the way he apparently seeks to distinguish perceptual impression from Davidsonian perceptual belief and judgement. On the one hand, he apparently appeals to the identity of the object and content of a veridical perceptual experience (together with the claim that perceptual content, hence perceptual experience, is a reason for belief ) in order to conclude that the object of a veridical perception is a reason for belief. He is thus tacitly assuming the character of the content of a veridical perception as a reason for belief (which premise he gets from the distinctively self-authenticating character of perceptual experience) in order to explain how the object, a bit of empirical reality, might be a reason for belief. On the other hand, it seems that the distinctively perceptual impressionality of perceptual experience, of which the decisive feature is its inherent credibility, is to be understood, at least in part, by appeal to the identity of object and content (in the case of veridical perception). But surely the attempt to explain the inherent credibility of perceptual experience by appeal to this identity only works if one assumes as a premise the character of the object of perceptual experience as a reason for belief. If so, then McDowell would now be assuming the character of the object 31 A difference, by the way, of which Davidson could rightly claim to be able to give a plausible account: a perceptual experience, i. e., a belief or judgement caused non-inferentially in us, via sensation, by external things, is inherently credible (or self-authenticating or self-certifying) because it is the kind of belief or judgement engendered in the kind of way which one cannot as a rule call into question without undermining one’s whole system of belief, and thereby one’s coherence as a subject of belief and action. In this way, Davidson can explain why a perceptual experience is inherently something to be taken at face value, i. e., as veridical in the absence of reasons to the contrary.

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of a veridical perception as a reason for belief in order to explain the character of the content as such a reason. Is there really such circularity lurking in the different ways McDowell attempts to set his position apart from Davidsonian coherentism? We do not wish to insist on this because the really crucial point has already been made: given what he says both in Mind and World and the later Woodbridge lectures, McDowell cannot claim to have articulated a conception either of perceptual experience itself or of the constraint exercised by empirical reality and perceptual experience upon empirical thinking which is so substantively different from Davidson’s that the latter simply could not consistently adopt it. Nor indeed have we been given any reason for thinking that Davidson’s coherentism endangers thought’s bearing on reality. Consequently, we have no reason for thinking either that there is something wrong with Davidson’s retention of “confinement imagery” or that coherentism, because it construes empirical reality as constraining empirical thinking in brutely causal fashion, encourages recoil back to the Myth of the Given. In short, McDowell has failed to demonstrate any antinomy between the Myth of the Given and coherentism such that, “(d)islodged from [the former] by a glimpse of the sort of consideration Sellars brings to bear, … one would try to renounce the idea of experience as an external rational constraint on the fixation of belief ”, only to find oneself “(d)islodged from [the latter] in turn” and “pushed back to the Myth of the experientially Given. And so on without escape.” (McDowell 1998b, p.366) There would appear to be no “interminable oscillation” (McDowell 1998b, p.366) from which one could only free oneself by challenging the generic conception of perceptual experience and empirical thinking underlying both positions – a conception which McDowell characterises as “the thought that sensibility is independent of the conceptual … .” (McDowell 1998b, p.366) No plausible case has been made for “the transcendental thought” that the constraint exercised upon empirical thinking by “the receptivity of sensibility”, and through it, empirical reality itself, “must be rational, not merely causal, if its presence in our picture [of empirical thinking] is to vindicate a conception of the responsibility of thinking to its subject matter.” (McDowell 1998b, p.366) In a way, these results should not be surprising. If we go back to the generic conception of perceptual experience underlying the thesis and antithesis of McDowell’s putative antinomy, we see that from the outset this understands the products of receptivity in a way which does not exclude, indeed explicitly includes, Peircean firstness. These products are, after all,

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understood to be completely separable, hence completely non-conceptual sensual impingements of empirical reality upon empirical thinking. (And in this regard it does not really matter whether they are also taken to be ‘inner things’ distinct from the empirical thoughts they may be held to cause – sensations as typically understood – or to be sensual features of certain items in consciousness, features which sit contingently and indifferently, hence in this sense separably, alongside certain other features constitutive of their bearers as moves within the conceptual sphere.) So if we are to generate a position substantively different from Davidson’s, we must ensure that when we negate this generic conception, that is, construe receptivity as not making an even notionally separable contribution to its co-operation with spontaneity, we explicitly include sensual or qualitative Peircean firstness as a not even notionally separable element in this co-operation. ii.(b) Thirdness + Secondness + Firstness = Experiential Intake? McDowell is not unaware, particularly in the later Woodbridge lectures, of the point that as long as one understands the receptivity of perceptual experience in a way which ignores what, for want of a better name, we have called Peircean firstness, one can secure no real difference to, but at most a correction of, Davidson’s account of perceptual experience and empirical thinking generally.32 For here McDowell displays a tendency not to understand the distinctively perceptual ‘impressionality’ of perceptual experience as solely a matter of some propositional content, however distinctively singular, being thrust upon one as true. These lectures make explicit McDowell’s rejection of the idea that ‘sensations’ play the role accorded them by Sellars and perhaps others before him. At the same time, McDowell appears to recognise that to reject ‘sensations’ is not necessarily to reject the whole idea that perceptual experience has a sensually impressional or receptive character, a certain Peircean firstness as well as secondness, of which the appeal to the presence of ‘sensations’ is arguably only a muddled misinterpretation. In this spirit, McDowell praises Sellars’ resolve not to construe those conceptual episodes which consist in “being under the visual impression that such-and-such is the case” as “phenomenologically colorless”, as if they had phenomenological 32 Crispin Wright has also seen this. Thus, he observes that McDowell’s ‘reconfiguration’ of the notion of experience in response to the alleged oscillation between Myth of the Given and coherentism does not seem to offer “anything essentially at odds with coherentism.” (Wright 1998, p. 397) See also Wright 1996, p. 240.

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colour merely through being contingently “associated with visual sensations” with no epistemic relevance or functional role. (McDowell 1998a, p.442) Now although Sellars himself still continues to speak of sensations, and although McDowell actually rejects the epistemic relevance and functional role Sellars attempts to give to them, McDowell’s commendation insinuates the thought that one does not conceive the phenomenological colour of perceptual experience correctly when one attempts to explain it away, for example, by appeal to the presence of separable sensations. One must think of it, not as contingently tacked onto, but rather as integrated into, as a primitive, irreducible aspect of, the intentional structure of perception itself. Clearly, when the impressional character of perceptual experience is understood as involving phenomenological colour in this genuinely integral way, talk of perceptual experience as a co-operation to which receptivity makes a not even notionally separable contribution looks much more like a real alternative to Davidson’s account of perceptual experience. Moreover, one arrives at a conception of perceptual experience which unambiguously negates the generic conception underlying both Davidsonian coherentism and the Myth of the Given. In other words, if one understands the impressional or receptive character of perceptual experience in such a way that phenomenological colour is integral to the distinctively perceptual contentfulness of such experience itself, one undoubtedly negates the presupposition which underpins the antinomy McDowell claims to find in the positions of coherentism and the Myth of the Given. This consideration suggests the following speculative thought: perhaps securing thought’s bearing on reality requires one to understand the (distinctively perceptual) impressionality or receptivity of perceptual experience to include a genuinely sensual, phenomenological colour, that is to say, a Peircean firstness. In Chapters Two and Three this thought is elaborated in the hope of finding real insight into, and above all real argument for, a substantive weakness in coherentism which can only be overcome when perceptual experience is conceived in line with this thought. Specifically, in Chapter Two, McDowell’s critique of Davidson is reconstructed in the hope of identifying a feature of coherentism of which one may plausibly maintain that it is the fault in coherentism which McDowell is trying to articulate. Chapter Three then elaborates how precisely to conceive perceptual experience as a genuine unity of receptivity and spontaneity into which phenomenological colour is integrated as an inseparable, that is to say, functionally indispen-

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sable moment. It then shows that in order to secure the bearing of empirical thinking upon reality, thereby explaining what sets it apart from a self-contained game, one must allow there to be perceptual experience which is a unity of receptivity and spontaneity in this sense. Lastly, it shows why what was identified in Chapter Two as the putative fault in Davidsonian coherentism towards which McDowell is gesturing is indeed a fault. That is, it shows why this putative fault prevents Davidson from construing perceptual experience as a unity of receptivity and spontaneity in that firstness-involving sense which has shown itself to be necessary for securing thought’s bearing on reality. Of course, if all these things can be accomplished, then we will have shown that McDowell ought to have pursued the thought implicit in his commendation of Sellars’ efforts to embed phenomenological colour more deeply and integrally into the intentional structure of perceptual experience than Davidson allows. But even simply to speculate that this is so raises the question of why McDowell has not pursued the thought. There would appear to be a simple explanation for this: by and large, it never occurs to him to do so. Once again, this has to do with the distinctive conception of perceptual experience to which his views on perceptual intentional content lead him. This conception of perceptual experience does not so much as mention phenomenological colour, much less accord it the status of a not even notionally separable structural moment of perceptual intentionality. Rather, its distinctive characteristic is the identification, in the case of veridical perceptual experience, of the object with the content of perception. This identification eliminates, as we shall later see, all ‘common factors’, all tertia, from the intentional structure of perceptual experience. And this elimination permits one, thinks McDowell, finally to understand how empirical thinking bears upon reality in a way in which a game does not – so much so that all temptation is dispelled to ask the usual sceptical questions, e. g., how one could ever know that one was not a brain in vat. The suspicion has already been voiced that by speaking of perceptual impressions that p where Davidson speaks of perceptual beliefs or judgements that p, McDowell is at best modifying, and not really challenging, the coherentist conception of perceptual experience and empirical thinking. If, however, this is so, then McDowell’s conception of perceptual experience should be no more able to secure thought’s bearing on reality than Davidson’s. In Chapter Four, this is positively shown to be so. More accurately, the elimination of ‘common factors’ and tertia from the intentional structure of perceptual experience is shown to be neither

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necessary nor sufficient for stilling the temptation to raise the usual sceptical questions – in which case a conception of perceptual experience which eliminates all ‘common factors’ and tertia is no more able than Davidson’s to render thought’s bearing on reality so unproblematic and unmysterious that one no longer feels tempted by the Myth of the Given or the usual sceptical questions. Of course, if this is so, then it becomes readily explicable why McDowell has such difficulty stating what is wrong with Davidsonian coherentism and distinguishing his own position from it. More importantly, proof will have been provided that the speculative thought mooted above is the one McDowell ought to have had. But now we must confront a crucial issue: does it even make sense to speak of phenomenological colour, of Peircean firstness, as integrated into the very intentional structure of perceptual experience itself ? Is it not incoherent to suggest that such colour might be involved in perceptual experience in any other sense than the traditional aggretative one given it by Davidson, namely, as consisting in the presence of sensations (which according to Davidson also cause perceptual belief or judgement)? After all, even Sellars33 continues to construe the sensually impressional character of perceptual experience in traditional terms, namely, as the presence of sensations. He, too, explicates both its sensually impressional and its conceptual characters as ‘inner items’34 out of which perceptual experience is literally composed, viz., sensation and perceptual belief or judgement respectively. In this sense, even he continues to import phenomenological colour from outside even though he differs from Davidson in attempting to give the sensual character of perceptual experience the epistemic role of ‘guiding’ the formation of its conceptual character. In fact, the very idea of perceptual experience as a genuine unity of ‘concept and intuition’35 must be a contradiction in terms as long as 33 See Sellars 1967, p. 9 f. 34 That is to say, inner entities, whether things, events, conditions or whatever. An item or entity is understood to be a pure something (reines Etwas) – any potential value of a variable whatsoever. 35 Every so often we will use these Kantian terms in similar contexts, simply in order to have a convenient slogan and in order to insinuate that of the various things Kant means by talk of concepts and intuitions one of them might well be something similar to what they are intended to connote here. It is important to note, however, that in thus talking we are not suggesting any particular strategy for regimenting Kant’s own talk. Kant’s use of these terms is certainly not unambiguous and is arguably at times inconsistent. What the real story is with Kant is not relevant here since we are not concerned here to reconstruct Kant.

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one retains an assumption to which not just Davidson and Sellars, but also Evans and McDowell, are instinctively committed. No specific sense can be coherently given to the general idea of integrating phenomenological colour as an essential moment into the intentional structure of perceptual experience as long as one assumes, as Evans, Davidson, Sellars and McDowell always do, that to be conceptually contentful is to be propositionally36 contentful. Under this assumption, one is forced to attempt to import phenomenological colour from outside. As we have seen, Davidson’s claim that “nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief ” (Davidson 1986, p. 310) is loosely formulated. Not beliefs, but believed, hence conceptual contents are reasons in the primary, non-derivative sense. Davidson should rather have said that a reason for belief is always only a conceptual content for which truth is claimed. Since one can only claim truth for a conceptual content if it is representable by the schema ‘that p’, this is as much as to say that to be a reason for belief, judgement or assertion is to be a propositional content (for which truth is claimed). Now at first sight, this correction of Davidson’s slogan appears to open the possibility up of there being a truth-claiming state or act which is neither belief nor judgement nor assertion, but precisely a perceptual impression that p. If, of course, this should be so, then there could be a reason for belief (in the secondary sense distinguished above) which was not itself a belief, judgement or assertion but, say, a perceptual impression that p. To this extent, the correction might appear to offer some help in the search for a clear, substantive difference between McDowell’s perceptual impressions that p and Davidson’s perceptual beliefs or judgements that p. These appearances are, however, deceiving. In order to be a truthclaiming state or act, no intentional state, intentional experience or linguistic act requires anything more than what a belief, judgement or assertion requires in order for it to be the kind of truth-claiming condition or act that it is. In other words, nothing not possessed by belief, judgement, assertion and their shades is functionally essential to being a truth-claiming. Consequently, it could not be essentially integrated into, or unified with, the conceptual element, of any truth-claiming act since the unity at issue here can only be a functional one: something is an essential, not even notionally separable moment of this kind of whole if and only if 36 Insofar as an alternative to propositional contentfulness is considered at all, it is merely sub-propositional contentfulness – see above, note 11.

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it makes some essential contribution to the kinds of functional role this whole essentially plays. The idea, therefore, that there could be perceptually appearings to one that p which differ from comings-to-believe or judgings that p precisely in that they integrate a sensually impressional element into their propositionally contentful intentional structure founders on the fact that no such sensually impressional element is functionally essential to being a truth-claiming that p. A reason for belief, judgement or assertion (in the primary sense) is thus always and only a believed, judged or asserted propositional content. Davidson’s claim that “nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief ” (Davidson 1986, p. 310) may be loosely formulated in that it fails to distinguish clearly between the primary and secondary senses in which one may speak of reasons for belief. Its fundamental point is, however, quite correct: the only thing that can count as a reason for belief in the secondary sense is a belief (or judgement or assertion) because (a) only items for which truth can be claimed can be reasons for belief in the primary sense and (b) the only truth-claiming states (or events or acts) there are are the various species of belief (or judgement or assertion). Thus, all one could coherently mean by talk of perceptual impressions or appearings which are able to serve as reasons for belief (in the secondary sense) are perceptual comings-to-believe or judgings in Davidson’s sense. The effort to mean more than something causally impressed upon one as true by talk of perceptual impressions or appearings-to-one that such and such is the case must founder on its traditionally propositional way of binding content to act. So as long as we speak of perceptual impressions or appearings-to-one that such and such is the case, the ‘impressionality’ or receptivity of perceptual experience can only be a matter of merely causal Peircean secondness. One can assign no intelligible function to qualitative Peircean firstness in one’s account of perceptual intentionality and so, to the extent that one mentions it at all, one must construe it in traditional fashion as the presence of merely accompanying sensations with no epistemic relevance – a consequence only confirmed, as McDowell rightly sees,37 by Sellars’ inability to render intelligible, much less justify, the idea that sensations ‘guide’ the formation of the conceptual content of perceptual experience. Or, to put the same point in another, more positive way, if the impressional character of perceptual experience is understood in such a way that phenomenological colour or Peircean firstness constitutes 37 See McDowell 1998a, pp. 431 – 450.

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an integral feature of distinctively perceptual intentionality, then the cooperation between spontaneity and receptivity in which perceptual experience consists cannot be belief- or judgement-like, i. e., a truth-claiming state or occurrence whose content could be represented by the schema ‘that p’. What was said above is quite right: no specific sense can be given to the idea of integrating phenomenological colour into perceptual intentional content as long as one assumes that to be conceptually contentful is to be propositionally contentful. This result has two interrelated and clearly radical consequences for the elaboration to be undertaken across the next two chapters of the speculative thought that in order to secure thought’s bearing on reality, one must understand that ‘impressionality’ or receptivity which sets perceptual experience apart from perceptual belief to include phenomenological colour or Peircean firstness as an inseparable, functionally essential moment. Firstly, this elaboration will require one to break with an assumption as deeply ingrained in McDowell’s thinking as it is in the thinking of Evans, Davidson and Sellars. Insofar as perceptual experience is conceptually contentful at all, it is not propositionally so. One may have to countenance the thought that not all ‘synthesis’ (predication) is ‘logical’ or apophantic, that indeed there is an aesthetic kind as well. Of course, one ancillary virtue of this would be a ready explanation of why McDowell sees things through a glass so darkly. One could readily understand why he is so chronically unable to spell out and argue for what residually worries him about Davidsonian coherentism, why indeed he is so curiously able both to find no fault with Davidson’s arguments and yet to insist that Davidson’s coherentism fails adequately to distinguish empirical thinking from a self-contained game. For one would recognise that real insight into the root problem with coherentism requires McDowell to break with an assumption so fundamental to his thinking that he is barely aware of making it. Secondly and relatedly, because the speculative thought that the not even notionally separable contribution made by receptivity to its co-operation with spontaneity involves not simply Peircean secondness, but also firstness, requires one to reject the idea that perceptual experience is propositionally contentful, elaborating it must also require one to reject another assumption deeply ingrained in McDowell’s thinking. This is the assumption that the rational role played by perceptual experience in our cognitive economy consists in being a reason for belief, judgement, assertion or indeed action. If, therefore, perceptual experience is to constrain empirical thinking rationally at all, it must do so without being a reason

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for belief or action (in the secondary sense) – in which case empirical reality, if it is to exercise rational constraint, must do so through providing, via perceptual experience, a reason for belief or action without this reason’s being identical with perceptual experience itself. How might this be possible?

Chapter Two: Regaining the World It is time now to begin reconstruction, in the first instance, of McDowell’s crucial claim that, for all its subtle argument to the contrary, Davidsonian coherentism fails to preserve thought’s bearing on reality. Following clues left by McDowell himself, we must seek to identify what this worry might be via identifying some essential feature of Davidson’s account of interpretation which constitutes both a fatal flaw in this account and what McDowell might be inchoately sensing as this flaw. Furthermore, the essential feature identified must constitute a hypothesis with which to guide further reconstruction of McDowell’s overall argument. McDowell insists that in order to secure thought’s bearing on reality one must conceive perceptual experience as a unity of the conceptual and non-conceptual in a sense which Davidson could not embrace. We must therefore seek to show that the essential feature to be identified in the chapter now before us forces Davidson to separate the conceptual and the sensually or qualitatively impressional dimensions of perceptual experience in such a way that the latter can only occur, if at all, in his account of perceptual experience as causally1 coupled with the conceptual dimension. This further task of reconstruction will be undertaken in the chapter following (Chapter Three). There it will be accomplished in the following two steps: first it will be shown that if thought’s bearing on reality is to be secured, there must be perceptual experience in which the conceptual and sensually or qualitatively impressional perception are inseparably unified in a quite distinctive and, as we shall, quite non-propositional way. It will then be shown that to conceive perceptual experience as such a unity is to negate what this chapter will reveal to be the defining essential feature of the account of interpretation with which Davidson grounds his causally externalist conception of content. The collective effect of these demon1

Or perhaps merely contingently associated with the conceptual dimension. This is said in order to accommodate McDowell’s claim in the Afterword to Mind and World that according to “the style of thinking” about perceptual experience he objects to, the conceptual and non-conceptual dimensions of perceptual experience “need not be separated … as causes and effects.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 145)

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strations will be to show, so to speak by modus tollens, that Davidson is indeed forced to separate the conceptual and impressional dimensions of perceptual experience, hence does indeed fail to accommodate thought’s bearing on reality, just as McDowell alleges. Of course, any satisfactory reconstruction of McDowell’s critique of Davidson must preserve certain phenomena. In particular, it must explain the fact that McDowell clearly sees much that is right in Davidson, in the first instance, this latter’s critique of the dogma of scheme and content, but more particularly, Davidson’s concern to demonstrate that sceptical problems cannot even arise once the nature of empirical intentionality and intentional content is understood. In other words, it must identify much more clearly than McDowell himself the advance which Davidson represents for McDowell. Failure to preserve these phenomena would not simply be a lack, it would positively undermine the claim made by our reconstruction to be bringing to light the real insights of the text.

§ 1: Two Ways to the World According to Davidson, if by experience we understand simply non-conceptually articulated impacts occurring at the outer limits of consciousness, then we must not think of experience as able to justify judgement or belief. “The space of reasons does not extend further than the space of concepts, to take in a bare reception of the Given.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 14) So far, so good. “But Davidson thinks experience can be nothing but an extra-conceptual impact on sensibility.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 14) More accurately, he thinks that perceptual experience can be nothing other than either such an extra-conceptual impact or the mere causal coupling of such an impact with a perceptual judgement or belief. So (a)ccording to Davidson, experience is causally relevant to a subject’s beliefs and judgements, but it has no bearing on their status as justified or warranted. Davidson says that “nothing can count as reason for holding a belief except another belief [Davidson 1986, p. 310], and he means in particular that experience cannot count as a reason for holding a belief. (McDowell 1994b, p. 14)

While McDowell agrees with the point from which this argument departs, he finds the point in which it ends

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quite unsatisfying. … Davidson’s picture depicts our empirical thinking as engaged in with no rational constraint, but only causal influence, from outside. This just raises a worry as to whether the picture can accommodate the sort of bearing on reality [that distinguishes empirical thinking from a selfcontained game], and that is just the kind of worry that can make an appeal to the Given seem necessary. And Davidson does nothing to allay the worry. (McDowell 1994b, pp. 14 – 15)

At this point, McDowell makes an important claim. We can, he says, put the worry in the following familiar form: as far as Davidson’s picture of empirical thinking and perceptual experience is concerned, one might be a brain in a mad scientist’s vat. The Davidsonian response seems to be that if one were a brain in a vat, it would be correct to interpret one’s beliefs as being largely true beliefs about the brain’s electronic environment. (McDowell 1994b, pp. 16 – 17)

That this is Davidson’s response to scepticism about the external world McDowell has on the authority of Richard Rorty, who has reported Davidson as making a remark to this effect.2 McDowell questions, however, whether this response really gives us the reassurance we need. The argument that assertion, belief and judgement, in virtue of how they are contentful, are by nature inclined to truth was supposed to show that empirical thinking could be regulated merely internally, by a criterion of mere coherence, without thereby becoming indistinguishable from a self-contained game. But, says McDowell, the Davidsonian response to the brain-in-a-vat worry … works the wrong way round. The response does not calm the fear that [Davidson’s] picture [of empirical thinking] leaves our thinking possibly out of touch with the world outside us. It just gives us a dizzying sense that our grip on what it is that we believe is not as firm as we thought. (McDowell 1994b, p. 17)

Davidson has been reported as saying that he has no real idea what McDowell wants.3 Here is a crucial place at which one can understand why he might have said this. We have seen McDowell to persist in a worry about empirical thinking’s “bearing on reality” even though he does not dispute an argument which, if valid, must surely allay this worry. We now find him recasting this worry in brain-in-a-vat form 2 3

See Rorty 1986 p. 340. This was claimed by a participant to the discussion which followed Richard Rorty’s lecture “Recent Themes in Analytical Philosophy: Robert Brandom and John McDowell”, held at the University of Heidelberg on May 19th, 1998.

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even though we have no real idea what this worry is, hence cannot be sure that it concerns “global skepticism of the senses” (Davidson 1986, p. 317), that is, scepticism about the external world. Finally, McDowell recasts his worry in brain-in-a-vat form even as he disavows any intention of challenging the argument with which Davidson responds to the problem of scepticism about the external world – see McDowell 1994b, p. 16. McDowell himself recognises the difficulty of understanding what he is getting at. In a crucial footnote apparently added in order to clarify the main text of his lecture, McDowell remarks that (i)t takes care to say precisely why the response is unsatisfying. It is not that we are being told we may be egregiously wrong about what our beliefs are about. (McDowell 1994b, footnote 14, p. 17.)

Here, McDowell recognises that whatever is wrong with the response to scepticism attributed to Davidson by Rorty, it is not that it replaces a first-level scepticism about whether we really know the world with a higher-level one about whether we really know the contents, and thus the very identity, of our own empirical beliefs. Thus, McDowell goes on to say If I protest that some belief of mine is not about electronic impulses or whatever but about, say, a book, the reply can be: “Certainly your belief is about a book – given how ‘a book’ as you use the phrase is correctly interpreted.” The envisaged reinterpretation, to suit the hypothesis that I am a brain in a vat, affects my higher-level beliefs about what my first-level beliefs are about in a way that precisely matches its effect on my first-level beliefs. (McDowell 1994b, footnote 14, p. 17.)

In other words, if belief is disposed to truth, then my higher-level beliefs about the contents of my first-level beliefs will share in this disposition, too. So they, too, are mostly true; even as brains in vats, we cannot be egregiously wrong about anything, including the content and thus the identity of our empirical beliefs. What McDowell says here is right but it hardly helps us to identify what is wrong with what he takes to be Davidson’s response to scepticism, and in consequence with Davidson’s coherentism itself. Indeed, our situation is worse because once we realise that the problem with this response is not that it replaces lower-order scepticism by a higher-order one, we seem quite unable to say what is wrong with it. The very fact that we can make no headway in understanding what is supposed to be wrong indicates that something is awry, not necessarily in Davidson’s response to scepticism itself, but in McDowell’s understanding of just what this response is. Perhaps McDowell is wrong to rely so heavily, to take so liter-

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ally, the remark attributed to Davidson by Rorty. In other words, perhaps it is wrong to think that Davidson’s real response to scepticism consisted in, or relied crucially upon, taking literally the remark that brains-in-a-vat would be believing, judging and presumably also asserting about items in their electronic environment. Perhaps indeed the remark Rorty attributes to Davidson is a casual, even ironical comment meant to intimate, in backhanded fashion, the fundamentally absurd, self-defeating character of the sceptical argument itself – along the lines of “Even if brains-in-a-vat could be intelligibly regarded as believing, judging and asserting (which they cannot), they would still have to be understood as doing so about the environment with which they are causally interacting.” Clearly, there is only one way to proceed at this point: we must work out for ourselves how Davidson responds to the scenario of brains-in-a-vat. Only then will we be able accurately to assess the status of the remark attributed by Rorty to Davidson and whether McDowell has got it right. More importantly, only then will we have put ourselves in a position to determine whether there might be a real problem in the Davidsonian response to scepticism which McDowell is seeing through a glass but darkly. Perhaps indeed, when we have worked out for ourselves what Davidson’s response to scepticism about the external world is, we will find ourselves able to make a crucial distinction, a distinction, namely, between the general insight into the nature of empirical intentionality and content which enables Davidson to answer the sceptic in surely the only manner conceivable; and the particular way in which Davidson derives this insight. For perhaps the problem with Davidson is precisely as McDowell at one point implies, namely, insight reached “the wrong way round.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 17) If this should be so, then we will be able to explain why McDowell is, on the one hand, concerned about Davidson’s response to scepticism and the argument with which Davidson seeks to secure thought’s bearing on reality and yet, on the other, not concerned to challenge this argument. i. The Worldliness of Empirical Thinking and Its Subject Let us start by identifying (a) what general feature possessed by the conception of content implicit in his account of interpretation enables Davidson to solve, or rather dissolve, the problem of scepticism about the

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external world; and (b) how specifically this conception secures this feature. According to Davidson, (i)f words and thoughts are, in the most basic cases, necessarily about the sorts of objects and events that cause them, there is no room for Cartesian doubts about the independent existence of such objects and events. … The … possibility [of global error] is ruled out if we accept that our simplest sentences are given their meaning by the situations that generally cause us to hold them true or false, since to hold a sentence we understand to be true or false is to have a belief. (Davidson 1989, pp. 164 – 165)

In other words, if we understand content in the causally externalist sense Davidson recommends, then to understand the contents of our thoughts is precisely to understand the situations which cause us to regard at least the simplest and most basic of these contents as true or false. So, at least in the plainest and methodologically most basic cases, we can rationally claim to know what the contents of our empirical thoughts, and thus what these thoughts themselves are, only to the extent that we can also rationally claim to know the causes of these thoughts. It is part of the very notion of empirical contentfulness that, in the plainest and methodologically most basic cases, if I regard (interpret) myself as having a belief with the empirical content that p, then eo ipso I regard (interpret) myself as having a belief which is caused (and not merely believed by me to be caused!) by its being the case that p since in these plainest and most basic cases one’s entitlement to believe that one believes that p just is one’s entitlement to believe that one has a belief caused by its being the case that p. And so, in such cases I cannot rationally claim to know that I believe that p without claiming to know that p. To insist, however, that, in the plainest and methodologically most basic cases, one can only rationally claim to know the content of one’s belief if one can rationally claim to know its object, is to deny the sceptic something assumed throughout his argument. For the sceptic, in order even to get the argument going, must presuppose from the outset that we can rationally claim to know what is in our minds without rationally claiming to know what specifically causes it to be in our minds,4 hence without rationally claiming to know its truth or veridicality. Davidson’s 4

This is not to deny that both Descartes and the sceptic could coherently regard belief as something necessarily caused by something (or other). Throughout the Meditations, Descartes continually assumes that those of his cogitationes which he is pre-philosophically inclined to regard as veridical perceptual experiences necessarily have some cause or other, be they the causes he would ordinarily regard them as having or some genius malignus.

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externalist account of empirical contentfulness directly entails that this is false, that in fact mens non notior est quam corpus. And since according to Davidson his externalist account of empirical contentfulness is the only one we need in order to be able to interpret and make sense of others, whether at home or abroad, it accurately captures our ordinary, pre-philosophical understanding of what it is for a belief or judgement to be empirically contentful. With this, the sceptic is denied the standpoint from which to pose the question of how I might ever know whether I am dreaming, the victim of an evil demon or a brain in a vat.5 As Davidson says, there is no room for Cartesian doubts – this because there is no room for the questions, or rather, the questionings, which evoke them. Let us now unpack this compressed argument in such a way that we can precisely identify that feature of Davidson’s conception of intentional content by tacitly denying which not just the sceptic, but Descartes himself, are able to uncouple (a) the entitlement a subject can have to claim to know the contents of its empirically contentful intentional states and experiences, and thus these empirically contentful states and experiences themselves;6 from (b) the entitlement a subject can have to claim to know the truth, veridicality or referential success of these contents.7 (We may call these two kinds of entitlement two kinds of certitudo, i. e., certainty, in recognition of the fact that whatever else Descartes’ search for sure foundations may come to, it is at least a search for the conditions under which we human beings may rationally make the knowledge-claims we do in fact make.) Now Davidson’s causal externalism consists in the claim that it is part of our pre-philosophical notion of empirical content, and thus of empirical intentionality itself, that empirically 5

6

7

As Davidson puts it, “(G)eneral scepticism about the deliverances of the senses cannot even be formulated, since the senses and their deliverances play no central theoretical role in the account of belief, meaning, and knowledge if the contents of the mind depend on the causal relations, whatever they may be, between the attitudes and the world.” (Davidson 1989, pp. 164 – 165) Or indeed any higher-order states or experiences of its seeming to one that … one is perceiving, believing, judging or asserting that p. After all, the identity of such higher-order states or experiences must be just as bound to the identity of the propositional content ‘that p’ as the first order states and experiences in which these seemings are grounded – see in this connection below, pp. 76 – 77. Note that this is not at all verificationist because we are quantifying here, not over all possible contents as such, but only over those contents in having or indeed merely seeming to have which certain inner events of ours consist – those inner events, whatever they may be, of which the sceptic would have us ask whether they are veracious, or not rather the products of global deception.

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cognitive, “truth-claiming” intentional states and experiences necessarily refer into the world in which their causes occur. That is, of such states and experiences it is necessarily, indeed conceptually true that if they refer to anything at all, then they refer to items in the world of their causes. In the plainest and methodologically most basic cases, these items are their causes but in all cases, for example, less basic cases such as the belief that E = mc2, these items at least belong to that spatiotemporal and causal order8 to which their causes belong. Given, however, that empirical intentionality must occur in the same empirical order as its causes, it now follows from the above that the spatiotemporal and causal order in which the referents of an intentional state or experience with empirical content occur (if this state or experience has referents at all, as it may not) must contain this intentional state or experience itself, hence the subject of this state or experience (in its capacity or identity as the subject of this state or experience). We may put this consequence of Davidson’s position as follows: the world in which the referents of an intentional state or experience with empirical content occur (if the state or experience has referents at all) is necessarily identical with that in which this intentional state or experience and its subject (as its subject) themselves occur. Let us call any conception of empirical intentionality which has this consequence one which recognises the worldliness of empirical intentionality and its subject. Note now that Descartes, as well as the sceptic who employs Descartes’ style of argument in order to generate the so-called problem of the external world, tacitly deny such worldliness. That is, they deny the necessity of the identity of the order into which an empirically cognitive intentional state or experience refers with the order in which this state or experience, and thus its subject, themselves occur. Specifically, they see nothing absurd in the suggestion that a certain self-conscious, thinking subject S might be a brain in a vat such that S and its intentional states 8

We are, after all, speaking of beliefs and assertions with our kind of empirical content. So the assumption that the world in which the referents of such intentionality occur (if it has referents at all, as in individual cases it may not) is a spatiotemporal and causal order of the kind we pre-philosophically understand ‘the’ world to be is quite legitimate. If, however, one should not like this assumption, one could speak here simply of the order of being in which the referents of empirical intentionality would occur. Of course, a crucial, fundamentally Kantian point implicit in this is that any such order must possess some analogues of our forms of intuition-cum-pure intuitions, i. e., space and time as we experience them.

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and experiences occur in the one spatiotemporal and causal order – that, namely, to which the computer scientist, the computer and the vat belong – while the contents of S’s (empirical) intentional states and experiences are such that if they referred to anything at all (which they do not, of course), then these referents would be items occurring in another, quite distinct spatiotemporal, causal order (which is in fact illusory but constitutes the order S wrongly thinks it and its intentional states and experiences occur in). Importantly, Descartes fully appreciates that he denies the worldliness of empirical intentionality and its subject. He clearly recognises that one does not get the so-called problem of the external world for free, simply by pumping pre-philosophical intuitions – as if unprejudiced, theoretically uncontaminated reflection on our ordinary, everyday concepts of knowledge, belief, justification and perceptual experience alone sufficed to make the existence of the world problematic. Descartes shows his appreciation of this when he says, “(E)ven if the senses should perhaps sometimes deceive us about certain minute and more remote things, there are still many other things that plainly cannot be doubted, although they be derived from the same senses … .”9 In saying this, he is acknowledging that by all ordinary, pre-philosophical standards one literally cannot doubt that one has a hand unless one has some empirical reason to doubt it – this notwithstanding the essential fallibility of all such empirical knowledge claims and the logical possibility of their untruth. Were he to think otherwise, Descartes says, he would be comparing himself to … the insane, whose brains the stubborn vapour of black bile so weakens that they constantly assert themselves to be kings when they are very poor, or to be clothed in purple when they are naked, or to have an earthenware head, or all to be pumpkins or made of glass. But these are people without minds, and I would not seem any less demented were I to take as an example for myself something from them.10

So how does Descartes get to the problem of the external world – a problem which, for reasons of his own, he seems positively to be seeking? The clue comes in a crucial slide contained in the argument from dreaming, precisely the argument with which he seeks to show that ordinary standards of indubitability are not enough because there is another kind of dubitability to which his perceptual experience is subject: “Brilliantly soundly argued,” he ironically declares, 9 Descartes 1641 (1990), First Meditation, § 4, AT vii. 18; translation modified. 10 ibid.; translation modified.

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as if I were not a human being accustomed to sleep at night and to undergo in dreams all the same things (eadem omnia) … as those which these [the insane] do when awake. Truly, how frequently nocturnal rest persuades me of such usual things – that I am here, that I am dressed in a winter robe, that I am sitting by the fire – , when, however, the clothes having been taken off, I am lying between the sheets! And yet now I certainly intuit this piece of paper with waking eyes. This head which I move is not asleep. As one who is prudent and knowing I extend this hand and I sense. Things so distinct would not happen to someone sleeping. As if … I did not remember that on other occasions I have also been deluded in dreams by similar thoughts (a similibus … cogitationibus)! Reflecting on these things more attentively, I see so plainly that being awake can never be distinguished from sleep by certain criteria that I am stupefied, and this stupor itself would almost confirm for me the opinion of being asleep.11

Note what Descartes presupposes in this passage: that when asleep one really does undergo perceptual experiences, just as the insane and indeed the sane do when awake; that nocturnal rest genuinely does induce in one beliefs of the kind Descartes enumerates; and finally, that what deludes one in dreams are indeed thoughts (cogitationes), indeed thoughts of similar content, hence items of just the same kind, as what one has or undergoes in waking life. In short, Descartes has presupposed that when dreaming, I am perceiving, thinking and even believing in just the same sense as I am in waking life. Of course, once he has assumed that one can have or undergo cogitationes irrespective of whether one is or is not dreaming, the conclusion immediately follows that from his own internal, first person perspective he is in principle unable to distinguish between sleep and waking life – this because this internal, first person perspective is so to speak immune to the distinction between sleep and waking life. Then, with this conclusion in hand, Descartes passes directly and unproblematically to the even more radical thought-experiment of the genius malignus in order to eradicate that last remnant of ‘certainty’ with which the Argument from Dreaming leaves him, the certainty, namely, that even if he is now dreaming, he still knows with certainty that at some point or other he has had veridical perceptual experience and knowledge of the world (since to be dreaming entails having once been awake). At this point, Descartes has secured the conclusion towards which the whole argument of the First Meditation is working, namely, that alone, reliant solely on his own cog-

11 ibid., § 5, AT vii. 19; translation modified and italics added.

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nitive resources, he can never account for the legitimacy of his pre-philosophical, ‘natural’ conviction that he is capable of empirical knowing. Now Descartes certainly regards himself as entitled to assume the worldlessness of empirical intentionality and its subject as a premise here. And in a certain sense he is right in this. For as we shall see only in conclusion,12 this worldlessness follows directly from a certain understanding of the very being of empirically cognitive intentionality and its subject from which, as certain crucial remarks in the Sixth Meditation show, Descartes is working from the outset. As we shall also see, this ‘ontology’13 of empirical intentionality and its subject is itself based on Descartes’ preferred ‘ontology’ of the world (God’s creation), which he explicates by appeal to a certain understanding of what it is to be ‘in nature’. But for the moment, these issues and the legitimacy of Descartes’ moves are not important. What is important is the fact that by conceiving empirical intentionality and its subject as worldless in the sense indicated, Descartes, as well as the sceptic who exploits Descartes’ kind of argument, are able to make the move essential to generating the problem of the external world. For the worldlessness of empirical intentionality and its subject gives both the basis upon which to argue that ordinary, everyday rationality is in fact wrong to bind intrinsically together the two kinds of ‘certainty’ or entitlement distinguished above: on the one hand, the entitlement a selfconscious subject can have to claim to know the contents of its empirically contentful intentional states and experiences, hence these empirically contentful states and experiences themselves;14 and on the other, the en12 See Conclusion, pp. 364 – 366. 13 In the sense of ontologia rather than the sense at least typically intended when analytical philosophers speak of ‘serious ontology’. In analytical philosophy, ontology is often de facto understood to connote an account of what really or most truly is. It is then ontologia in the service of special metaphysics (metaphysica specialis) – see Chapter Six, § 1, for an account of the distinction between ontologia and metaphysica specialis. Typically, if not always, ‘serious ontology’ is ontologia pressed into the service of that form of metaphysica specialis which constitutes the default stance of analytical philosophy, viz., modern “naturalism about nature” – see Chapters Five and Six. 14 Or indeed any higher-order states or experiences one might like to postulate of its seeming to one that … one is perceiving, believing, judging or asserting that p. After all, the identity of these higher-order states or experiences is just as bound to the identity of the propositional content ‘that p’ as the first order states and experiences in which these seemings are grounded. Once again, see in this connection pp. 76 – 77 below.

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titlement such a subject can have to claim to know the truth, veridicality or referential success of (at least some of ) these contents. Such worldlessness suffices for denying that one may only claim to know the former if one may claim to know the latter. And it is necessary for this denial at least in the sense that it is hard to see what other ground there could be for maintaining such disparity of certainty. For as we have seen, and indeed seen Descartes to have seen, our ordinary, pre-philosophical understanding of knowledge, justification and perceptual experience provides no such ground. Thus, only because Descartes and the sceptic who follows in his footsteps assume this worldlessness can either assume that even if I were dreaming, or radically deceived by an evil genius, or a brain in a vat, I would still nonetheless exist, and know myself to exist, as thinking these contents (in the sense of wondering or asking of them whether they are true or veridical, or whether it merely seems to me that they are true or veridical, etc.). Or again, only because they assume the worldlessness of empirical intentionality and its subject can they create that traditional predicament “in which,” as McDowell nicely puts it, “we are supposed to start from some anyway available data of consciousness, and work up to certifying that they actually yield knowledge of the objective world.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 112) For this assumption gives Descartes and the sceptic their conviction that even as the victim of radically global error, I could still genuinely ponder the question as to whether I was a victim of radically global error – as if thinking (doubting, wonderingwhether, telling-whether, etc.), unlike, say, walking, were a special kind of intentional behaviour exempt from the principle that to be dreaming or in some other way hallucinating that one is engaged in B is not to be engaged in B at all, not even a very special kind of B called its seeming to one that one is engaged in some kind of B. Evidently, the proper response to Descartes and the sceptic consists in showing the nature of empirically contentful intentionality to be such that one cannot uncouple these two kinds of certainty. This is precisely what Davidson does: on the basis of his causally externalist conception of intentional contentfulness, he shows empirical intentionality to be such that it makes no sense to speak of rationally claiming to know this intentionality itself without committing oneself to claiming to know (sufficiently many of ) the objects of this intentionality. The first step in showing this consists in the claim that the interpretation of another works from the methodological assumption that interpretees are ‘mostly’ right, an assumption which enables the interpreter to identify (in the sim-

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plest and most basic cases) the contents of belief, and thus belief itself, via identification of the causes of belief. The second step consists in the claim that this notion of empirical belief, hence of empirical content, since it is the one needed for interpretation of one subject by another, is the only one there is.15 This second step is, of course, what gives Davidson the well-known argument which McDowell is concerned about but does not dispute. For given this second step, it immediately follows that belief is not just methodologically assumed by the interpreter to be by nature veridical, it is by nature veridical. Crucially, however, this argument is, as we now see very clearly, more a corollary than the core of Davidson’s response to sceptism. For given this second step, it also immediately follows that what goes for the interpretation of another must go for interpretation of oneself. 16 With this, parity of certainty follows immediately. It is thus misleading to focus solely on Davidson’s claim that belief is by nature veridical, as if it were the heart of Davidson’s response to scepticism. For in fact this argument stands alongside, as strictly coordinate with, that consequence of Davidson’s conception of content which plays the really decisive role in the demonstration of the self-defeating character of scepticism about the external world. This latter consequence is precisely parity of certainty, which may indeed be described as the form taken by the methodological assumption that one’s interpretee has ‘mostly’ true or veracious intentional states and experiences when the interpretee is (and is, of course, known to one as) oneself.17 Since the worldlessness consciously employed by Descartes as a premise negates parity of the two kinds of certainty, to assert the latter is to negate the former. Thus, 15 Clearly implicit in this second step is the assumption that Davidson’s causally externalist conception of content suffices to accommodate self-interpretation, i. e., self-consciousness. Whether this is so will be discussed in Part II; in the meantime see Christensen 2007b. 16 That is, if, given Davidson’s causally externalist conception of content, it goes for self-interpretation at all. See above, note 15. 17 Equally, however, one could put the point the other way around: the methodological assumption made by an interpreter that the interpretee has ‘mostly’ true or veracious intentional states and experiences is simply the ‘externalisation’ of the claim that the two kinds of certainty are intrinsically linked. To deny Descartes and the sceptic their privileging of certainty about the inner in the way Davidson does is thus not to ‘privilege’ certainty about the outer. In order to ‘refute’ scepticism about the external world, one has only to contradict the privilege given to the inner perspective of the self-interpreter. To do this is not to go to the other extreme of asserting a contrary (truly pragmatist and Rortyian?) privilege of the outer.

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through his causally externalist conception of content Davidson de facto asserts the worldliness of empirical intentionality and its subject (as such a subject). Davidson would rightly insist that this argument is not question-begging – as if it were not enough to show his causally externalist conception of content to be the only one needed for interpretation, as if, therefore, one needed some further reason for holding it to be the notion of content applicable in one’s own case. For of course there is only one notion of content here – which is not to deny that the wielding of this one notion of content in the interpretation of oneself is and must be direct and immediate in a way in which it is not in the interpretation of another. In any case, what goes for the goose must go for the gander: if it were insufficient justification for his causally externalist conception of content to appeal to its being the only conception of content needed for interpretation of another, then Davidson could demand in return that Descartes and the sceptic demonstrate the need for two conceptions of content (which presumably could only come by demonstrating the necessity of construing empirical intentionality and its subject as worldless). No ordinary everyday intuition forces one, as Descartes well knew, to uncouple certainty about the inner from certainty about the outer, thereby privileging the former over the latter (since the latter, simply because it is a form of certainty, must always presuppose the former, as Descartes’ demonstration of the undeniability of the cogito makes evident). Short of a reason for assuming worldlessness, only utility counts. Here, Davidson would rightly argue, his account of content wins hands down. McDowell, however, does not see these things clearly enough and so is led to misunderstand and misinterpret the remark Rorty attributes to Davidson in two respects. Firstly, he thinks that the remark itself articulates Davidson’s reductio ad absurdum of scepticism about the external world. This is not correct. The general upshot of Davidson’s response to scepticism is not that if we were brains in a vat, we would be truly believing, judging and in some sense asserting about items in our electronic environment. Rather, its upshot is that we would not be believing, judging or asserting at all – a result which leads the sceptic ab absurdum in a much more satisfactory sense since the sceptic must assume that even as brains in a vat, we would be believing, judging, asserting and indeed wondering about something – the cogitationes which constitute the “anyway available data of consciousness.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 112) This is not to deny, of course, that if we were brains-in-a-vat, we would be hallucinating (in the world of the computer scientist) that we

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were believing, judging, asserting, and possibly even wondering whether we were brains-in-a-vat. But such hallucinating is precisely not a kind or sense of seeming-to-one that p which would constitute an “anyway available” datum of consciousness about which one could wonder, even as one is having it, whether it is veracious or not. For hallucinating, like dreaming, is a kind of seeming which is precisely not available to a subject for questioning even as this subject is undergoing it.18 Ordinary ways of speaking confirm this: we no more speak of believing, judging, asserting or indeed wondering while hallucinating or dreaming than we speak of walking while hallucinating or dreaming. Rather, just as we speak of hallucinating or dreaming that we are walking, so, too, we speak of hallucinating or dreaming that we are believing, judging, asserting or wondering. This is so whatever we happen to be hallucinating or dreaming ourselves to be believing, judging, asserting or wondering about, in particular, whether we are or are not brains-in-a-vat. So properly understood, Davidson’s kind of response does not leave the option open of iterating the sceptic’s initial question at a higher level, as if room were still left for the question, “But how do you know that what seems to you to be (such and such) a cogitatio really is (such and such) a cogitatio?” The thrust of Davidson’s kind of response is to show that, given the nature of intentional content and, in particular, the parity of certainty it entails, there is no level of seemings-to-one such that the existence of these seemings is more ‘certain’ than the existence of at least sufficiently many of their objects. To think that Davidson were not entitled to this completely general claim about any level of 18 There is, of course, a sense in which Jones, while dreaming in his bed or floating in his vat, would be undergoing seemings-to-him (or even, if I am Jones, in which I would be undergoing seemings-to-me). Note, however, that a seeming-to-Jones (or even -to-me) in this sense is only available as a datum for consciousness from within the world in which Jones is sleeping, or floating in his vat. As such, it is not a form of seeming which could be a datum for Jones’ (or my) consciousness even while it is objectively in Jones’ (or my) consciousness. So it is not an “anyway available datum of consciousness”. That is, it is not a kind of seeming about which Jones (or I) can have thoughts even as he is (or I am) having it – for which reason, of course, it is not iterable. The only items which can genuinely pass through Jones’ (or my) mind, in the sense of being data of consciousness anyway available for questioning, are judgements, perceptual experiences or seemings-to-perceive in the sense in which my seeming to perceive a life-saving oasis there on the sandy horizon is a seeming. This latter is clearly always such that future experience might expose it for what it is.

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seemings-to-one whatsoever, as if his claim concerned only the ground floor level, is to misunderstand the nature of his argument. For Davidson’s response to scepticism primarily concerns contents, not ‘acts’. That is, it primarily concerns items which are rather than have contents. In particular, it turns on the following claim: for contents C of the plainest and methodologically most basic kind, my entitlement to claim to know the content C of a cogitatio I am having now is inseparable from my entitlement to claim to know certain contents C* of this kind to be true or veridical. Of course, given that acts (cogitationes) are individuated by their contents (cogitata), this claim about contents yields a further claim about acts: my entitlement to claim to know, with regard to a cogitatio of the most basic kind, that is, with content of the most basic kind, that I am now having it is inseparable from my entitlement to claim to know certain contents of this kind to be true or veridical. And so it follows that my entitlement to claim to know that it now seems to me that I am now having a cogitatio of the most basic kind is also inseparable from my entitlement to claim to know certain contents of this kind to be true or veridical. After all, my entitlement to claim to know that it seems to me that I am now having such and such a cogitatio, i. e., a cogitatio with such and such a content, is no less dependent on my entitlement to claim to know what this content is than my entitlement to claim to know simply that I am now having such and such a cogitatio. So to assert parity of certainty is indeed to assert it at and for any level of seeming, that is, for all kinds of seeming which genuinely constitute seemings-accessible-to-me, as opposed to that sense in which things seem inaccessibly to me while I am dreaming in my bed, or floating in my vat. Or, to put the point another way, it is to affirm philosophically what we already know pre-philosophically, namely, that in a dream or any other form of global hallucination, one is no more perceiving, believing, judging, asserting or indeed wondering about one’s hallucinatory world than one is walking about in it. Given this, it follows that to doubt the existence of the world even while it is seeming (accessibly) to one that one is having veridical perceptual experience of it (or while it is seeming to one that it is seeming to one that … one is having veridical perceptual experience of it) is absurd – absurd in precisely the same sense in which it is absurd to doubt one’s existence as thinking each time one thinks it, or has it before one’s mind. The second respect in which McDowell misunderstands and misinterprets the remark attributed by Rorty to Davidson concerns the seriousness with which he seems to take it. For it follows from Davidson’s gen-

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eral position that he could not have meant the remark seriously at all. Davidson’s real response to the sceptic simply could not be that if we were brains in a vat, we would be believing, judging and presumably also in some sense asserting about items in our electronic environment. Davidson could only respond in this way if it made sense, from a Davidsonian perspective, to speak of interpreting brains-in-a-vat. But precisely on a Davidsonian understanding of interpretation, this makes no sense: (I)t is clear that a very complex pattern of behavior must be observed to justify the attribution of a single thought. Or, more accurately, there has to be good reason to believe there is such a complex pattern of behavior. And unless there is actually such a complex pattern of behavior, there is no thought. (Davidson 2001d, p. 100)

For Davidson, interpretees are essentially entities engaged in intentional behaviour whereas brains-in-a-vat, while they may be under the illusion that they are engaged in intentional behaviour, are not really thus engaged. Davidson’s remark, which occurs in no published writing, is a throwaway line perhaps intended ironically, as paradoxical way of articulating the absurdity in scepticism about the external world. It is at best the claim that even if brains-in-a-vat could be intelligibly regarded as believing, judging and asserting, they would still have to be understood as doing so about the environment with which they are causally interacting. In other words, this remark is a quixotic, counterfactual way of asserting the falsity of what Descartes and the sceptic must assume in order to get their argument going, namely, the worldlessness of empirical intentionality and its subject (in its capacity as a subject of such intentionality). So is McDowell simply mistaken about what Davidson’s response to scepticism about the external world is and what might be wrong with it? Above we noted McDowell’s tendency both to acquiesce in, and dissent from, Davidson’s views. We also noted his claim that Davidson’s response “works the wrong way round.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 17) Lastly, we speculated that perhaps these things express recognition that Davidson reaches the right kind of answer from the wrong direction. How, then, might Davidson be reaching right results in the wrong way, indeed, in a sense yet to be explained, the wrong way around?

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ii. Another Sense of World? The proper response to Descartes and the sceptic consists in so conceiving what it is to be an empirically intentional state or experience that one contradicts that uncoupling of the two kinds of ‘certainty’ distinguished above which Descartes and the sceptic accomplish by assuming the worldlessness of empirical intentionality and its subject. As we have seen, Davidson does precisely this. Yet he does so in a quite specific way. For his causally externalist conception of how empirical intentionality ‘relates to an object’ puts a certain spin on the worldliness thereby imparted to such intentionality. An account of intentionality recognises empirical intentionality and its subject to be worldly if it entails that the world in which the referents of an empirically intentional state or experience occur (if the state or experience has referents at all, as it may not) is necessarily identical with that in which this intentional state or experience and its subject (as its subject) themselves occur. But there are two different, indeed opposite ways in which this identity could be derived. In Davidson’s case, it follows from the thesis that our pre-philosophical notion of empirical intentional content is to be understood in causally externalist terms.19 This thesis immediately yields a conception of empirical intentionality according to which empirically cognitive, “truth-claiming” intentional states and experiences necessarily refer into the world in which their causes occur. These kinds of intentional state or experience are such that their objects occur, and are understood as occurring, within that world in which their causes occur, and are understood as occurring. More precisely, world in the sense of that order in which the objects of empirical intentionality occur is a function of world in the sense of that order in which the causes of empirical intentionality occur. In this sense, then, the latter sense of world is conceptually prior to the former sense. To put the matter sloganistically, causality comes before intentionality. In principle, however, one could imagine a conception of intentionality and its contentfulness which, while entailing that empirical intentionality and its subject were worldly, did so in a manner which inverts the priority Davidson gives to causality. Whereas Davidson maintains that the objects of empirical intentionality must occur, and be understood 19 How other forms of intentional content, e. g., the contents of mathematical propositions, are to be understood is, of course, a further and surely very difficult question for Davidson. How he might deal with it is not, however, relevant here.

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as occurring, in the world of the causes of these states or experiences, this inversion would maintain just the opposite: the causes of empirically intentional states and experiences must occur, and be interpreted as occurring, in the world of the objects of such intentionality. In other words, it would construe world in the sense of the order in which the causes of empirical intentionality occur as conceptually posterior to world in the sense of the order in which the objects of such intentionality occur. The identity of entities in their capacity as the causes of empirical intentionality would be fixed by their identity as the objects (referents) of such intentionality rather than the other way around. Of course if this should be so, then the contents of empirically intentional states and experiences, their Fregean fine grain, could not be construed in causally externalist fashion. Or, to put matters once again sloganistically, intentionality would come before causality. At this point, several interesting questions arise: firstly, might one have to construe empirical intentionality, in particular, perceptual intentionality, in such a way that one could, on the one hand, side with Davidson in rejecting the disparity of certainty to which Descartes and the sceptic help themselves by assuming the worldlessness of empirical intentionality and its subject; yet on the other, invert the priority which Davidson gives to causality over intentionality? Clearly, such a conception would, no less than Davidson’s, count as recognising the worldliness of empirical intentionality and its subject but it would do so ‘the other way around’. Secondly, might this alternative conception be, as the phrase ‘the other way around’ suggests, the real point lurking behind McDowell’s criticisms of Davidson? Thirdly, might this alternative conception require one to construe perceptual experience as a ‘unity of concept and intuition’ in a manner which constitutes a real difference to Davidson’s account – real in the sense that Davidson not only does not embrace this conception as a matter of fact, but simply could not do so? The fact that such a conception of perceptual experience would rest on a non-causally-externalist conception of intentional content would already make it seriously nonDavidsonian. But perhaps it would also be incompatible with Davidson’s more specific claim that perception is sensation causing perceptual belief or judgement. Finally, perhaps only it would preserve thought’s bearing on reality – in which case we would finally understand how Davidsonian coherentism might genuinely threaten such bearing. Clearly, if these questions can be answered affirmatively, then we will have explained much that is mysterious in Mind and World, in particular, how exactly the different threads of McDowell’s argument hang together.

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So is there any indication in the text itself that McDowell finds something wrong with the way in which Davidson dispels that disparity of certainty which renders the existence of the external world problematic? In particular, is there any indication that he finds something wrong with the priority Davidson gives to causality over intentionality, thereby implying that the primary, non-derivative notion of world is the causal one? Let us return to the footnote already mentioned, in which McDowell seeks retrospectively to clarify his worries specifically about Davidson’s response to scepticism and more generally about coherentism. As we know, McDowell finds the remark attributed by Rorty to Davidson that if one were a brain in a vat, one’s thoughts would be about items in one’s electronic environment unsatisfactory as a response to scepticism about the external world. Yet, as we also know, he does not find this remark unsatisfactory because it exchanges one sceptical possibility for another. No, the real problem is, says McDowell, that … in the argument Rorty attributes to Davidson, we ring changes on the actual environment (as seen by the interpreter and brought into the interpretation) without changing how things strike the believer, even while the interpretation is supposed to capture how the believer is in touch with her world. This strikes me as making it impossible to claim that the argument traffics in any genuine idea of being in touch with something in particular. The objects the interpreter sees the subject’s beliefs as being about become, as it were, merely noumenal so far as the subject is concerned. (McDowell 1994b, footnote 14, p. 17)

The central claim here is that on Davidson’s picture of intentionality and intentional content “we ring changes on the actual environment (as seen by the interpreter and brought into the interpretation) without changing how things strike the believer, even while the interpretation is supposed to capture how the believer is in touch with her world.” (McDowell 1994b, footnote 14, p. 17) It seems, then, that according to McDowell, Davidson wrongly regards the environment to which we appeal when interpreting another as in some sense independent of how it strikes, that is, how it perceptually appears, seems or looks to our interpretee to be. Given the way McDowell puts things here, one could be forgiven for thinking that McDowell were accusing Davidson of construing in Reidian fashion the relation between an interpretee and the objective order with reference to which we interpreters seek to identify our interpretee’s perceptions, beliefs, desires and behaviour: “how things strike the believer” becomes a veil of appearance in the sense that the “actual environment” can vary objectively while remaining the same for the believer –

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in which case the believer could not possibly notice the variation. But it would be wrong to accuse Davidson of anything like this. So perhaps the charge against Davidson concerns not some sceptical possibility generated by how Davidson understands the relation between the interpretee and the “actual environment”, but rather this relation itself. More precisely, perhaps it concerns how Davidson understands the term “actual environment”, or indeed those other terms which one could use in the same context, viz., ‘world’, ‘external reality’, etc. That objective order in which we interpreters perceive the interpretee to be located, hence with reference to which we seek to interpret it, should not be conceived as Davidson conceives it, namely, simply as the order we observe to be causally affecting the interpretee. Rather, the term “actual environment” (or ‘world’, ‘external reality’, ‘the outer’, etc.) must connote for us interpreters what it connotes for our interpretee. And what these terms connote for the interpretee is implicit in McDowell’s clause “how things strike the believer”: they all connote that objective order which exists if the interpretee is perceiving by and large veridically – not simply the world, the external reality, which strikes the interpretee, but as it strikes the interpretee. Only in the “actual environment” (world, external reality, etc.) in this intentional, indeed perceptual sense of the term can we hope to locate the causes of our interpretee’s perceptions, beliefs and intentional behaviour, for only when we understand the “actual environment” in this way do we have so much as an interpretee, a subject of empirical intentionality and intentional behaviour, in view. To insist, therefore, that we as interpreters must understand the term “actual environment” (or ‘world’, ‘external reality’, etc.) as the interpretee does is in effect to define it in terms of how things strike the subject being interpreted rather than the subject interpreting: whatever else the “actual environment,” world, external reality, in short, the outer, may be, it is essentially something containing items which perceptually appear to the interpretee as thus and so (and by and large are thus and so). Clearly, understanding the “actual environment” in terms of how it perceptually appears to the interpretee, rather than how it perceptually appears to us as affecting the interpretee, constitutes a direct inversion of the stance Davidson recommends to the interpreter. According to Davidson, as interpreters, we access the interpretee’s beliefs, assertions and behavioural responses generally by appeal to items in the environment as we perceive it to be, items which we can regard as the causes of our interpretee’s belief and intentional behaviour, which causes are, at least

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under appropriately ‘charitable’ assumptions, also the objects (referents, truth conditions) of its belief, hence what it is behaviourally comporting itself towards. So for Davidson the term “actual environment” (or ‘world’, ‘external reality’, ‘the outer’, etc.) connotes “that objective order in which the interpreter perceives the interpretee to be caused to believe and behaviourally respond to by items in this order.”20 What satisfies this description is, of course, objectively speaking, the order which strikes our interpretee, but we Davidsonian interpreters only access it as it strikes us, not as it strikes the interpretee. To invert the stance Davidson recommends to interpreters is thus to invert the priority Davidson gives to world in the causal sense (the order in which the causes of empirical intentionality occur) over world in the intentional sense (the order in which the objects of empirical intentionality occur). In other words, it is precisely to invert the priority which Davidson gives to causality over intentionality: if we interpreters must work from the world not as it strikes us as causing our interpretee to believe and behave but as it strikes our interpretee itself, then we as interpreters can only access the causes of our interpretee’s empirical intentionality and behaviour through accessing how things perceptually appear to the interpretee rather than the other way around. But then we are conceding that the causes of perception, empirical belief and intentional behaviour necessarily, indeed conceptually, occur in the world of the objects of perception, empirical belief and intentional behaviour rather than other way around. Or, to put the point more provocatively, not the world in its capacity as (perceptible to us as) containing the causes of empirical intentionality 20 We see here, incidentally, the need to be a little more precise in the way we characterise that sense of world to which Davidson gives priority over intentionality: strictly speaking, world in the causal sense is not just that order in which the causes of empirical intentionality occur. Rather, it is that order in which these causes strike an interpreter as occurring, i. e., in which certain items perceptually appear to an interpreter as the causes of empirical intentionality. For Davidson, the order in which a subject of empirical intentionality and behavioural response exists is eo ipso the order in which it must be interpreted as existing. This difference, which flows from, or perhaps rather simply is, Davidson’s orientation towards interpretation, sets him apart from more direct forms of causal externalism, such as one finds in Dretske 1981 and Fodor 1987. This subtle difference corresponds to the difference between Davidson’s smooth, ‘non-reductionist’ brand of naturalism and what McDowell calls bald naturalism. It is also what enables Davidson effectively to respond to the sceptic – see below, Chapter Four, pp. 185 – 186, and note 7, p. 185.

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and behaviour generally fixes the identity of the world in which the referents of such intentionality and behaviour occur (insofar as it has referents at all, as in individual cases it may not). Rather, the world in its capacity as that order in which the referents of such intentionality must occur (if this intentionality has referents at all, as it now all the more clearly only occasionally may not) fixes the identity of the world in which the causes of empirical intentionality and intentional behaviour generally occur. World in the empirically intentional, hence perceptual sense – the totality of possible referents of perceptually based empirical intentionality – is conceptually prior to world in the causal sense – the totality of potential causes of such intentionality. Things are outside of, or external to empirical intentionality and its subject (in its capacity as such a subject) primarily in this intentional and perceptual sense, and only secondarily in the causal sense favoured by Davidson. Evidently, an inverse notion of world must reflect an inverted, nonDavidsonian notion of interpretation, which latter rests in turn upon an inverted, non-Davidsonian notion of content. If, after all, we as interpreters must understand the identity of the world in which the causes of our interpretee’s perceptual, hence empirical intentionality generally occur as fixed by that into which this intentionality itself refers, then we tie the very identity of this world to that of the contents and concepts implicated in our interpretee’s empirically cognitive intentional states and experiences: the world in this sense just is, so to speak by definition, that order which exists insofar as our interpretee is perceiving veridically to any extent at all. Consequently, it just is an order containing items which satisfy such and such concepts, those concepts, namely, which are wielded by our interpretee in its belief, judgement, assertion and in particular perception. If, however, this is so, then neither the identity of the contents of our interpretee’s perceptual and empirically intentional states and experiences generally, nor indeed the identity of the concepts implicated in these contents, can be fixed by any relations to external items in this world. These contents and concepts must be able to determine the referential properties of such intentionality independently of whatever relations, in particular, causal relations, in which it stands to its referents (insofar as these latter exist, as occasionally they may not). To invert Davidson’s sense of world must therefore be to negate his externalist conception of content. No doubt a veridical perception or, in the simplest cases, a true belief, judgement or assertion must be caused by its referents but this fact cannot be used to explicate our pre-philosophical understanding of its contentfulness. More precisely, because one cannot understand the identification

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(interpretation) of perceptual, doxastic, apophantic or assertoric intentional content as appealing to this causal relation, one cannot, via such explication of the concept of interpretation, explicate the identity (concept) of such content in these causal terms – this notwithstanding the fact that veridical perception, or again, true belief, judgement or assertion of the simplest kind, is necessarily caused by its referents.21 Of course, none of this tells us precisely what it is to conceive interpretation and content, hence world and the worldliness of empirical intentionality, in this inverse way. Nor indeed has any reason been given for thinking that we need to do so. At this stage, however, we have not sought to show these things. Rather, we have sought merely to identify some essential feature of Davidson’s position which can help us to make sense of McDowell’s ambivalent stance towards Davidson. Our results may be put as follows: Davidson, thanks to his account of interpretation and the causally externalist conception of content implicit in it, is able to contradict the disparity of certainty assumed by Descartes and the sceptic between claims about the inner and claims about the outer. In so doing, he conceives empirical intentionality and its subject (as the subject of such intentionality) as worldly in the sense stipulated above. But the sense of world implicit in this worldliness is a causal rather than intentional one: as interpreters, we work with an essentially interpreter-relative, causal sense of the terms ‘world’, ‘empirical reality’, “actual environment” or whatever other term might connote that in which empirical thinking and its subject are to be interpreted as occurring. Just this is, or so we shall argue, the problem McDowell senses in Davidson’s position. This causal understanding of the notion of world constitutes the danger which coherentism presents to thought’s bearing on 21 Analogously, P. F. Snowdon has argued against causal theories of perception that just because a (veridical) perceptual experience is necessarily caused by its object, hence a causal relation to its object part of the very concept of such experience, one should not think that the concept could be analysed by appeal to this causal relation – see Snowdon 1988, pp. 192 – 193. In other words, one should not think that there is some non-circular characterisation of this causal relation which would be sufficient for perceptual experience. Davidson does not, of course, attempt to show by analysis that the identity of the causes of belief and assertion fixes the identity of the content thereof. Rather, he appeals to an intrinsic connection provided by truth and causation between the identity of content and its identifiability by another (interpretation). Against this, we argue that, while the objects of the most basic and methodologically fundamental kinds of belief are necessarily the causes thereof, being an object, hence a content of belief cannot be explicated by appeal to the notion of being a cause of belief.

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reality. Moreover, it constitutes this danger through the consequences it has for perceptual experience: in order to secure thought’s bearing on reality, we must conceive perceptual experience as a co-operation between receptivity and spontaneity in which both are inseparable moments yet this causal understanding of world prevents us from doing so. Or, to put the point in a form which will more closely reflect the structure of our argument, when one conceives perceptual experience as a genuine unity of the contribution of receptivity with that of spontaneity in the sense required in order to secure thought’s bearing on reality, one finds that such perceptual experience itself and empirical intentionality generally are worldly in a perceptual and intentional rather than causal sense. Needless to say, the kind of co-operation between receptivity and spontaneity required for securing thought’s bearing on reality will turn out to be one in which the not even notionally separable contribution made by receptivity is sensually, and not simply causally, impressional. Clearly, we will have to put a lot more flesh on these bare bones. Nonetheless, this schematic outline does make one thing clear: we must begin by working out what exactly is wrong with Davidson’s account of interpretation, this in such a way that we have reason for thinking that the priority which Davidson gives to causality over intentionality inverts the true order. As we shall see, to work out what is really wrong with Davidson’s account of interpretation is to put oneself in a position to see that everything does turn, just as McDowell insists, on the notion of perceptual experience. In what sense precisely everything turns on the notion of perceptual experience will be demonstrated in the chapter following.

§ 2: Getting (to) the World the Wrong Way round Davidson seeks to ground his causally externalist conception of content by appeal to the device of radical interpretation. This consists in interpreting the utterances and therefore large tracts of the psychology and intentional behaviour of a radically alien interpretee by first identifying the causes of its perceptual belief and behaviour and then, by assuming charity, inferring back to the objects and contents of such belief and behaviour. If this should be possible, then this will show that the identity of items in “the actual environment” as the objects of perceptual belief and behaviour is fixed by their identity as the causes of perceptual belief and behaviour.

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The central task of this section is to argue, in the first two-subsections, that this strategy of grounding does not succeed and that therefore Davidson fails in his effort to explicate the notion of content (‘meaning’) in terms of truth and causation. The argument is complex, not the least because Davidson’s position is so hard to pin down. The difficulties in understanding Davidson begin, of course, with the conceptual linchpin of his strategy: the concept of radical interpretation. We must therefore begin by attempting to determine just what this is. i. How Radical is Interpretation Actually? Imagine we are attempting to understand the behaviour, hence psychology of, in other words, to interpret, a linguistic being A who is alien to us in the following sense: we do not understand A’s language, nor does A understand ours, so we cannot enter into straightforward linguistic communication with one another. Nor is A so like us in its culture, technology and general environment that our position is similar to that of contemporary English speakers observing contemporary Serbocroats. (Perhaps we stand to A as European explorers of the eighteenth century stood to Australian aboriginals.) We observe A to utter some sentence S under circumstances such that we have reason to believe that A holds S true. Our first step towards understanding A and A’s assertions will doubtlessly consist in being ‘charitable’ towards A, i. e., methodologically assuming that A is sufficiently rational and adept enough at asserting the truth that A actually is asserting the truth. Since the Davidsonian notion of content (whose correctness is meant to be demonstrated by the possibility, at least in principle, of radical interpretation) entails that the identity of the most basic kinds of (true) assertion and asserted propositional content is fixed by what causes the assertion, we have now to set out to identify what could have caused A to assert S since, given the truth of what A is asserting, this state of affairs will be its truth condition. Its identification will therefore reveal the propositional content of A’s assertion. A will have asserted the sentence S in some context or ‘environment’. This environment will contain numerous different states of affairs only some of which will be causally implicated in the production of A’s assertion. Furthermore, the set of states of affairs implicated in the causal process which generated this assertion will itself be large, possibly even indefinitely so. Let us, for example, assume that in the context or environment in which A asserts S we note two distinct states of affairs, e. g., a kangaroo

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hopping by and a magpie flying overhead. Presumably, only one, if any, of these states of affairs is causally implicated in causing A to make its assertion (and, of course, to form the corresponding belief ). Furthermore, this state of affairs will obviously not be the only member in the set of those states of affairs which are, as opposed to those states of affairs which are not, causally implicated in the production of A’s assertion. All sorts of other states of affairs, all cognitively available to us to one degree or another, will also be causally implicated in causing A to make its assertion (and to form its belief ) – some because they are themselves causes of whichever of our first two states of affairs is causally implicated, hence are more distal to A’s assertion than it, others because they are effects of it, hence less distal, that is, more proximal, to A’s assertion than it. Let us, for example, assume that a kangaroo’s hopping by is indeed causally implicated in the production of A’s assertion. Let us also assume that this state of affairs has itself been caused by a clap of thunder (which has startled the kangaroo). The state of affairs of there occurring a clap of thunder is thus more distal to A’s assertion than that of a kangaroo’s hopping by. Finally, let us assume that its hopping by has itself caused a certain pattern of light to stream into A’s eyes, which in turn has caused a certain pattern of stimulation at the endings of A’s optical nerves. This latter state of affairs is thus less distal to A’s assertion than that of a kangaroo’s hopping by. We thus confront two interrelated but nonetheless distinguishable problems: how do we discriminate between those states of affairs which are, and those states of affairs which are not, causally implicated in the generation of A’s observable behavioural response, viz., assertion of the sentence S? And how do we identify, within the set of causally implicated states of affairs, the one which constitutes the ‘object’ (referent, truth condition) of A’s true22 assertion (and corresponding belief )? At this point, a straightforward solution presents itself: from the outset we have assumed that A is an interpretee, i. e., is a perceiving, believing, and desiring subject engaged in ongoing intentional behaviour. (The more similar to us and our own behaviour A and its behaviour appear perceptually to us to be, the more readily we will be able to assume this.) Consequently, we will surely already have, at least typically, a 22 Recall that, as interpreters, we must assume, at least in the first instance, that what our interpretee says (and believes) is true. Only by making this assumption can we at least begin to map the interpretee’s behaviour onto objectively existing features of the “actual environment” as the causes of this behaviour.

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good and certainly refinable idea of what A generally believes and desires. In particular, we will surely already have, at least typically, a good and certainly refinable idea of what A might in general want or need to perceive, and is generally able to perceive.23 This prior knowledge of what kinds of thing A might, given its beliefs and interests, both in general and in this specific (kind of ) context need and be able to perceive makes it easy to sort the causally relevant states of affairs out from the causally irrelevant, just as it makes it easy, if not quite to the same degree, to introduce enough Fregean fine grain into the set of causally relevant states of affairs. Thus, it might permit us to recognise that, as a matter of brute fact, A was not in a position to perceive that a magpie was flying overhead, but was in a position to perceive that a kangaroo was hopping by. And should both states of affairs in fact lie equally well within A’s field of view, then the fact that A has, at least on this occasion, no desire or need to be perceiving a magpie – A is holding a spear rather than a slingshot and believes spears to be more suited to killing kangaroos than magpies, hence is more interested in catching kangaroos than magpies – would permit us to discriminate between them. Moreover, this prior knowledge permits us to distinguish within the class of causally relevant states of affairs between those causes which are, and that one cause which is not, too distal or too proximal to be what A is perceiving and assertionally responding to, hence which constitutes the object (referent, truth condition) both of A’s assertion of S and of S itself (as currently asserted by A). It permits us, for example, to recognise that A is aware neither of what caused the kangaroo to hop by, nor of the patterns of light falling into its eyes, nor of the patterns of electricity travelling down its optical nerves. Because we know, at least to some degree, what A needs, wants and above all is able to perceive, both in general and in this particular situation, we can exclude, not just the causally irrelevant states of affairs previously considered, but also all these merely causally relevant ones. Indeed, we do not need to consider them at all, at least not in their capacity as causally relevant or irrelevant. For given what we already know about what A needs, wants and is able to perceive in a context such as this, we can move quite quickly to the hypothesis that the state of affairs which forms the truth condition of A’s (true) assertion 23 This is not to say that we could only ever recognise that thing out there to be an interpretee, hence something perceiving and responding behaviourally to items in the “actual environment” if we have some such idea – see below, pp. 93 – 94, for an example to the contrary.

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(and corresponding belief ) is a kangaroo’s hopping by.24 We conclude that the sentence S, as uttered by A on this occasion, imparts to A’s assertion of it a content such that this assertion is true (solely in virtue of this content) if and only if a kangaroo is hopping by. Clearly, the procedure we have employed here in order to identify some item in the “actual environment” which not only belongs in the class of items causally responsible for A’s linguistic behaviour (assertion), but is also that item within this class which constitutes the ‘object’ of its perception and assertion is quite sensible and uncontroversial. But is it a case of radical interpretation in the sense required by Davidson, that is, a process of interpretation in which one works back from behaviour to the causes of behaviour, and only thence to the objects of perceptual belief and behavioural response? Davidson presents the notion of radical interpretation as if it were entirely sensible and uncontroversial so it is tempting to answer in the affirmative. Closer inspection of the case just considered reveals, however, that to answer thus would be wrong. For in fact our prior knowledge about (some significant portion of ) what our interpretee is and is not able and likely to perceive has enabled us to move directly to identifying some state of affairs as what our interpretee is most likely perceiving, hence responding to (in the shape of a linguistic utterance), without any distinguishing of causes as causes at all. In order to get this result, at no point have we had to distinguish either causes from non-causes, or between causes at different distances to their common effect. Of course, this prior knowledge, once it has enabled us to distinguish the objects of A’s perception and behavioural response, permits us to go on then to distinguish causes of A’s perception and behavioural response from non-causes, and different causes of the same from one another. But this is only to say that it permits us to make these causal distinctions in what Davidson must regard as the wrong way around. The commonsense procedure in which this prior knowledge was employed thus suggests that insofar as we are ever concerned to identify anything as a cause of perception and behavioural response at all, or to discriminate between such causes, we typically set about doing so by first trying charitably to identify (and for the most part actually identifying) something as an object of perception and behavioural response. Or, to 24 Naturally, in order to make this move we will have to make all the assumptions about A’s overall rationality and cognitive success upon which Davidson places so much emphasis.

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put the same point another way, the procedure just outlined rests on the assumption that the “actual environment” relative to which we primarily and most fundamentally interpret is, and is understood by us as, the world of the objects, not the causes, of our interpretee’s perception and intentional behaviour25 – things as they strike the believer (and naturally also, to some degree at least, as they strike us). Of course, anything identified by this procedure, that is, by appeal to our prior knowledge of A’s psychology, and in particular, of what A can and cannot perceive, will necessarily be a cause of this perception. It will thus also be, through this perception, a cause of A’s observable linguistic and non-linguistic behaviour. Even so, we are not looking for this cause in its capacity as a cause, but rather in its capacity precisely as what A is perceiving, thereupon responding behaviourally to – in this case at least, thereupon asserting to obtain. The commonsense procedure just described does not support the view that the notion of cause is constitutive of our pre-philosophical notions of interpretation and content in any sense which would permit us to use the former notion to make philosophical sense of the latter ones. At this point, it might seem that the notion of radical interpretation is in serious trouble. Davidson’s account of radical interpretation is so lapidary that one naturally assumes him to have in mind the kind of interpretation just considered. What else could he mean when he speaks of interpreting others very alien to us? But as soon as one investigates what we normally understand by the interpretation of others ‘very’ alien to us, we find that in fact such interpretation is not that radical after all. More accurately, however radical such interpretation might be in a pre-philosophical or non-Davidsonian sense, it is not interpretation of the kind Davidson needs in order to make his philosophical points. One might now suspect there to be no such thing as radical interpretation in the sense required by Davidson. This conclusion would be too quick. Actual interpretation, even in cases where our interpretee is very alien to us in a pre-philosophical, everyday sense, typically does not consist in identifying the objects of perception, belief and behaviour by identifying the causes thereof. Even in such cases, then, it will not typically be truly radical interpretation, that is, of such a kind that it would serve Davidson’s philosophical goals. But precisely the structure of interpretation radical only in the pre-philosophical sense illustrated by the example intimates, via¯ negativa¯, 25 Which objects are, at least in part, cognitively available to us as such objects.

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what radical interpretation is. Notice that in the example A’s being an interpretee, that is, something perceiving, thereupon behaviourally responding to, items in the “actual environment” is not in the least an issue for us. This is due to the fact that A is not so radically unfamiliar that we cannot recognise that A is perceiving and responding behaviourally to items in “the actual environment” in and through recognising what, at least in general, A perceives and behaviourally responds to. From the outset, we pick A out as occurring in an environment, world, external reality, etc., understood by us as one full of entities A is able to perceive and respond behaviourally to – that kangaroo there, this magpie here, that clap of thunder then, etc. True, because A was a sufficiently unfamiliar (kind of ) individual in a sufficiently unfamiliar (kind of ) environment, we could not immediately and directly recognise what specifically, on this occasion, A was perceiving and responding behaviourally to, namely, the kangaroo hopping by. We could not directly identify what A was perceiving and responding to in the way in which we might identify what someone who had just dropped their wallet on the tram and was now hurriedly picking up the coins strewn across the floor was perceiving and behaviourally responding to. Yet even in the case of A we are only uncertain as to which of the numerous conceptual contents and concepts we already know A to be able to wield we should sensibly regard A as wielding here and now. For we have no doubt that A can, e. g., see and respond to the usual range of colours and other such sensible properties, as well as the usual range of plants and animals, even if we are not sure whether A’s various concepts of animal and plant life map directly onto our own. In fact, only because we did not doubt this were we able to proceed as we did. Indeed, commitment to proceeding in this manner was present from the outset – present in our initial preparedness to regard A as an interpretee at all, hence as something which is perceiving and responding behaviourally, that is to say, suitably or intelligently, to items in “the actual environment.” For this preparedness reflects the fact that from the outset we had judged A to be an interpretee of such a kind that it is in general able to perceive and respond to such and such kinds of thing in its environment, indeed is currently perceiving and responding to such and such kinds of thing in its environment now. Thus, even though interpretation of A must be more deliberate and reflective than in the case of the person dropping coins in the tram, it does not differ qualitatively from it. In the one case as in the other, recognition that the interpretee A is perceiving and responding behaviourally to items in “the actual envi-

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ronment” comes as a mere part or consequence of recognition of what (at least in general) A is perceiving and responding behaviourally to. Or, to put the same point another way, recognition that the interpretee A is perceiving and responding behaviourally to items in “the actual environment” comes as a mere part or consequence of recognising A as having an environment of its own, that is, as existing in an objective spatiotemporal order understood from the outset as containing items A can and needs to perceive in order to respond suitably to them. Just this explains why, even though in the example considered A was alien to us in an ordinary, pre-philosophical sense, interpretation was not truly radical, that is, not such as to proceed from behaviour via causes to objects and contents. For if recognition that one’s interpretee A is perceiving and responding behaviourally to items in “the actual environment” comes as a mere part or consequence of recognising what (even merely in general terms) A is perceiving and responding behaviourally to, then it comes as a mere part and consequence of recognising at least something of what (at least in general terms) A is perceiving and responding to items in the environment as. In other words, if one recognises A to be an interpretee perceiving and responding to various things in the “actual environment” in this way, then one already knows from the outset at least something of the Fregean fine grain or conceptual content of A’s intentional states and experiences. This is, of course, why, even in the example considered, interpretation took no detour through identification of the causes of perception, belief and behaviour. This immediately reveals what radical interpretation must be if it is to serve Davidson’s philosophical purposes: interpretation in which assessment of A as an interpretee, that is, commitment to A’s perceiving and responding suitably or intelligently to items in “the actual environment”, rather than merely registering and responding to them as a barometer registers and responds to changes in air pressure, is completely independent of any recognition of these items themselves. When interpretation is radical in a genuinely Davidsonian sense, recognition of the former does not arise in the normal way, namely, in and through recognition of the latter. Truly radical interpretation presupposes, as an independent accomplishment, recognition that that thing out there is perceiving and responding behaviourally to items in “the actual environment” in order then to determine, by appeal to their status as causes of behaviour, both what these items are and what they are perceived and responded to as. Now it is certainly possible that recognition of something as perceiving, hence genuinely to responding to items in the “actual environment”

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should be an independent accomplishment in this sense. That is, it is certainly possibly to recognise that something is perceiving and behaviourally responding to items in the “actual environment” without recognising what items it is perceiving and responding to, hence without recognising what it is perceiving and responding to these items as. We might, for example, while observing some strange entity A*, eventually recognise that the stream of long and short radio beeps , , —, — , — , — —, — — , … emanating from it constitutes a series of representations, with three as their base, of the natural numbers from one to fifteen. This would give us a good but of course only fallible reason for believing that A* was an intelligent, indeed self-conscious being, one, moreover, which was trying to get in touch with other such beings. Having recognised this much, we might then go on, by displaying ‘charity’ towards A*, then observing how it reacts to what stimuli (which stimuli we might, of course, experimentally induce), eventually to work out what it is perceiving and behaviourally responding to. In this way, we might eventually determine the objects of A*’s perceptions and beliefs, and thereby what A* is perceiving and responding to these objects as, that is, the contents of A* perceptions and beliefs. Clearly, in this unusual but certainly possible case, we engage in radical interpretation in Davidson’s sense: we proceed, first, from behaviour to the causes of behaviour, and then on to the objects and contents of perception and belief. Yet surely it is equally clear that interpretation radical in this sense is derivative – derivative in that in order to be capable of it one must be capable of interpreting normally, that is, in the manner illustrated by the case of the person who has strewn coins across the floor of the tram, or even by the case of the alien A considered initially. More precisely, our recognition of A* as perceiving and responding to items in the environment is derivative in the following sense: our being able to recognise, in the manner indicated, the alien life form A* as perceiving and responding to items in the environment entails that we are already able to recognise something A as perceiving and responding to items in the environment in the normal way, that is, in and through recognising what A is perceiving and behaviourally responding to, hence what A is perceiving and behaviourally responding to items in its environment as. That this is so is shown by a simple consideration: being able to recognise in experience anything A ¤ as perceiving, thereupon behaviourally responding to, items in the environment entails being able to recognise, for some A given in one’s experience, (something of ) what A is perceiving *

*

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and behaviourally responding to. This simply reflects, in application to the clearly relational predicate “x is perceiving and behaviourally responding to certain items y in the environment”, a minimal condition which any relational predicate must satisfy insofar as it is applicable in experience. Thus, one could only ever be able to recognise something A ¤ given in one’s experience as to the left of something or other if one were already able to recognise, indeed always already had recognised, something A given in one’s experience as to the left of such and such – this B here, that C there, etc. – , which must therefore have been just as much given in one’s experience as A itself. In the case of this particular relational predicate, however, the general point has a particular consequence and significance. For if one can only recognise, of some A ¤ given in one’s experience, that A ¤ is perceiving and behaviourally responding to something or other in the environment if one can already recognise, for some A given in one’s experience, that A is perceiving and behaviourally responding to, say, this B here and that C there, rather than this D here and that E there, then this latter ability must be an ability directly to recognise, for the kind of A in question, certain items in the environment as A’s intentional, in particular perceptual objects (referents) and behavioural targets. If, however, this is so, then it is in fact primarily an ability to recognise, for such A at least, at least something of what A is perceiving and responding to items in the environment as. In other words, it is an ability to recognise, for certain A, at least something of the Fregean fine grain or conceptual content of A’s intentional states and experiences. It would therefore seem that radical interpretation of the kind illustrated by the case of the alien life form A* is only possible for us if we are already able to recognise some other (kind of ) entity A as perceiving and responding to items in the “actual environment” in a quite non-radical manner, that is, without any detour through the causes of behaviour. Indeed, it seems we must already be able directly to recognise in the sense of being able to perceive A as perceiving and responding to certain items in the environment – as when I directly recognise, that is, see, that the man who has dropped his wallet in the tram himself sees the coins strewn about the floor as coins strewn about the floor and is thus attempting to recover them. I can only perceive and recognise all this, without any prior, independent hypothesis as to what items perceptually available to me are causally responsible for, hence explain, my fellow commuter’s behaviour, because I already know some considerable portion of what he perceives and responds to things as.

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Clearly, if radical interpretation of the truly Davidsonian kind illustrated by the case of the alien life form A* is derivative in the sense just argued for, then Davidson’s programme is in serious trouble. One might, however, dispute the argument just given. Specifically, one might object as follows: perhaps the argument does show that one can only interpret radically in Davidson’s distinctive sense if one can interpret non-radically. Surely, however, it is invalid to infer from this that radical interpretation is ‘derivative’ upon non-radical interpretation in any genuine, that is to say, asymmetric fashion. For surely the sense in which the argument just given shows a capacity for radical interpretation to entail a capacity for interpretation of the more everyday kind also permits us to assert the converse: the ability to interpret non-radically entails the ability to interpret radically in the sense that anyone capable of normal, everyday interpretation even of the unfamiliar must surely be able to work out how to make sense of the strange creature A* in the fashion indicated above. The argument just given only makes the philosophically uninteresting point that these abilities go hand in hand. Even at the level of pre-philosophical gut intuition one recognises there to be something wrong with this response. It takes, however, some subtle argument to pin down precisely what this is, that is, to elaborate the sense in which radical interpretation of a being such as A* is strictly derivative upon interpretation as it occurs domestically, or at home, rather than differing merely quantitatively, through its greater difficulty and less unreflecting, more conscious character. In particular, we must explore more extensively than thus far Davidson’s causally externalist conception of content, and in particular, what precisely this conception commits one to. To this end, we must examine an issue already intimated in the description given above of how we would normally interpret the alien interpretee A. This is the problem of so-called distal causes. ii. The Dog, the Child and the Triangle Davidson seems to regard the problem of distal causes as the central problem facing his account of interpretation and content. Let us see how he characterises and solves this problem by working from an example provided by Davidson himself. If sufficiently often one rings a bell in sufficient proximity to a dog, thereupon presenting it with food, the dog will learn to associate hearing the bell ring with its being given food. Once this association has become

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entrenched, the dog will, upon hearing the bell ringing, form the expectation of food, which will in turn induce salivation. But why, one might ask, do we find it so natural to say that the state of affairs to which the dog is responding is the ringing of the bell, rather than, say, the vibration of the air close to the ears of the dog—or even the stimulation of its nerve endings? Certainly if the air were made to vibrate, in the same way the bell makes it vibrate, it would make no difference to the response of the dog. And if the right nerve endings were activated in the right way, there still would be no difference. In fact, if we must choose, it seems that the proximal cause of the behavior has the best claim to be called the stimulus, since the more distant an event is causally from its perceiver, the more chance there is that the causal chain will be broken. (Davidson 2001e, p. 118)

Or, to put the same point in another, more antiquated way, why do we find it so natural to say that the dog is having an ‘idea’ or ‘impression’ of a bell ringing, rather than, say, of air vibrating near its ears, which ‘idea’ it then associates, naturally only instinctively and unreflectingly, with the ‘idea’ of its being fed? Here we see very clearly what the problem of distal causes is and why it bears this name: if we are to be able to identify the objects and contents of perception, belief and behaviour by identifying their causes, then, since there are many such causes, all forming a causal chain in which they are more or less distal to perception, belief and behaviour, we must be able to pick out a cause which is not too distal and not too proximal, but ‘just right’. This will be the cause which forms the object of the intentionality it causes, hence that to which the subject of intentionality is genuinely responding behaviourally. Why, then, do we find it so natural to regard the dog as responding behaviourally to the bell’s ringing rather than anything else? Because, says Davidson, it is natural – to us. Just as the dog … respond(s) in similar ways to certain stimuli, so do we. It is we who find it natural to group together the various salivations of the dog; and the events in the world that we effortlessly notice and group together that are causally linked to the dog’s behavior are ringings of the bell. … The acoustical … patterns that speed … between bell and dog ears, … we cannot easily observe, and if we could, we might have a hard time saying what made them similar. (Except by cheating, of course: they are the patterns characteristic of bells ringing ….) Nor do we observe the stimulation of nerve endings of other people and animals, and if we did we might find it impossible to describe in a noncircular way what made the patterns relevantly similar from trial to trial. The problem would be much the

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same as the (insoluble) problem of defining … bell-ringings in terms of sense data without mentioning … bells. (Davidson 2001e, pp. 118 – 119)

So it is not that we find it natural to identify the bell’s ringing as what causes the dog’s salivation because we know this to be what the dog perceives and has learnt to associate the presentation of food with. Rather, just the opposite is the case: we know the bell’s ringing to be what the dog perceives and has learnt to associate the presentation of food with because this is what we find natural to identify as causing the dog’s salivation. Davidson is not, of course, denying that the dog is quite genuinely perceiving, thereupon quite genuinely responding to, the bell’s ringing.26 Rather, he wants merely to insist that such modes of speech reflect, they do not justify, our choice of the bell’s ringing as that cause of the dog’s behaviour which constitutes what it is perceiving and responding behaviourally to. We find it natural to regard the dog as perceiving and responding to the bell’s ringing because a bell’s ringing is the kind of thing we observers can perceive (and, of course, experimentally manipulate, in the manner of Pavlov), whereas indefinitely many other states of affairs equally implicated in the causal chain extending from the ringing to the salivation are either not at all or at least not very readily perceivable by us. And, although Davidson never explicitly does so, he would doubtless also insist that we are quite right, quite justified, in so regarding the dog – provided, however, it be understood that what makes us right is simply the fact that by regarding the dog as perceiving, hence responding to, the bell’s ringing rather than any other cause of its salivation, we put ourselves in a position best to explain and predict the dog’s behaviour. It immediately follows from this that “the question whether a creature, in discriminating [in the shape of differential behaviour] between stimuli, is discriminating between stimuli at the sensory surfaces or somewhere further out, or further in” (Davidson 2001 g, p. 212) literally has no answer until there is an interpreter who is observing this discriminating behaviour and identifying some state of affairs perceptibly available to the interpreter as the cause of this behaviour. In other words, the only 26 Of course, this must not be understood as the claim that dog is perceiving and responding to the bell in any sense as complex as would be appropriate in our own case – as if the dog could self-consciously make the perceptual judgement that a bell is ringing, then self-consciously infer from this judgement the conclusion that food will soon be presented (which concluding induces salivation as a reflex response).

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answer that can be given to the question as to what precisely, out of all the causes implicated in the generation of a creature’s discriminating behaviour, is the cause it is perceiving and responding to, is that it is that state of affairs, that cause of behaviour, which an interpreter observes and correlates with the behavioural response as its cause, therein cognising a causal connection in a manner which effectively preserves the interpreter’s capacity to regard the creature as in general responding to its environment suitably or intelligently (as this is determined by its interests). “(I)t is only when an observer consciously correlates the responses of another creature with objects and events of the observer’s world that there is any basis for saying the creature is responding to those objects or events rather than any other objects or events.” (Davidson 2001 g, p. 212) If this is right, then the notions of intentional content, intentional state and intentional experience must indeed be understood primarily in terms of the role they play in the interpretation of the purposive behaviour of one subject by another:27 the legitimacy or warrant of such notions lies in their enabling an interpreter I to construct a coherent account of the behaviour overall of another A, such that I can in general explain and predict what A does as more or less suitable or sensible responses to items in the “actual environment.” The dog is perceiving and responding to the bell’s ringing because, and only because, the statement “If a bell rings, then this dog will be thereby caused to salivate” is that formulation of an acquired disposition to be caused to salivate by, amongst many other things, a bell’s ringing which best allows interpreters such as we are to explain and predict the dog’s behaviour, and indeed to develop a comprehensive account of why it sensibly does what it does. Davidson rejects any suggestion that this amounts to the view that intentional contents, states and experiences are not truly ‘real’ but mere artifices of interpretation – as if he were adopting some kind of instrumentalism about intentionality. He emphatically denies that “mental events 27 As we point out below in sub-section iv, this is an extension of Davidson’s general stance towards description and explanation to intentional description and explanation. Thus, a similar situation prevails in the case of physical description and explanation: the notions of causal power and causally efficacious property are to be elucidated in terms of effective or successful physical description and explanation rather than the other way around. Consequently, that (kind of ) property borne by an entity is the causally efficacious one by appeal to which one comes up with a better, more informative causal explanation, i. e., one which better allows one to construe the causal process explained in terms of strict causal law.

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and states are merely projected by the attributer onto an agent,” holding on the contrary that they “… are as real as physical events, being identical with them …”, so that attributions of such events and states are just as objective. And while agreeing with Quine that “attitudes [that is to say, intentional states and experiences] are dispositions to behave in certain ways, which are in turn physiological states, which finally are physical states”, he also agrees with Quine that descriptions of these dispositions in intentional terms “… are not reducible to behavioral or physical descriptions”. For “the mental vocabulary is practical and indispensable” – indispensable for ordinary, everyday explanation and prediction of behaviour – , even though “it is not made for the most precise science.” (Davidson 2001c, p. 72) Given this account of what it is for something to be perceiving and behaviourally responding to some item in its immediate environment, it becomes trivially easy to explain what it is for one, and only one of all the states of affairs causally implicated in the generation of behaviour to be that cause which fixes the content and thus the identity of perceptual experience, hence fixes the identity of the behaviour generated by it as a response to it. The object of perception and behavioural response simply is that cause thereof which it is most feasible and expeditious for us interpreters to correlate with behaviour in such a fashion that we preserve as far as possible the capacity to regard our interpretee as genuinely responding behaviourally, that is to say, suitably or intelligently, to its environment. And so this solution to the problem of distal causes makes the crucial case for Davidson: the only notion of intentional object, hence of intentional content, we need is one according to which the concept of an object, hence the content of empirical intentionality and behavioural response can be philosophically explicated in terms of what causes the same (together with the concept of truth). But is this solution really adequate? More accurately, does it so much as identify, much less address, the real problem for Davidson’s account? Is the problem of distal causes the real problem at all? Or has it not been misdescribed from the outset in order that an illusion of ‘solution’ might be created which pushes the real problem out of sight? The very strong assumptions Davidson needs to make in order to achieve his solution to the problem of distal causes can be exposed by moving to consider another example, one which Davidson intertwines with the example of the dog. Imagine a child who has been taught to respond to the presence of tables by uttering the sound ‘table’. Why do we here, as in the case of the dog, find it natural to say that the child is perceiving and respond-

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ing to tables when it behaves in this way in the presence of tables? Once again, because it is natural – to us. Just as … the child respond(s) in similar ways to certain stimuli, so do we. … We find the child’s mouthings of ‘table’ similar, and the objects in the world we naturally class together that accompany those mouthings is a class of tables. (Davidson 2001e, p. 118)

There are thus three patterns of similarity here: The child finds tables similar; we find tables similar; and we find the child’s responses in the presence of tables similar. It now makes sense for us to call the responses of the child responses to tables. Given these three patterns of response we can assign a location to the stimuli that elicit the child’s responses. The relevant stimuli are the objects or events we naturally find similar (tables) which are correlated with responses of the child we find similar. It is a form of triangulation: one line goes from the child in the direction of the table. One line goes from us in the direction of the table, and the third line goes between us and the child. Where the lines from child to table and us to table converge, ‘the’ stimulus is located. Given our view of child and world, we can pick out ‘the’ cause of the child’s responses. It is the common cause of our response and the child’s response. (Davidson 2001e, p. 119)

One might at first take the claim that “(t)he child finds tables similar” to mean that the child perceives tables as similar – whether one understands the similarity in question as triadic, that is, as similarity in respect of tablehood, or simply as dyadic, in other words, the primitive perceptual recognition of this as like that.28 But as the following confirms, Davidson does not mean this: If we consider a single creature by itself, its responses, no matter how complex, cannot show that it is reacting to, or thinking about, events a certain distance away rather than, say, on its skin. The solipsist’s world can be any size; which is to say, from the solipsist’s point of view it has no size, it is not a world. (Davidson 2001e, p. 119)

If the claim that the child finds tables similar were the claim that it perceives tables as similar to one another, then obviously, however alone the child may or may not be, its regularly reacting to the presence of tables by uttering the sound ‘table’ would show it to be having perceptual experience of, hence in this sense to be reacting to, or thinking about, some 28 Similarity is, of course, objectively speaking, only ever similarity in some respect. But perhaps one must initially perceive something x as brutely similar to something y before going on to become more reflectively aware of x as similar to y in respect F.

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one thing, namely, a table. So the child’s finding tables similar just is its regularly reacting to the presence of a table by displaying in each case a similar response, viz., utterance of the sound ‘table’. Now, of course, the point of the triangulation metaphor becomes obvious: whenever the child shows the behavioural response of uttering the sound ‘table’, there is a causal chain of events culminating in this behavioural response and this causal chain includes the presence of a table. And the only sense in which, of all the items in this causal chain, the presence of a table stands out is that it stands out for us. It does not have its status as the object (referent or truth condition) of the relevant perceptual experience and ensuing behaviour intrinsically, but only because (a) there is a causal chain of events culminating in the child’s finding the table similar (table to child); (b) there are two causal chains of events culminating in our finding the child to be finding and responding similarly to the presence of a table (table to us and child to us);29 and (c) each of these two latter chains intersects with the first, respectively, at that cause of the child’s behaviour which is (the presence of ) a table; and at that effect which is the behaviour itself. These things we observe ‘naturally’ and so – to the extent that in general we find ourselves able to regard the child as responding behaviourally to items in the “actual environment” in ways which secure and advance its presumed interests – we also find it ‘natural’ to regard the child as perceiving the table and behaviourally responding to it in a manner in which we do not find it natural to regard the child as perceiving and responding to other events in the causal chain extending through and from the presence of a table to its uttering the sound ‘table’. So the fact that the latter two causal chains intersect with the first where they do is what distinguishes the presence of the table from all other causes of the child’s perception and behaviour as the object thereof. Unless these causal chains or pathways exist, extending back from their respective subjects through table and behaviour respectively into the past, there literally is no ‘arrow’ of intentional reference pointing out from the child into the world. It is thus not because some one of the causes of the child’s perception and behaviour has the status of object that we interpreters are able to ascertain a chain of causes extending through and from table to the child’s behaviour, thereby establishing a line of triangu29 Which response on our part, unlike that of the child, Davidson would presumably regard himself entitled to describe as a perceiving of the table. Whether Davidson is right in this need not concern us here.

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lation. Rather, the opposite is the case: it is only because we interpreters are able to ascertain a chain of causes extending through and from table to the child’s behaviour, thereby establishing a line of triangulation, that any cause of the child’s behaviour has this intentional status at all. Of course, if this is so, then no cause of the child’s behaviour actually has this status unless we interpreters actually exist and bring the two additional causal chains or pathways required for triangulation into existence. So the (presence of a) table is only ever actually the object of the child’s perception relative to an actual interpreter who accomplishes an actual act of interpretation.30 Just this is what Davidson is getting at when he says that “(b)elief, intentions and the other propositional attitudes are all social ….” (Davidson 2001e, p. 121) Here, he is not simply claiming that there is an internal relation between the propositional attitudes and their manifestation in behaviour such that these attitudes are inherently available to, and interpretable by, another. Rather, he is making the considerably stronger claim that to be a subject of empirical intentionality at all is to be an interpretee not just for some possible, but for some actual interpreter of intentional behaviour – see Davidson 2001e, p. 119.31 Only if there actually is an 30 This orientation towards the interpreter is the ultimate source of what Ross is objecting to when he describes the principle of charity as a principle of patronisation and what Taylor is objecting to when he claims that Davidson’s account of meaning and interpretation excludes Gadamer’s notion of the fusion of horizons – see Ross 1985 and Taylor 1985c, esp. pp. 273 – 282. McDowell’s attempt to save Davidson from this kind of objection founders on the inability exposed in section one of Chapter Four to see the fundamental instability, hence tension in Davidson’s position: Davidson certainly does not mean to privilege the standpoint of the interpreter over that of the interpretee, any more than he would display inherent hostility to the idea of a fusion of horizons (which presupposes that the identity of an interpretee’s intentional contents is not simply a creature of an interpreter’s ability to make sense of him, but can rather transcend this ability). But his position pushes him in the direction in which Rorty wants quite explicitly to take him, namely, towards what McDowell calls a “sideways-on” picture not just of radical interpretation, but of interpretation as such – see McDowell, op. cit., note 28, p. 153. 31 Davidson’s view in fact appears to be that this stronger claim explains the conviction that there is an internal relation between the propositional attitudes and their manifestation in behaviour such that these attitudes are inherently available to, and interpretable by, another. Indeed, his view appears to be that this internal relation simply is capacity for integration by an interpreter into some overall, coherent explanatory and predictive account of the interpretee and its behaviour as more or less rational. This suggests a conception of inner and outer behavioural

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(other) interpreter who is picking out some cause of an interpretee’s behaviour as what it makes sense to regard the interpretee as perceiving and behaviourally responding to is there a cause of behaviour which actually possesses the property of being what the interpretee is perceiving and behaviourally responding to. “If we consider a single creature by itself, its responses, no matter how complex,” not only “cannot show that it is reacting to, or thinking about, events a certain distance away rather than, say, on its skin;” they cannot so much as be instances of responding to, or thinking about, events at some specific distance from them. If “(t)he solipsist’s world can be any size,” then not only has it no size from the solipsist’s point of view; “it has no size, it is not a world” at all. (Davidson 2001e, p. 119) It is important to see just how strong this claim is, for otherwise one runs the risk of confusing it with a weaker and much more plausible thesis. This latter and more plausible thesis, which one might also plausibly associate with Wittgenstein, is that a being can only self-consciously distinguish between right and wrong, true and false, hence rationally evaluate its own purposive behaviour, if it actually is a participant in linguistically mediated social practices. But Davidson is not simply asserting the essentially linguistic, hence given the essentially public character of language, the essentially social character of the propositional attitudes insofar as these are available to their possessor for rational evaluation and revision. Rather, his claim concerns the very nature of intentional content as such: if there is an object of perception and behavioural response at all, then there actually is some interpreter who actually is recognising it as such an object – this by first recognising it to be a cause of behaviour, then undertaking the necessary triangulation. As we have already seen Davidson to say, “(I)t is only when an observer consciously correlates the responses of another creature with objects and events of the observer’s world that there is any basis for saying the creature is responding to those objects or events rather than any other objects or events.” (Davidson 2001 g, p. 212)

events, indeed of events in general, according to which whatever unity they display vis--vis one another is explicable in terms of the comprehensiveness of theories formulated in order to explain and predict them. Crucially, this conception does not entail that the unity of reality is not a real feature of reality itself. I suspect that this conception of events, hence of causality itself, also lies at the heart of (at least Natorp’s brand of ) Marburg neo-Kantianism – see Christensen, op. cit.

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So Davidson is indeed claiming much more than that a self-conscious subject of empirical intentionality could only ever be alone in the manner of Robinson Crusoe, who, although now alone on his island, had once been a member of certain linguistically mediated social practices. In fact, one might say that Davidson is radicalising the Kantian principle of the ‘I think’: an empirical representation only objectively occurs ‘in’ a subject A if there is an (other) interpreter I who can attach an ‘A thinks’ to it. And this way of putting it underscores how implausible Davidson’s claim is. Surely, one wants to say, there could be all sorts of objects of perception and behavioural response without there ever being any actual interpreters at all, much less any actual acts of recognising them as such objects. It is clear what the source of this implausible claim is: Davidson’s determination to construe the intersection of two causal chains, one extending through and from the table to the child, the other extending through and from the table to us, as the child’s interpreters, as constituting that cause of the child’s behavioural response which lies at the point of intersection, namely, (the presence of ) a table, as the child’s perceptual and behavioural object. Now one might be tempted to take the fact that Davidson’s conception of content and interpretation has this implausibly strong consequence as a reason for rejecting it. Specifically, one might be tempted to take it as a reason for inverting his construal of the objects of perception and behaviour as supervening on the causes thereof. Thus to invert things would be to construe the identity of the causes of perception and behavioural response as fixed, precisely in the methodologically most basic cases, by their objects rather than the other way around. As such, it would fundamentally negate Davidson’s whole position. Yet one needs a more telling reason for inverting the priority Davidson gives to the causes over the objects and contents of perception and behavioural response. He could, after all, simply bite the bullet and insist on correcting the pre-philosophical intuition underpinning the sense of implausibility. In this revisionary spirit, he would simply declare that when we speak of there being, in the absence of any actual acts of interpretation by an actual interpreter I, a certain cause C of behaviour displayed by a subject A which actually is the intentional object of a belief in A driving this latter’s behaviour, all we really mean is the following: if there were such and such a kind of interpreter I, then, for I, the line of triangulation extending from I would most naturally meet the line of triangulation extending from A at C. Fortunately, one does not have to look far for a more telling reason.

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The case of the dog shows that Davidson can (in a sense) solve the problem of distal causes. The case of the child shows what the price of this solution is, that is, what the conception of content which requires the solution really involves: it follows from this conception of content that not just the identification, but the identity and existence, of objects and contents (as objects and contents) presupposes the existence and identification of causal chains, indeed several causal chains, from object to interpretee, from object to interpreter and from interpretee to interpreter. Only if such causal chains exist are there lines of triangulation. And the chains only exist if not just the interpretee, but the interpreter actually exists. No actual interpreter who actually recognises the interpretee as an interpretee, no actual causal chains and lines of triangulation, no actual intentional object, hence content. So for the same reason that there is no actual intentional object without actual lines of triangulation, so, too, there is no actual intentional object without actual presence of someone as triangulating, that is, an interpreter who, having actually recognised that that there is an interpretee perceiving and responding to items in “the actual environment”, is now attempting to determine both what in “the actual environment” that there is perceiving and responding to and what that there is perceiving and responding to it as. It is trivially true that the identification of some cause of an interpretee’s perception and behaviour as the intentional object thereof is dependent on there being an interpreter who recognises in advance the interpretee to be an interpretee. But Davidson is committed to maintaining something much more problematic, namely, that the very identity and existence of some cause as an intentional object is thus dependent. In order for some cause of behaviour even to be an intentional object of perception and of belief driving behaviour, the behaver must have always already come into some interpreter’s view as an interpretee, that is, as something which is perceiving and responding behaviourally to items in “the actual environment.” Precisely for this reason interpretation ‘radical’ enough to secure Davidson’s philosophical objectives must separate out, as an independent and prior act, recognition that the interpretee is perceiving and responding behaviourally to items in “the actual environment”, from recognition of what these items are. In the previous sub-section we saw that the ability to recognise in one’s experience something A* as perceiving and responding behaviourally to something or other entails the ability to recognise in one’s experience something A as perceiving and responding to such and such. We now see that Davidson must deny the internal connection between these two abil-

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ities because otherwise he could not maintain that the very identity, as opposed to the mere identification, of some cause of perceptual belief and behaviour as the intentional object thereof were relative to an interpreter, with the requisite recognitional abilities. Not to deny this internal connection would in effect be to concede that in genuinely radical interpretation, in which there genuinely is identification and triangulation of causal chains, the status of some one of the many causes as intentional object is precisely not a creature of the interpreter’s process of triangulation. One would have conceded that this status is in fact there all along, prior to all triangulation, as something accessible to that kind of interpreter which, relative to the interpretee, would count as normal, with a normal ability directly and immediately to recognise what the interpretee is perceiving and responding to items in “the actual environment” as. Yet it is absurd to maintain that one could recognise in one’s experience something A* as perceiving and responding behaviourally to something or other without being able to recognise something A as perceiving and responding to such and such. This would be like claiming, as the previous sub-section has shown, that one could recognise in one’s experience something as to the left of something or other while not being able to pick out anything in one’s experience as an example of something’s being to the left of something else. So the ability to interpret, in genuinely radical fashion, the alien life form A* does asymmetrically presuppose the ability to interpret in the typically non-radical fashion of everyday life – as when I directly see what the man in the tram who has dropped his wallet is (perceiving and) doing. One might put the asymmetry as follows: the ability to engage in radical interpretation of the alien life form A* presupposes the actualised ability to interpret in the typically non-radical fashion of everyday life. That is, the mere capacity for radical interpretation presupposes that one has always already actually interpreted in the everyday fashion illustrated even by our original example of the unfamiliar interpretee A. And while one’s having always already interpreted in everyday fashion certainly entails the ability to interpret radically, neither a capacity for, nor the actuality of, non-radical everyday interpretation presupposes that one has always already actually interpreted radically. In this sense, then, radical interpretation is strictly derivative, that is, onesidedly dependent upon interpretation in the non-radical, everyday sense. It therefore makes no sense to take the kind of interpretation we engaged in when seeking to make sense of the alien life form A* as a model for interpretation in general – as if in all cases of interpretation, i. e., for all interpretees A, we could in principle recognise that A was perceiving,

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hence behaviourally responding to, something without this recognition occurring as a mere part or consequence of recognising some item in the environment as what A is perceiving, hence behaviourally responding to. The kind of case in which one does work back from behaviour via causes to the objects and contents of the perception and belief driving the behaviour observed is parasitically dependent on the kind of interpretation which does not so proceed. Working back from behaviour to causes, and from there to objects and contents, could therefore never be the kind of interpretation we engage in ‘at home’. Davidson is thus wrong to imply that the problem of radical interpretation begins at home – see Davidson 1984b, p. 125. At home we could never confront the problem of radical interpretation since to be at home is precisely to be able to interpret directly in the sense of not having to take any detour through causes. If no interpretee ever came directly into view in this sense, namely, as perceiving and responding to items in its environment as thus and so, then nothing could ever come into view as an interpretee at all. Once the real problem lurking behind the so-called problem of distal causes is exposed, one sees that that prior knowledge of what an interpretee A is able and disposed to perceive in the circumstances which enables us to interpret in the commonsense fashion depicted in the previous sub-section cannot become available to us by working back from A’s observable behaviour to the causes thereof. In other words, the attempt to ground ordinary, everyday interpretation even of a significantly unfamiliar interpretee in genuinely radical interpretation must fail. And with it fail Davidson’s conception of interpretation and the causally externalist conception of content driving it. The objects of empirical intentionality do not necessarily occur in the world of its causes, at least not when this claim is understood in Davidsonian fashion as expressing the priority of causality over intentionality. iii. Glimpsing the World the Right Way Around? Note, however, that to negate the Davidsonian sense in which empirical intentionality and its subject are worldly is not necessarily to return to Cartesian worldlessness. As has already been intimated in our discussion of the commonsense procedure employed above for interpreting a significantly unfamiliar interpretee, another option is logically available to one: one can insist that the causes of empirical intentionality always only occur in the world of its objects. In other words, one can invert the sense in

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which Davidson understands the worldliness of empirical intentionality and its subject; these are worldly in a perceptual and intentional rather than causal sense. This latter, we suggest, is what McDowell is struggling to articulate in the obscure criticism of Davidson on interpretation he makes on p. 17 of Mind and World and in the accompanying footnote. More precisely, in these remarks he is struggling towards the insight that Davidson’s commendable efforts to tell the sceptic to get lost ultimately fail because he restores worldliness to empirical intentionality and its subject in the wrong way, in fact, the wrong way around. For by getting the world the wrong way around, Davidson fails to give an adequate account not just of what it is to interpret a subject of empirical intentionality, but also and more primarily, of what it is to be such a subject. As McDowell puts it, the account of interpretation to which Davidson’s causally externalist conception leads misconstrues “how the believer is in touch with her world.” (McDowell 1994b, footnote 14, p. 17) More accurately, it misrepresents the world with which the believer is in touch: this is primarily empirical reality in its capacity as striking the believer in its own perceptual experience; only derivatively and secondarily is it empirical reality in its capacity (as striking us interpreters in our perceptual experience) as causing the believer to believe and behave. Yet this cannot be all that McDowell is objecting to in Davidsonian coherentism. For the critique just given of Davidsonian interpretation proceeds negatively: it shows primarily how we must not conceive the world, i. e., that in relation to which empirical intentionality and its subject must exist, and be interpretable as existing. It reveals the incoherence in Davidson’s account of interpretation, hence suffices as a mere refutation of Davidsonian coherentism. But McDowell is not interested simply in refuting Davidson’s or, for that matter, anyone else’s philosophical position. The critique of Davidson is meant to play a positive role in extracting positive insight into the very being of empirical intentionality and its subject, in particular, into how, that is, in what sense, this subject is in touch with its world. From this perspective, the critique of Davidson on interpretation cannot be enough. At the end of this critique we see that world is not to be understood in Davidson’s causal sense (because so doing leads to a misconstrual of what interpretation primarily is). And in bringing this negative point out, we also bring out the positive, inverse point that world must be understood in a perceptual and intentional sense. At least to this extent, then, we have already given some sense to the

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claim that Davidsonian coherentism endangers thought’s bearing on reality, and indeed shown how this is so. Even so, this inverse point remains quite general: critique of Davidson on interpretation, precisely because it is a primarily critique, does not so much explicate as presuppose what it is to understand the “actual environment” or world – that wherein empirical intentionality and its subject must exist and be primordially interpretable as existing – in a perceptual and intentional sense. So it alone cannot give any adequate or complete account of how the subject of empirical intentionality is in touch with its world, or rather, of the world with which such a subject must be in touch. In particular, as much as it shows that world must be understood in a perceptual and intentional rather than causal sense, it does not show why this is so, at least not in that sense of ‘why’ which cannot be reached simply by showing the absurdity of all competing accounts. We therefore need some independent, positive account of what it is to understand empirical intentionality and its subject (in its capacity as such a subject) as worldly in a perceptual and intentional sense. It must be positively shown why the primary sense of world, of that wherein empirical thinking exists and relative to which it must be (primarily) interpretable as existing, is “that order which shows itself in and through an interpretee’s perceptual experience, as the constant background to the changing foreground referents of its perceptual intentionality.” But how are we to proceed? At this point, attention must shift directly to independent reconstructive interpretation of McDowell’s claim that the very possibility of thought’s bearing on reality is bound up with how one conceives perceptual experience. For if securing thought’s bearing on reality requires one to conceive empirical intentionality and its subject as worldly in an intentional, and in particular, a perceptual rather than causal sense, then this can only be because that conception of perceptual experience which secures such bearing directly entails that empirical intentionality and its subject are worldly in the former rather than the latter sense. So to describe how perceptual experience must be in order for thought’s bearing on reality to be possible must at the same time be to provide the positive account we seeking both of what it is to conceive empirical intentionality and its subject as worldly in a perceptual and intentional sense and of why they must be so conceived. Since such a conception of perceptual experience would contradict the causal understanding of world which Davidson’s causally externalist conception of content forces upon him, it would constitute a genuinely anti-Davidsonian conception, that is, one which Davidson could not en-

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dorse, no matter what. We would have therefore reconstructed McDowell’s overall argument in such a way that one significant factual limitation of it had been overcome: McDowell’s inability to make good the claim that he is offering a substantively different account of perceptual experience to Davidson’s. And we would have shown that McDowell’s fundamental claim is fundamentally right: Davidson does endanger thought’s bearing on reality because of how he construes perceptual experience, indeed is forced to construe it by his causally externalist conception of content. More precisely, we would have shown that Davidson endangers such bearing on reality because his causally externalist conception of content commits him to that generic conception of perceptual experience which was identified in Chapter One as common to both coherentism (Davidson) and the Myth of the Given (Evans). Everything now turns on getting clearer than McDowell is able to make us about what is meant by thought’s bearing on reality. This task is undertaken in the next section. Significantly, when it comes to spelling out more closely what thought’s bearing on reality is, Davidson proves to be at least as useful as McDowell himself. Although McDowell would insist no less than Davidson that inner subjectivity must be manifest in outer intentional behaviour, Davidson’s focus on interpretation leads him de facto to construe internal empirical cogitation as just one form more of rational responsiveness to external reality alongside external purposive behaviour; de facto, he treats both as just so many kinds of rationally self-regulating and potentially self-revising sensitivity to how things objectively are. And so he has, as a matter of brute fact, a broader, more generic grasp of what is at issue in this notion, whereas McDowell, as his term empirical thinking shows, remains hamstrung by a traditional focus on the epistemic (empirical knowing). Having got clearer about what is at issue in talk of thought’s bearing on reality, we must then show in some detail how securing such bearing requires one to conceive perceptual experience in a way which breaks with the generic conception of it identified in Chapter One as common to both coherentism (Davidson) and the Myth of the Given (Evans). This will be to justify McDowell’s general claim that thought’s bearing on reality requires receptivity to be so closely integrated with spontaneity in a form of perceptual experience that its contribution is indeed not even notionally separable from that of the latter. But another result of Chapter One was that a conception of perceptual experience which genuinely breaks with this generic conception of perceptual experience cannot be quite what McDowell thinks it is. In particular, it must be a conception

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of perceptual experience in which the not even notionally separable contribution of receptivity to its co-operation with spontaneity is sensually or qualitatively impressional. Our elaboration of this genuine alternative to to the positions of both Davidson and Evans must therefore show it to be a non-propositional unity of a kind neither Davidson nor Evans nor McDowell himself would embrace. This will be to explain why McDowell is unable to clarify how perceptual experience might involve a co-operation between receptivity and spontaneity of such a kind that Davidson could not in principle endorse it. These further tasks of justification and explanation are undertaken in the next chapter. iv. Getting Interpretation and Explanation the Wrong Way Around But before we leave critique of Davidson and coherentism completely behind us, let us digress to consider a more elegant way of demonstrating the conclusion just reached, namely, that interpretation cannot proceed primarily or non-derivatively via causes from behaviour to objects and contents, but only directly from behaviour to the latter. This demonstration derives its elegance from its generality: it shows the error in Davidson’s extensionalist account of interpretation to be a special case of the error in his extensionalist account of causation. As Crane points out (Crane 1995, pp. 226 – 227), Davidson rejects the view that something A stands in causal relations to something else B in virtue of having such and such properties and relations, whatever these might be. This is the point of his claim that “it is irrelevant to the causal efficacy [even] of physical events that they can be described in … physical vocabulary.” (Davidson 1993, p. 12) It is, of course, possible to distinguish between causally efficacious and causally inefficacious properties and relations. One must not, however, take this distinction as primitive – as if causal explanation were to be understood as a matter of identifying the ‘causal powers’ of entities in virtue of which these entities are able to act upon, and be acted upon by, other entities in various lawful ways. For just as the notion of intentional content is to be understood in terms of effective or successful interpretation – what one might call intentional explanation – rather than the other way around, so, too, the notion of a causally efficacious, as opposed to non-efficacious property is to be eludicated in terms of effective or successful causal explanation. What we really mean by a causally efficacious or -relevant, as opposed to causally non-efficacious, irrelevant property is that (kind of ) property by appeal to

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which we come up with a better, more informative causal explanation. And a better, more informative, distinctively causal as opposed to intentional explanation is one which better allows us to construe the causal process under explanation in terms of strict causal law, i. e., in terms of “a generalization that [is] not only ‘law-like’ and true, but [is] as deterministic as nature can be found to be, [is] free from caveats and ceteris paribus clauses; that [can], therefore, be viewed as treating the universe as a closed system”, that is, as containing only causal relations which instantiate the kind of strict causal law which Davidson regards physics as ascertaining. (Davidson 1993, p. 8) Clearly, Davidson’s interpreter- rather than interpretee-relative account of our notions of intentionality, intentional content and meaning constitutes an extension to the case of understanding and interpretation of his explainer- rather than explanandum-relative conception of causation and explanation. This suggests that problems in his extensionalist account of interpretation will find counterparts in his extensionalist account of causation and explanation. The argument developed across the first two sub-sections of this section points to a possible candidate. One conclusion of this argument was that interpretation so little proceeds primarily or originally by appeal to causes that in the primary and most original case we in fact proceed conversely, that is, identify the causes of empirical intentionality by appeal to their status as intentional objects. This is a central implication of the thesis that the causes of empirical intentionality are located in the spatiotemporal order in which its objects occur, rather than, as Davidson would have it, the other way around. Note now that this positive point can be formulated negatively, namely, as a problem already intimated to be both prior to, and masked by, the problem of distal causes and for which Davidson has no ready answer: how are we, as radical interpreters, supposed to distinguish the causes of perceptual belief and behavioural response from co-present non-causes? In fact, in his account of interpretation Davidson simply presupposes that this question has been answered – as if from the outset we interpreters had always already made this distinction and were now simply searching amongst items already identified as causes of perceptual belief and behavioural response for the objects thereof. In fact, the problem of how we interpreters can make this distinction represents the instantiation to interpretation (intentional explanation) of a general difficulty for Davidson’s whole account of causation and explanation: how are we, as explainers, supposed to distinguish the causes from co-present non-causes of anything at all?

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It is not hard to see how this general problem arises for Davidson. With very limited or even no knowledge of chemistry I can easily recognise that a strip of the curious red paper I have taken from my high school chemistry lab will be caused to turn blue by a sample of White King laundry bleach whenever it is immersed in a beaker containing the latter. Now my ability thus to ‘correlate’ the presence of White King laundry bleach in the beaker with the turning blue of the strip of red paper is not simply a matter of noticing their constant conjunction. For if it were, then, since across finitely many trials indefinitely many other items will be as constantly conjoined with the turning blue of a strip of my red paper as the presence of White King laundry bleach in the beaker, I would have to hold many more trials than I actually do in order to isolate the presence of White King laundry bleach in the beaker as a cause, rather than a mere companion, of the turning blue of my strip of red paper. Of course, in some sense, that is to say, in some specific circumstances, ‘constant conjunction’ of the presence of White King laundry bleach in the beaker with the turning from red to blue of the strip of paper does entitle me to suspect a causal connection between these two items. But this cannot be ‘constant conjunction’ in any old sense, in any old circumstances. In particular, it cannot be solely ‘constant conjunction’, but ‘constant conjunction’ in the ‘right’ circumstances, under the ‘right’ conditions – circumstances in which, conditions under which, ‘constant conjunction’ genuinely evinces a causal relation. The reason why I can so very easily, and indeed with very few trials or observation, determine a causal relation on the basis of an observed ‘constant conjunction’ is that I know bleach and paper not just to be present to me, that is, copresent in the “actual environment” as I perceive it to be, but present to one another, that is, constantly conjoined in circumstances which, given their common character or nature as material, and their specific characters or natures as liquid and solid respectively, permit there to be a causal connection between them. It is clear what this ‘presence’, this ‘right relation’, of putative cause and effect to one another is: immersion of the paper in the liquid in the beaker.32 In short, ‘constant conjunction’ certainly can evince the presence of causal connection, but only insofar as the items constantly conjoined 32 One might say that immersion of the paper in the liquid in the beaker constitutes (for these two kinds of items) the ‘right’ kind of being-in-contact-with-one-another for causal interaction to occur.

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stand in the ‘right’ relation to one another, the kind of relation under which items of their more or less general kind causally interact with one another. Note that the dependence upon a certain ‘right’ relatedness of the conjuncts displayed by any ‘constant conjunction’ rightly taken as evincing a causal connection explains why, in recognising the causal connection between bleach and paper, I immediately and quite legitimately regard myself as entitled to extend it, for example, by claiming – naturally only ever fallibly – that a sample of White King laundry bleach will cause a strip of red paper to turn blue whenever the former is dropped on the latter by means of an eye dropper. In other words, it explains why what I recognise has a certain projectability for me. From the outset, then, I understand immersion of the strip of red paper in a beaker containing White King as merely a specific case of right-relatedness between putative agent and patient, that is, the kind of relation in which they, in virtue of their being solid and liquid respectively, must typically stand if they are to interact causally with one another, at least in ways which I can ascertain. Because the liquid in the beaker and the strip of red paper are appropriately related, that is, in a manner which permits them to exercise the ‘causal powers’ inherent in their solidity and liquidity;33 and because I understand this to be so: all sorts of constant conjunctions fall from view as so much irrelevant white noise. In consequence, I am able to home in on the one that really matters: the constant conjunction of the presence of a certain kind of liquid in the beaker with the turning from red to blue of a certain kind of paper. Now a proponent of Davidson’s view of causation and explanation might say that while this is true enough, my awareness of liquid and paper as standing in the kind of relation given which, and given their characters as solid and liquid respectively, some causal interaction might occur is in fact merely the sedimentation of past observation 33 This intimates, incidentally, why it does not suffice as a reply to this argument to say that it only shows the need for us to possess a (non-derivative) concept of causality-in-virtue-of-being-an-F, not that this concept must possess a nonempty extension. Were one, namely, to regard the concept of causal-efficacyin-virtue-of-being-a-solid as an illusion (however ‘transcendentally’ necessary, hence ineliminable), one would also have to regard the concept of being a solid as similarly illusory – as if there were no such things as solids. For the point here is really about the primitively dispositional character of such concepts of kind as solid and liquid, and of course also of the various more specific concepts of kind into which these latter differentiate themselves. That, however, there are no such things as solids is false.

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and causal explanation. If so, then the point just made about the essentially conditioned character ‘constant conjunctions’ must have insofar as they evince causal connections is perfectly consistent with Davidson’s account. But the answer to this defence is obvious. Firstly, if not now in the present, then at least at some time in the past one must have become directly aware, without any appeal to yet earlier observation and explanation, of two items as so conjoined with, or co-present to, one another that, given what they are, one may assume there to be a causal connection between them. Note that this simply generalises the point made in the previous sub-section that while in certain circumstances one can interpret radically, by working from behaviour to causes, and then on to objects and contents, this is dependent on having in other circumstances interpreted directly, without detour through the causes of perception and behaviour. At some point, for some kinds of entity, one’s awareness of the conditions under which, given what they are, they are likely to act upon, and be acted upon by, other entities, must be primitive, just as at some point, for some kinds of interpretee, one’s awareness of the conditions under which they are likely to be perceiving and behaviourally responding to things as thus and so, must be primitive. Secondly, unless some part of one’s awareness of putative cause and effect as so related that their ‘constant conjunction’ can count as indicating a causal connection were not the fruit of prior observation and explanation, but dictated by the very character of putative cause and effect (as, say, material, or liquid or solid, etc.), one would not be able to project in the manner implicit in the case of my recognising the presence of White King laundry bleach in the beaker to be the cause of change in colour of the paper immersed in it. Some features of the entities I encounter must be such that to bear them is to be disposed, at least typically, to act and be acted upon in certain conditions and not in others. Were this not so, then not only could I not make any coherent or principled distinction, within the myriad of constant conjunctions by which I am constantly surrounded, between those that are and those that are not, manifestations of a causal connection. I also could not ‘project’ the causal connections I did observe, as when in recognising the causal connection between the presence of White King and the change in colour of my paper, I immediately recognise that this same causal relation would manifest itself were I to let drops of White King fall onto the paper. Ultimately, then, it is absurd to deny the claim that “(c)auses have their effects in virtue of (some of ) their properties.” (Crane 1995, p. 229 and p. 230) More accurately, it is absurd to construe this claim

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as merely derivatively true, that is to say, as explicable by appeal to the notion of causal explanation. On pain of an incoherent regress, causal explanation must, at some point, be a matter of identifying the ‘causal powers’ of entities in virtue of which these entities are able to act upon, and be acted upon by, other entities in various lawful ways. Precisely for this reason any account of causation and causal explanation which leaves us “unable to answer the question of why certain explanations are better than others by invoking the efficacious features of reality” (Crane 1995, p. 228) must be inadequate. This inadequacy must characterise not just Davidson’s account, but also those other recent conceptions of causality which, like Davidson’s, attempt to explicate causality in terms of its role in causal explanation, but which, unlike Davidson’s, also claim that causal connection must therefore be “if not in the eye of the beholder,” then “in the successful explanatory strategies of the theorist.” (Brandom 1994, p. 57; see also pp. 55 – 6234) This general point can be applied to Davidson’s account of interpretation, whereupon it yields precisely the central conclusions of the preceding sub-section. For what must the ‘right’ kind of relatedness between putative agent and putative patient be, and be understood by us interpreters to be, when the causal connection we are attempting to ascertain is one between an item in the “actual environment” and behaviour which constitutes a genuine response to some item in this environment, i. e., behaviour assessable in terms of suitability or intelligibility? The answer seems clear enough: if we are to pick out some item as causing behaviour of this kind, then we must understand our putative cause as at least in a position to shape how and what the subject of this behaviour perceives: a bell’s ringing, if audibly present to the dog – that is, if the dog hears it! – , will cause the same to salivate. The causal chain between intentional or at least responsive behaviour and any of its numerous causes only comes into view insofar as we know this behaviour to be precisely intentional or responsive. Consequently, this causal chain and its elements only come into view insofar as we already know ourselves to be dealing with a subject able to perceive, and indeed actually perceiving, at least some of the items in the causal chain producing its perception, and thereby this behaviour itself.35 34 Brandom has Dennett in mind, in particular, Dennett 1971. 35 Note, incidentally, that this entails the quasi-de re character of perceptual experience, that is, the fact that one only perceives if there is something that one perceives – see Chapter Three, p. 155.

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Furthermore, in some cases we must also know (more or less) what these items are, and what they are perceived and responded to as, since in these cases our knowledge that something A is a subject perceiving and responding to items in the “actual environment” is a mere part or consequence of our recognising A as a subject perceiving and responding to such and such as thus and so. These are, of course, those original cases in which A is familiar to us – familiar precisely in the sense that we are able directly to recognise A as perceiving and responding to such and such as thus and so. And as we have already seen, all other cases, in which we recognise simply that A is perceiving and behaviourally responding to items in the “actual environment without knowing what these items are (perceived and responded to as), are strictly derivative upon this most original kind of case. If, however, this is so, then the very identity of the set of items causally implicated in the generation of genuinely responsive behaviour is fixed by the identity of the subject engaged in this behaviour, and in particular, by what this subject is and is not able to perceive. This underscores something evident in the conclusions of the previous sub-sections: the identity of the objects of empirical intentionality in their capacity as such objects, that is, the identity of the contents of empirical intentionality, fixes the identity of the causes of such intentionality, and not conversely. It is only another way of putting this anti-externalist point to say that terms such as ‘world’, the “actual environment”, ‘external reality’, or whatever else one uses to denote the outer to thought’s inner, i. e., that as bearing upon which any interpretee must exist and be interpreted as existing, connotes the order which appears to the interpretee in its (by and large veridical) perceptual experience.

§ 3: Thought’s Bearing on Reality Revisited Given the pivotal role it plays in Mind and World, it is remarkable how casually McDowell introduces the notion of thought’s bearing on reality, then wields it in the work, as if it were a quite straightforward, self-explanatory notion. As we have seen, McDowell often means by this a property borne by individual empirically cognitive intentional states and experiences, namely, their character as truth claimings whose bearer can evaluate them with regard to their truth or falsity, hence rationally revise them in the light of such evaluation. But as we have also seen, he does not only mean such “objective purport” of empirically cognitive

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intentional states and experiences. He also means a character of the whole process of empirical thinking to which individual empirically cognitive intentional states and experiences belong, its character, namely, as rationally responding to an independent, objective reality. Bearing on reality in this primary sense is obviously not something individual states and experiences do. Rather, it is something done only by that which possesses such states or undergoes such experience, however this latter might be conceived more nearly. (Of course, it makes its responses by dropping intentional states it would otherwise retain and acquiring new ones, changing the course of its experience, etc.). As these characterisations of it show, McDowell’s conception of thought’s bearing on reality in both its primary and secondary senses betrays a traditional orientation towards knowing, particularly in the emphatic, deliberative sense pre-eminently exemplified by theoretical knowing. This traditional orientation towards knowing, indeed theoretical knowing, is already evident in McDowell’s tendency to call what bears on reality precisely ‘thought’ or empirical thinking; these names show that for McDowell the representative case of the rational responsiveness in which thought’s bearing on reality in the primary sense consists is self-conscious, systematically self-regulating deliberation about what is and is not the case, as exemplified by the giving and taking of reasons in argumentative discourse. Precisely in this spirit he speaks of thinking as “a self-critical activity, the activity by which we aim to comprehend the world as it impinges on our senses”. (McDowell 1994b, p. 35) Later, he describes our capacity for such ‘spontaneous’ rational responsiveness as “a faculty that is exercised in actively self-critical control of what one thinks, in the light of the deliverances of experience”. (McDowell 1994b, p. 49) Finally, in a passage already cited, he describes, in language redolent of nineteenth century German neo-Kantianism, thought’s bearing on reality as a matter of “taking a stand on how things are [Stellungnahme!], a posture correctly or incorrectly adopted according to how the world is arranged.” (McDowell 1994b, pp. 141 – 142) Yet precisely the behavioural, but not, of course, behaviouristic, connotations of the word ‘responsiveness’ suggest that McDowell should in fact be aiming at something broader and more generic. At many places, one could well think that, notwithstanding a certain tendency to truncate the notion by interpreting it as connoting an essentially cognitive phenomenon, what McDowell has primarily in mind is something broader: the character of empirical thinking as any kind of self-evaluating, hence self-consciously and rationally self-regulating process, whether of perceiv-

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ing, judging, believing, deciding, making or doing, which revises itself in the light of how things are in its environment even when how things are, while relevant to its success, is not anticipated in the general principles or ‘rules’ governing it. Of course, empirical thinking in this sense would be the subject of empirical intentionality as such, at least insofar as it could wield the notion of a reason, hence the first person. Correlatively, thought’s bearing on reality would be the very subjectivity of such a subject. That is, it would be the character of such a subject as a dynamic whole or system – see McDowell 1994b, p. 34 – engaged in the ongoing business of comporting itself rationally towards items within its environment, reacting to them neither as a barometer is caused to shift its needle by changes in air pressure, nor as a robot is caused to behave in virtue of rules and representations contained in its programme, nor indeed even as an animal incapable of the first person might respond, however intelligently and intelligibly, to saliences36 in its milieu. There are indeed passages in Mind and World that insinuate this interpretation – see, for example, p. 12, p. 34, p. 43, p. 47, p. 49, and p. 125. Insofar, then, as the broader interpretation insinuated by these places in the text may be taken as the right one, those places which insinuate the narrower, more traditional neo-Kantian conception of thought’s bearing on reality (as the process of self-consciously raising, rationally evaluating and, where necessary, revising knowledge claims) would show themselves to be misleading. For the business of raising, evaluating and revising one’s thoughts in the light of how things are, however internal this might in some sense be, is just as much a matter of rational behavioural response as that external rational responsiveness which consists in initiating action, then evaluating and revising it on the fly in the light of how items in one’s environment are relevant for success. At the same time, such epistemic responsiveness is not, as this very way of putting the matter shows, the only kind. To the extent, then, that McDowell really has in mind the rational responsiveness of the subject of empirical intentionality as such, in these places a certain species of rational responsive-

36 What McDowell calls, in his appropriation of Gadamer, “problems and opportunities” – see McDowell, op. cit., p. 116. Note also McDowell’s admittedly obscure reference on p. 77 to distinctively ‘sentient’, i. e., perceptual responsiveness to ‘meaning’, which one might well construe as the distinctively self-conscious, rational version of that responsiveness to salience which all higher animals possess.

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ness is being made to represent the genus – with potentially misleading consequences. Notice, however, that if McDowell does have thought’s bearing on reality in this generic sense in mind, then we have already de facto encountered it in our critique of Davidson’s account of interpretation. That ‘right relatedness’ of our interpretee A to certain items in the “actual environment which permits us to determine quite easily what does and does not cause its intentional, or at least its genuinely responsive behaviour, is precisely A’s perceiving them. Naturally, A’s perceiving only has this status because it is not undertaken out of idle curiousity, but rather because A needs to perceive in order to be able to respond rationally to items in the “actual environment”, that is, in ways which, given A’s desires and affectivities, make good or intelligible sense. From the outset, then, we have been understanding the perceiving in question here to be essentially integrated into A’s ongoing behaviour vis--vis its environment as an aspect of such behaviour always already built into and required for its overall character as a rational responsiveness to how things are in the environment. It is useful to be a little more fine-grained here: from the outset, we have been understanding perceptual experience to be, in the case of creatures which, like Davidson’s dog, are not self-conscious, hence incapable of acting for reasons, essentially something that enables A at least to regulate itself and its behaviour intelligently, i. e., in a manner which makes good sense, given how things objectively are in the “actual environment”, hence impact upon its concerns. And from the outset, we have been understanding perceptual experience to be, in the case of creatures such as ourselves, who are self-conscious and can act for reasons, essentially something that enables A genuinely to evaluate, hence rationally regulate itself and its behaviour in the light of how objective reality is, hence impinges upon A’s concerns. If, however, this is so, then at least insofar as we interpreters have taken our interpretee A to be genuinely capable of wielding the first person, we have, from the outset, understood perceptual experience to be essentially and primarily something which enables thought’s bearing on reality in the generic sense just considered. From the start, we have understood A to be responding, in ongoing, rationally self-regulating fashion, to items relevant to it in the “actual environment” – whether this responsiveness be behavioural in the strict, external sense of the term, or the responsiveness of internal cogitation. This immediately intimates what the connection might be between two central claims McDowell makes about Davidson, namely, that Da-

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vidson does not really secure thought’s bearing on reality and that in order to secure this bearing on reality, one must conceive perceptual experience as a genuine unity, rather than mere causal collaboration, of receptivity and spontaneity (in a way Davidson cannot). The claim that we, as interpreters, could primarily access the objects, hence contents, of A’s empirically cognitive intentional states and experiences via their causes misrepresents interpretation, thereby misrepresenting the world with which a believer is in touch. And so it must fail to capture precisely how (in what way) a subject of empirical intentionality is in touch with its world, namely, through its perceptual experience – that ‘right relatedness’ to items in the world which enables interpretation of the subject as comporting itself more or less rationally towards empirical reality. Somehow, then, the claim that perceptual experience consists in sensation causing perceptual belief or judgement misrepresents perceptual experience – this because perception so conceived could not enable what Davidson presupposes and permits us interpreters to presuppose: thought’s bearing on reality, understood in the widest sense as the character of distinctively self-conscious subjectivity as comporting itself self-evaluatingly37 towards items in the “actual environment” (or world, external reality, etc.). If, however, this is so, then our reconstruction of McDowell does indeed confront the two tasks mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. In the first instance, we must show that in order to secure thought’s bearing on reality, understood as this generically rational, hence not necessarily epistemic responsiveness to how things are, perception must be conceived as a co-operation between receptivity and spontaneity of a genuinely non-Davidsonian kind, that is, as a genuine unity of the conceptual and the sensually or qualitatively impressional. This task is undertaken in section one of the chapter following. In the second instance, in order successfully to tie the two strands of our reconstruction together, we must show how the distinctively causal way Davidson understands the worldliness of empirical intentionality prevents him from embracing that account of perception which secures thought’s bearing on reality. Or, to put the point in a manner which more closely reflects the form that the argument will actually take, we must show how perceptual experience, when conceived in a way which secures thought’s bearing on reality, entails that the outer to thought’s inner is the world in a perceptual and in37 Indeed, comporting itself understandingly towards entities within the world.

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tentional rather than causal sense. This task is undertaken in section three of the next chapter.

Chapter Three: Perceptual Appearance and Perceptual World Interpretation, and thus world, must be primarily understood in interpretee-relative, intentional, hence perceptual terms, rather than in Davidson’s interpreter-relative, causal terms: conceptually speaking, intentionality comes before causality, world in the sense of the totality of possible referents of perceptual, hence empirical intentionality generally comes before world in the sense of the totality of potential causes of such intentionality. Whatever terms one uses for that wherein empirical thinking and its subject must exist, and be interpretable as existing, they all connote that order in which those items occur which veridically ‘strike’, i. e., perceptually appear to, the believer as thus and so. Only in this order do the causes of such intentionality occur. In a sense, then, we are already in a position to agree with McDowell that Davidson, by denying, indeed inverting these things, must fail to capture thought’s bearing on reality – “how the believer is in touch with her world.” (McDowell 1994b, footnote 14, p. 17) But as we have seen, this much does not fully capture all McDowell’s worries about Davidson. In particular, it gives us no clue as to why and in what sense securing thought’s bearing on reality might require one to conceive perceptual experience as a co-operation between receptivity and spontaneity of such a kind that Davidson could not, in principle, embrace it. What might be wrong with conceiving perceptual experience as Davidson does, namely, as something outside causing, via sensation, perceptual belief or judgement about it inside? What might be wrong with such Davidsonian “confinement imagery”? Must “confinement imagery” be eradicated entirely, as McDowell often, although not always, insists? Or is there, as McDowell rather less frequently implies, a non-Davidsonian kind of “confinement imagery” which is both harmless and indeed obligatory? Let us approach these complex tasks by eliminating as irrelevant one all too simple way of understanding McDowell’s insistence on the need to do greater justice to “how things strike the believer.” A central conclusion of the critique just given of Davidson’s account of content and interpre-

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tation was that the “actual environment”, external reality, world, etc., with reference to which we seek to interpret an interpretee A must be construed in interpretee- rather than interpreter-relative, perceptual rather than causal terms. Thus to construe the words “actual environment”, ‘external reality’, ‘world’ or whatever other word one might use to connote the outer to A’s inner is, however, to regard them as defined in terms of how they strike A, rather than how they strike us interpreters as causally affecting A. So whatever else the denotandum of these terms may be, it is always at least something containing items which are (veridically) perceivable by A as thus and so. So its identity as satisfying this connotation of the external or outer is fixed precisely by the identity of A’s perceptual experience and its contents, hence the concepts implicated therein. In other words, the “actual environment”, external reality or world relative to which A is to be interpreted is essentially such as to contain items bearing certain properties, or standing in certain relations, which A can perceive these items as bearing or standing in. Classic examples of such properties are, of course, ‘secondary qualities’ such as being red while examples of such relations would be things like being to the left of … . Then there are morphological properties, such as being spherical. Such perception-relativity has nothing to do with whatever metaphysical dependence on the subject one might regard, say, secondary qualities as having, e. g., a metaphysical dependence which allegedly renders them less ‘real’, more ‘subjective’ or more ‘response-dependent’ than other properties.1 The point is simply that it is part of the very being of such properties and relations that in order to cognise them, one must have conceptual abilities whose conditions of correct exercise include their being correctly applied to things that perceptually appear as this does here, rather than that does there. In other words, the particular character of A’s perception of things as bearing these properties, or standing in these relations, fixes the very identity of these properties and relations themselves, hence of the corresponding conceptual abilities. How items in the world perceptually appear to A is constitutive of what they appear to A as. Or, to put the same point another way, the sensual or qualitative character of A’s perception becomes integral to the very identity of the objective order relative to which we must undertake interpretation in a way in which it is not for Davidson. So we can only identify the contents (thereby providing an interpretation), and indeed the causes (thereby pro1

This is not to deny, of course, that such perception-relativity constitutes the prephilosophical point of departure for such metaphysical interpretations.

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viding an explanation), of A’s empirically cognitive intentional states and experiences insofar as we know what it is like for one to perceive as A does. Consequently, or so one might conclude, the sensual or qualitative character of A’s perception must be constitutive of A’s perceptual concepts in a way Davidson must deny. When McDowell insists on “how things strike the believer”, he is simply making this point, implying thereby that Davidson cannot really endorse it. Relatedly, McDowell is insisting that, given how the sensual character of A’s perception is constitutive of A’s perceptual concepts, interpretation must require us, as interpreters, “to see things from the interpretee’s point of view or perspective”: this, too, or so the argument continues, Davidson must deny. And now the argument might go on to add that since the interpretee’s point of view or perspective is not our own, we can only interpret by placing ourselves vicariously in it through empathetically feeling ourselves into (sich einfhlen in) A’s position. Davidson must, therefore, fail to acknowledge the constitutive role of empathy in interpretation. Clearly, this is a poor argument. No reason has been given for thinking that Davidson’s conception of interpretation and content prevents him from endorsing its decisive premise, namely, that how A perceives is constitutive of the distinctively perceptual concepts A wields. Consequently, it provides no reason for maintaining that Davidson cannot take as seriously as anyone else “how things strike the believer”, understood as that aspect of knowing-what-it-is-like which constitutes a grasp not of what, but of how A perceives things. The argument thus provides no real basis upon which to rest the claim that Davidson does not do justice to the distinctive point of view or perspective of the interpretee, that he fails properly to account for whatever role might be played by such things as empathy, etc. Naturally, whatever account Davidson gives of these things will reflect his conception of interpretation and content, and in particular, his account of perceptual experience. But on the face of it, nothing about his conception of interpretation and content, or his account of perceptual experience, prevents him from giving some kind of account. Why might Davidson not, for example, endorse the kind of claim often made by empiricists, namely, that genuinely to ‘grasp’ the concept of red, that is, to possess it self-consciously, is to know that red is that property which typically causes one to experience sensations of such and such a kind, sensations one must be directly acquainted with? Whatever problems this claim might have, it certainly acknowledges the idea that how A perceives

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fixes what A perceives things as. And no reason has been given for thinking that Davidson cannot acknowledge the idea in this or indeed any other form. Whatever defect there might be in Davidson’s conception of perceptual experience cannot, therefore, lie in an inability to provide some account of the notion of “knowing-what-it-is-like”, as opposed to both “knowing-that” and “knowing-how” in the standard pragmatist senses. Consequently, McDowell’s charge that Davidson endangers thought’s bearing on reality would come to nothing were he to understand Davidson’s alleged failure to take seriously “how things strike the believer” in this anodyne sense. The defect in Davidson’s account of perceptual experience must lie far deeper – which is not to deny that once the real defect has been uncovered, it will turn out that Davidson is in fact unable to do justice to the notion of “knowing-what-it-is-like” as a kind of knowing in its own right alongside “knowing-that” and “knowing-how”. How, then, might we set out to identify some candidate for this defect? The critique given in the previous chapter of Davidson’s notion of interpretation and content has already intimated how we might do this. For it has shown us how properly to understand thought’s bearing on reality (in the primary sense), namely, as the generic character of the subject of empirical intentionality as essentially engaged in ongoing, potentially self-conscious, rational self-regulation of its intentional behaviour, whether internal – empirical thinking in the strict sense of cogitation – or external – intentional behaviour in the strict sense. We have, therefore, now to ask how perceptual experience must be if ‘empirical subjectivity’ in this sense is to be possible. To determine this is to determine the relevance of the notion of perceptual experience for thought’s bearing on reality. So to determine this will be to determine whether Davidson’s account of perceptual experience is up to the job.

§ 1: Perception as a Unity of Receptivity and Spontaneity We begin by noting a crucial feature of the way Davidson accommodates the phenomenologically ascertainable fact that perceptual experience has a sensually or qualitatively impressional character which sets it apart from belief and judgement: on the face of it, admitting any such sensual or qualitative character is for Davidson simply a concession made in order to accommodate an independently available philosophical observation. The fact is there, demanding to be taken on board, and so it seems Da-

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vidson resorts to the concept of sensation simply in order to take it on board. Likewise, the fact that, pace Dennett, perception is not like premonition is simply there, demanding that room be made for it. Here too, Davidson might put the concept of sensation to work in order to accommodate another independently available observation: perceptual experience is not just perceptual belief or judgement caused by things outside. Rather, it is perceptual belief or judgement whose being caused by things outside the perceiver involves sensation, which latter (presumably) can potentially be made explicit in first person, introspective reflection. Both moves highlight, however, how gratuitous the sensual, qualitative dimension of perceptual experience at least appears to be on Davidson’s account. It seems as if, were it not for such independently available phenomenological observations as those just mentioned, Davidson could do without this dimension altogether. This is of course because he gives this dimension no rational role in the way perceptual experience shapes subsequent behavioural response, whether this latter be internal cogitation or deliberation (empirical thinking in the strict sense of the term) or external behaviour in the strict sense of acting practically. From start to finish, Davidson sees the sensually impressional character of perceptual experience simply as an independent part and causal factor – precisely as sensation – in the generation of what on his account does rationally shape subsequent behavioural response, namely, perceptual belief or judgement. What, then, if there should be something wrong with this? In particular, what if we interpreters of a perceiver’s behaviour could not make sense of this behaviour as an intelligent response to items in the “actual environment” unless its perceptual experience were conceived, in nonDavidsonian fashion, as a unity of conceptual and sensually or qualitatively impressional non-conceptual dimensions? What if a perceiver could not itself make sense of its behavioural responses, in particular, those internally behavioural moves which constitute its cogitation (empirical thinking), unless the perceptual experience driving these responses were conceived as a genuine unity of concept and intuition, or rather, as a genuine, epistemically relevant intuition, as opposed to something either solely conceptual (judgement) or solely non-conceptual (sensation) or the aggretative coupling of judgement and sensation in a causal relation? This would mean that a conception of perceptual experience as such a unity were a necessary condition of thought’s bearing on external reality, understood not simply as intelligent, but also as rational, self-evaluating responsiveness to how things objectively are. A capacity on the part of a subject S for perceptual experience in this sense would then be a con-

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dition of the possibility not just for our being able to ascribe empirically intentional states and experiences to S, but for S’s being able to ascribe such states and experiences to itself (as itself ). In further consequence, a capacity for the kind of perceptual experience in which the contributions of receptivity and spontaneity are genuinely integrated would also be, just as McDowell claims, a condition of the possibility of the “objective purport” of the empirically intentional states and experiences of such a subject S. That is, it would be a condition of the possibility of thought’s bearing on reality in the secondary sense. One thing, however, needs to be noted in advance: we are seeking here to identify what McDowell ought to mean when he demands that perceptual experience be conceived as a genuine unity in which the contribution of receptivity (the non-conceptual and impressional) is not even notionally separable from the contribution of spontaneity (the conceptual). The difficulties encountered by McDowell in his efforts to explain just what this demand comes to have already been noted. They begin at the most obvious, superficial level, namely, inability to indicate a difference between perceptual impressions and Davidsonian perceptual beliefs substantial enough for Davidson not to be able to embrace perceptual impressions. But they also go deeper, having as their ultimate source two intimately interrelated convictions which McDowell shares with both the Myth of the Given and Davidsonian coherentism: for McDowell, no less than for the more traditional positions he wants to challenge, the only way in which perceptual experience, and thereby reality itself, could rationally constrain empirical thinking is by providing, indeed being, a reason for belief and action. As for his opponents, so, too, for McDowell, perceptual experience can only be conceptually contentful if it is propositionally contentful. At the end of Chapter One it was argued that to conceive perceptual experience in this way is to preclude from the outset its being a co-operation between receptivity and spontaneity in which (a) the contribution of the former is genuinely integrated with the latter yet (b) retains that connotation of the sensual and qualitative (Peircean firstness) which has been traditionally associated with the notion of receptivity and blocks assimilation to premonition and the like. If perceptual experience is understood as having itself to be (at least potentially) a reason for belief or action, then it does not need any sensually or qualitatively impressional character. Thereby the sensual and qualitative character is rendered functionally irrelevant, and because the only kind of integratedness here must be a functional one, this character cannot be understood as essentially in-

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tegrated into the very intentional structure of perceptual experience. Perceptual experience can then only ever be a strictly discursive, ‘truth-claiming’ state or experience whose contentfulness is representable by the schema ‘that p’. At this point, the only impressional character intrinsically or inherently possessed by perceptual experience in the epistemically relevant sense is the character of such experience as the being-thrust-uponone of some proposition as true (Peircean secondness alone). But then no significant difference to Davidson has been secured. The key to securing some real, genuinely non-Davidsonian integration of the non-conceptual and conceptual characters of perceptual experience therefore consists first in acknowledging that the non-conceptual character must be impressional in a genuinely sensual, qualitative, and not just a causal sense. One must then renounce the conviction that the only sense in which perceptual experience, and thereby reality itself could rationally constrain (or rationalise) empirical thinking is by being a reason for belief and action. And so one must also reject the prejudice that to be conceptually contentful is to be propositionally contentful (in the sense of instantiating the schema ‘that p’), which in turn requires one to reject the even more fundamental prejudice that truth-claiming is the only kind of conceptually contentful, cognitively intentional state or experience – as if the only kind of cognitive ‘attitude’ towards a conceptual content were a propositional one, that is, some form of believing or judging (doxa or apophansis). The unity of concept and intuition to be described in the first part of this section, then justified in the second, is a non-propositional one involving a distinctively aesthetic rather than apophantic kind of ‘synthesis’, i. e., predication (or what McDowell calls, not without tending to conflate predication and truth-claiming, ‘togetherness’ – see McDowell 1998a, p. 440 and elsewhere). Only when perceptual experience is understood as a ‘synthesis’ in this non-‘logical’, that is to say, non-propositional sense does a truly substantial difference to Davidson emerge. Indeed, only then can one give clear sense to an important idea potentially hidden in such borderline oxymorons as “a passive operation of conceptual capacities” (McDowell 1994b, p. 67): that perceptual experience is neither mere passive receptivity, nor mere active spontaneity, but a middle-voiced unity of both.

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i. The Perceptual or Intuitive ‘How’ Evans argues that if perceptual experience somehow involved conceptual capacities, as it would have to were it conceptually contentful, then the concepts involved would have “to be endlessly fine-grained.” (Evans 1982, p. 229) For according to Evans we can discriminate numerous shades of colour for which we cannot plausibly be said to have concepts. Christopher Peacocke has elaborated Evan’s point as follows: (A)n experience can have a finer-grained content than can be formulated by using concepts possessed by the experiencer. If you are looking at a range of mountains, it may be correct to say that you see some as rounded, some as jagged. But the content of your visual experience in respect of the shape of the mountains is far more specific than that description indicates. The description involving the concepts round and jagged would cover many different fine-grained contents that your experience could have, contents that are discriminably different from one another. (Peacocke 1992, pp. 67 – 68)

Evans takes this possibility to indicate that perceptual experience is not conceptually contentful in any sense at all. But as McDowell points out, Peacocke and others who have followed Evans in taking this kind of consideration “to require crediting experience with non-conceptual content” have diverged from Evans in not “… relegating the content of experience completely to the non-conceptual … .” (McDowell 1994b, p. 56) Rather, they “aim to accommodate the phenomenological point Evans makes … by saying that the content of experience is partly non-conceptual.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 56) Formally speaking, those who do not follow Evans are right since the kind of case he has in mind entails merely that perceptual experience does not solely involve concepts, hence does not have solely conceptual content; it does not entail that perceptual experience is not conceptually contentful at all. At the same time, those who do not follow Evans need to be careful not to perpetuate a more fundamental non sequitur in his argument: Evans concludes from this kind of case that experience makes details available for the guidance of behaviour and discrimination which the subject of experience cannot conceptually represent or articulate. But this, too, does not follow. All this kind of case shows is that experience can make available for behavioural guidance and discrimination details which are not conceptually articulated in this experience itself even though the subject of experience may very well have the appropriate concepts.2 2

This undercuts, as ill-conceived, McDowell’s dispute with Evans as to whether a

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That this is so is shown precisely by the kind of case Peacocke considers: I can surely see a jagged mountain range stretching out left and right before me without seeing the mountain range as obtusely (as opposed to acutely) jagged. Yet I clearly do possess the concepts both of being acutely and of being obtusely angled even though my experience does not involve the exercise of either – perhaps because, given the current stretch of intentional behaviour I am engaged in, how specifically the mountain range is jagged is not something I need to notice. After the event, I can, of course, reflect back on my experience in that sense in which recollection is a matter of reliving the experience itself, as opposed to merely remembering, as when I remember what the teacher told me about the Battle of Hastings, namely, that it occurred in 1066. Crucially, when I reflect back in this ‘vivid’ sense, I dissect or lay out the experience which I have re-called. In so doing, I become aware of how, in what specific sense, the mountains I saw as jagged were jagged, namely, obtusely so rather than acutely. Nor is this feature gratuitous or incidental: my perceptual experience simply would not qualify as perceptual experience were it not internally structured in such a way that I can not only simply remember it, but also recollect it in the sense of reliving it. In other words, it is essential to the character of my perceptual experience as perceptual experience that it be contentful in a fashion which permits me literally to re-call it, therein reflectively noting how a jagged mountain range appeared to me then as stretching out there, left and right before me. If, then, such vivid recall and reflective explication is to be possible, my perceptual experience itself must be a showing how a certain object appears as thus and so when persubject can, in and through its experience, make discriminations between, e. g., shades of colour for which it does not have the corresponding concepts – see McDowell 1994b, pp. 56 – 60. With Evans and against McDowell, one can acknowledge that perception makes details of what is perceived available for behavioural guidance and discrimination details in a non-conceptual manner; with McDowell and against Evans, one can acknowledge that this does not entail that the subject lacks the corresponding conceptual abilities. This even-handed response to the issue leaves the question open of whether, for any detail which a subject’s experience makes available for behavioural guidance and discrimination, a subject must already have the corresponding conceptual ability. One reason why one might want to deny this claim (to which McDowell is surely committed) is that one thereby leaves open the possibility of acquiring, through reflection on one’s experience, more fine-grained conceptual abilities. Of course, to say this is not to commit oneself to maintaining that perceptual experience could make what is perceived available for behavioural guidance and discrimination solely in a non-conceptual manner.

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ceived by me from here, and in particular, a showing how this object there appears given how, specifically, it is thus and so. Only because my perceptual experience displays this internal structure am I at all able to call it back as the perceptual experience with such and such conceptual content I remember having then in order to learn more about the object presented in the experience as satisfying this conceptual content. My perceptual experience must therefore have already made this more available to me without, however, having done so conceptually. In general, because my perceiving such and such as thus and so permits me to recognise subsequently how more specifically it is thus and so, my perceiving must present these more specific details in a manner quite different to the way in which it presents such and such as thus and so in the first place. It must, in other words, present these details in a non-conceptual manner and indeed precisely because it presents these details nonconceptually, I only come to conceptual awareness of them after the event. Yet the character of my perceptual experience as presenting these details non-conceptually clearly presupposes and requires the original conceptual content of my perceiving. These non-conceptually presented details have, after all, just been characterised as how specifically what I perceive is thus and so, that is, satisfies a certain conceptual content. So the character of my perceptual experience as presenting these details non-conceptually is its character of revealing non-conceptually how a certain conceptual content applies there now. Thus, when I look at the jagged mountain range extending out to the right and left before me, the objective reality I see is perceptually given to me not just in a certain Fregean, that is to say, conceptual fineness of grain, but also and necessarily in a certain subjectively, objectively and contextually conditioned way or mode of instantiating this Fregean fine grain. It is this latter which permits me retrospectively to identify further features of this objective reality, precisely those features which are causally responsible for this mode of sensual, hence non-conceptual givenness. On the one hand, I perceive the mountain range in a certain Fregean fine grain, e. g., “a jagged mountain range stretching out right and left there.”3 And on the other my perceptual experience will give this Fregean fine grain to me in such a way that, on the basis of this ex3

Whereby the demonstrative adverb of place ‘there’ will denote the region in which my line of sight intersects with the line formed by the mountain range itself.

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perience alone, I can in principle subsequently recognise4 how more specifically this generic content applies. In particular, I can subsequently recognise how, objectively speaking, it is finer grained in and through recognising how, subjectively speaking, the mountain range originally appeared in its original Fregean fine grain. Note how this brings to the fore a second sense, or perhaps rather, a second dimension to the one sense, of ‘how’. In the first instance, my perceiving the mountain range is a matter of perceiving how a certain conceptual character objectively applies, in whatever further Fregean fine grain: I experience how a jagged mountain range stretches out right and left there before me in the sense that it reveals to me how, more specifically, but also objectively, what I perceive on this particular occasion instantiates a conceptual character, viz., “jagged mountain range stretching out right and left there” (which, precisely because it is a conceptual character, can be instantiated in any number of more specific ways). Thus, when I call my experience back, I re-cognise that the mountain range is obtusely jagged, that its individual mountains are all of more or less equal height, all snow-covered half the way down, etc. But my perceptual experience is only a showing how this conceptual content objectively applies because it also involves a ‘how’ in a subjective sense. Imagine, for example, that I were looking at the mountain range at an acute angle, so that my line of sight formed an acute angle with the line formed by the mountain range itself. In this case, my perceptual experience might be accurately described as a matter of my perceiving a jagged mountain range extending out there before me, right and away from me, left and towards me. Now when I recollect my experience, I might reflectively recognise that the mountain range appeared to me as jagged in so to speak an acute manner: I saw the mountain simply as jagged, but given the fact that it is obtusely jagged along the line of the mountain range itself and given my acutely angled position to it, the mountain range appeared to me, in virtue of its obtuse jaggedness acutely – a situation one can make clear to oneself by imagining how an artist would perspectivally depict the mountain range as it appeared to me from my acutely angled position to it. Note that there is nothing necessarily deceptive in my experience, as if it inherently inclined me (even under ideal perceptual conditions) to regard or treat the mountain range as objectively acutely jagged (and myself 4

Or at least take myself to recognise this; I could, of course, always be wrong, i. e., subject to perceptual error.

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as viewing it from head on rather than at an acute angle): through my experience I learn that a jagged mountain range stretches out there, i. e., before me, right and away from, left and towards me. Now when I reflect on my experience, I will realise that the range is obtusely jagged. But if I reflect further on my experience, in a manner which serves only a cognitive interest in the structure of perception itself rather than any more mundane, practical interest in the objects of perception, I will further recognise my experience to be the perceiving of a mountain range as jagged which occurs under such conditions that the objective obtuseness of the mountain range’s jaggedness appears acutely to me. The point here can be demonstrated more clearly by appeal to an example derived from Locke.5 Imagine that I am observing a uniformly red coloured sphere lying there on the table before me. Let us also assume that the sphere is illuminated from one side only, say, from the right, by light entering through the only window of the room in which the table is standing. So the right hand side of the sphere, which is turned towards the light source, will appear lighter than the left hand side, which is turned away from it. Yet given that I am perceiving under more or less normal or optimal conditions, in no sense do I perceive the sphere as bearing different shades of red across its surface, as if it were more lightly red on the side turned towards the light source and a darker red on the side turned away from it. We would all say that I see the sphere as having some one colour across its entire surface, a colour which, however, given the perceptual context, appears lighter on the one side than on the other. Of course, the light waves being reflected off the sphere’s surface into my eyes will no doubt differ in relevant ways, e. g., wave length, across the surface, from the lighter side turned towards the light source to the darker side turned away from it. Even so, I never see the sphere as being differently coloured across its surface but as being uniformly coloured even as this uniformity of colour manifests itself to me across the sphere’s surface in different, contextually modulated ways. There is thus on the one hand the perfectly objective way in which the sphere is uniformly red – the objective how of the sphere’s redness – , which is, of course, its specific shade of red. And on the other hand, there is the subjective way in which it appeared to me as uniformly red – the subjective how in which this shade of red is given to me. This can be exhibited 5

See Locke’s example of the “round globe of any uniform colour, v.g., gold, alabaster, or jet” in Locke 1690 (1975), Book II, Ch. ix, 8.

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via the pattern of varying shades of red I would apply to a piece of white paper in order to depict how the sphere appeared to me as uniformly red. Clearly, when I recall my perceptual experience of the jagged mountain range and recognise both how, objectively speaking, the mountain range is jagged, namely, obtusely so, yet also recognise how, subjectively speaking, the mountain range appeared to me as jagged, namely, as an obtuse jaggedness appearing to me acutely,6 I am similarly noting in what contextually modulated or conditioned way a certain objective property or feature of what I perceived appeared to me. So in all perceptual experience, at least of the kind at issue in Peacocke’s example, there are indeed two senses of ‘how’, or rather, two aspects or dimensions of the one ‘how’: in the first instance, to perceive is to perceive how something objectively is what it is (which objective ‘how’ one can recollectively unpack and make explicit in the ways indicated).7 And it is this because and only because in the second instance to perceive is to perceive a certain objective reality as what it is in a certain subjectively, contextually and objectively conditioned mode or how of sensual, non-conceptual givenness. Or, as one may also put it, to perceive is to perceive things as looking thus and so. We may therefore define the relational property of being (able to be) perceived to be thus and so in a certain subjectively, contextually and objectively conditioned how of sensual givenness as the perceptual look of the entity which bears it – that sensually conceptual and conceptually sensual kind of contentfulness which distinguishes perceptual intentionality as aesthetic rather than apophantic, intuitive rather than discursive.8 Already at this point we can begin to see a sense in which one might want to say that perceptual experience, because and only because it shows me things in a certain mode or how of perceptual givenness, hence how 6 7

8

One can cash this as a matter of the range’s appearing as jagged in such a way that one could, under certain circumstances, e. g., misapprehension as to how one stands vis--vis the range, reflectively conclude that it was acutely jagged. Does this mean that for every bit of Fregean fine grain as satisfying which I perceive something there are different ways in which it could be instantiated? That is, does it mean that every bit of conceptual content has a generic or determinable rather than specific or determinate character such that this bit of content can always be specified in different ways? No, it only means that at least some bit of such content must be specifiable further. Thus, what is said here does not rule the possibility out of my perceiving something as exhibiting an absolutely determinate shade of red. Or, as in Part II we shall see Husserl say, ‘signitive’.

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more specifically, but perfectly objectively they are what they are, makes me truly acquainted, or puts me truly in touch, with objective reality – a “bearing on reality” which I only make explicit when I recollectively unpack how things perceptually appeared to me as thus and so, thereby making explicit how things are more specifically, distinctively and possibly even uniquely thus and so. But thus far we have merely sketched, and provided no serious justification for, a conception of perceptual experience which permits one to say this. All we have sought to do thus far is to provide a phenomenologically plausible description of perceptual experience which could serve to exhibit what it might mean to speak of the products of receptivity as making a not even notionally separable contribution to a co-operation with spontaneity. In other words, all we have thus far done is to put some meat on the bones of the speculative hypothesis reached at the end of the last chapter. There, we speculated that once one has found oneself forced to take seriously what it is like to perceive as the interpretee does, one also finds oneself forced construe such experience not as a matter of one discrete event, say, sensation, causing another, namely, perceptual belief or judgement that a certain object is thus and so, but as one single, sensually yet also conceptually contentful event in which one is struck by how a certain object is thus and so – in a slogan, as a matter of perceiving how rather than that p. Our next task must therefore be to provide some substantive justification for the claim that the conceptual ‘synthesis’ which perceptual experience in any epistemically relevant sense involves is in this sense aesthetic rather than doxastic or apophantic. Before, however, we turn to provide the arguments needed, we must clear away some very dangerous potential for misunderstanding. Nothing said thus far requires us to construe my recognising, on the basis of having perceptually experienced, a jagged mountain range stretching right and away there before me as a matter of recalling the past presence in my mind of a certain subjective ‘shape’, say, some inner map of the mountain range’s two-dimensional profile, upon which I had then performed some inference or computation in order to derive the conclusion that a jagged mountain range stretches right and away there before me; upon which I now perform some more detailed and careful calculations in order to derive the further conclusion that, given the perspective I then had on the mountain range, its objective shape is a case of obtuse rather than acute jaggedness. Indeed, everything thus far said would seem to require us positively not to construe either my original perceptual experience or my subse-

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quent reflective laying-out of its content in this way, at least not if the subjective ‘shapes’ and corresponding inferential or computational processes are assumed to be introspectively available. For the whole point is precisely to reject any suggestion that ‘appearances’ are entities caused by, or occurring in, the process of perception itself. The appearance or rather, the appearing, of a certain objective reality as instantiating a certain Fregean fineness of grain just is the perceiving itself; it thus could not be any entity or event in the perceiving, nor is there need to postulate any such, at least not in order to provide a phenomenologically accurate description of the intentional structure of perceptual experience. Moreover, if perceptual experience just is the appearing of something in a certain Fregean fineness of grain, then it is essentially the appearingof-something. That is, its character as a sensually, qualitatively impressional appearing is strictly inseparable from its conceptual character. So appearances are not things of which one could become aware without becoming aware of the objects of appearance (even if, as happens in misperception, these objects do not in fact satisfy the relevant conceptual character). Consequently, one can only ever get at the subjective appearance of the objects perceived, the mode or ‘how’ of their strictly sensual, nonconceptual givenness, indirectly, as when, for example, I draw a jagged line to indicate how the shape of the mountain range appeared to me as seen from such and such a perspective. All in all, precisely this conception of perceptual experience as a genuine unity of the conceptual and non-conceptual entails that the sensually impressional character of such experience does not and cannot consist in the presence of a certain inner, private ‘object’ – Wittgenstein’s beetle in the box. Rather, this character is inner and ‘private’ merely in the sense that it is a dependent moment of perceptual experience which can become public only indirectly or vicariously, through the perceiver’s engaging in the appropriate aesthetic or mimetic showing. It immediately follows from this that awareness of the outer objects of perception comes first. Lastly, the fact that one can only get at the sensual, non-conceptual ‘how’ of perceptual givenness by aesthetically or mimetically showing it intimates the correctness of a claim made previously, namely, that we must distinguish knowing-what-it-is-like from knowing-that, and indeed from knowing-how as well. Interestingly, knowing-what-it-is (or was!)like seems to combine both discursive knowing-that and practical knowing-how: I know what it is or was like only insofar as I can show what it was like, which consists in my knowing how to do something quite bodily

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(mimicking, drawing, etc.) of which I claim to know that it accurately reflects how such and such is what it is and how it appears as what it is from such and such a perceptual perspective on it. ii. Why How rather than That? – Two Transcendental Arguments We turn now from phenomenological description guided by the goal of conceiving perceptual experience as a genuine unity of receptivity and spontaneity to a ‘transcendental’ justification of the conception reached thereby. The notion of perceptual experience is a functional one: perceptual experience is what it does, so much so that whatever internal structure it has can only become visible in the light cast by understanding the kinds of thing perception essentially accomplishes. Precisely such essential accomplishments, which we pre-philosophically recognise to be definitive of perceptual experience, require there to be perceptual experience in the sense just outlined. The capacity to play such functional roles demands that there be perceptual experience with the internal intentional structure just sketched, in which the conceptual and non-conceptual integrally mesh with, and complement, one another. It is potentially very misleading to say simply that the job of perceptual experience is to convey information about objective reality to higher cognitive processes. For this obscures the fact that nothing could count as perceptual experience of the kind we undergo unless it conveyed information about reality in such a way that it thereby enabled its subject to behave intelligently and context-sensitively vis--vis this reality. Furthermore, nothing could count as perceptual experience of the kind we undergo unless it conveyed information in such a way that it thereby enabled its subject to engage self-consciously and rationally in intelligent, context-sensitive behaviour vis--vis reality. Since to behave self-consciously and rationally requires one to be able to evaluate for oneself one’s own intentional states, intentional experiences and intentional behaviour (as one’s own), and since this requires one to be able perceptually to identify and re-identify the objects of one’s intentional states, experiences and behaviour (as such objects), perceptual experience must be such as to enable such identification and re-identification. This intimates two interrelated ways in which one might seek to show that there must be perceptual experience which conforms to the schema ‘how p’ (aisthesis) rather than ‘that p’ (apophansis). The first exploits the fact that perceptual experience, at least as we pre-philosophically under-

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stand it, must be, to borrow a nice turn of phrase from Heidegger, a sight which guides:9 if one could not adjust one’s behaviour “on the fly” to the context of such activity as it or one’s activity in it changes, then one could not be said to be behaving intentionally and purposively at all. And it is clearly perception which enables one to recognise changes in the context of behaviour which are relevant or salient to one’s current behaviour. One claim to be demonstrated is thus that perceptual experience with this internal intentional structure is a condition of the possibility of the kind of genuinely responsive behaviour which, unlike merely biomechanical or reflexive behaviour – digestion, blinking or flinching when another lashes out with an arm – , regulates itself in the light of a dynamic, potentially unique behavioural context that can change in unexpectedly relevant ways or contain unexpectedly relevant facts. The second way exploits the fact that, at least for self-conscious, ‘I’thinking, hence presumably also ‘I’-saying subjects such as ourselves, perceptual experience enables rationally self-regulating intentional behaviour. The possibility of this requires, as we have seen, an ability to evaluate for oneself one’s own intentional states experiences and behaviour, which in turn requires the ability to identify the objects of one’s empirical intentionality and intentional behaviour (as such objects). So the second claim to be demonstrated is that only on a conception of its internal intentional structure according to which to perceive is at least in some cases to perceive how rather than that p can perception enable the identification of the objects of empirical intentionality and intentional behaviour (as such objects). In other words, the second claim to be demonstrated is that perceiving how rather than merely that p is a condition of the possibility of thought’s bearing on reality in the sense primarily before McDowell’s mind,10 namely, as distinctively self-conscious, first person empirical thinking, which responds self-evaluatingly, hence in rationally self-regulating fashion, to how things “out there” objectively are. In particular, this latter argument will reveal something of crucial relevance for the previous discussion of the Davidsonian causally oriented sense of world and its non-Davidsonian perceptually and intentionally 9 See Heidegger 1979b, § 15, H 69 (98). 10 See McDowell, op. cit., p. 12, p. 34, p. 43, p. 47, p. 49 and other places which insinuate the view that exercising conceptual capacities (thinking) constitutes “taking a stand on how things are, a posture correctly or incorrectly adopted according to the way the world is arranged”, that is, being “rationally answerable to how the world impresses itself on the subject in experience.” (pp. 141 – 142)

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oriented counterpart: in some sense, it must be, pace McDowell, quite alright to think of perceptual experience as something caused at, or just inside, a border between inner and outer, by things outside and itself causing further things further inside. In some way, Davidson must be quite right to seek to render “confinement imagery” harmless rather than to eliminate it completely. Everything depends on just how one thinks of perceptual experience itself, i. e., that which takes place at or just inside the border. “Confinement imagery” will be harmless if it can be shown to be so to speak implicitly contained within the very structure of perceptual experience itself. If perceptual experience is internally structured or contentful in such a way that it entitles its own subject, provided only this latter be sufficiently capable of first person, introspective reflection, to extract from it and it alone precisely a picture of this very perceptual experience as occurring at or just inside the border of the inner domain of consciousness and caused by something outside, then “confinement imagery” will be utterly harmless. For then, and only then, will perceptual experience be something that permits a sufficiently self-conscious perceiver to understand itself in terms of the picture. Problems can really only arise should one conceive perceptual experience in such a way that it does not bear the structure of its confinement on its face. This is precisely the case when one thinks of perceptual experience in classically empiricist, even Reidian fashion, as a matter of receiving various merely sensual, hence completely non-conceptual impressions – sense data, sensations, etc. – which the mind in some sense processes into higher order empirical cognition. But, as this way of putting things is meant to indicate, at this point we see that in this regard Davidson’s conception of experience is not essentially different from the empiricist or Reidian one. For although Davidson rejects the idea that perceptual impressions in the completely non-conceptual empiricist sense (sense data, sensations, etc.) could be reasons for belief, and although he rejects utterly the suggestion that the mind somehow moulds impressions into empirical knowledge by applying a conceptual scheme to them, his picture holds this one crucial element in common with the empiricist one: none of the items which occur in the causal chain stretching from object to subject, and no part of this chain itself, in particular, that part in which perceptual experience consists, are themselves so structured internally that they themselves insinuate the picture and their place in it. Of course, this claim is, as things stands, very unclear. The arguments following will permit us to clarify it.

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ii.(a) How Perception enables Intelligent, Context-Sensitive Intentional Behaviour Perception is clearly correctly characterised as the source of our empirical judgements and beliefs that such and such is the case. Yet it cannot be solely thus characterised if it is to be able to guide, in ongoing, self-regulating fashion, genuinely intentional, purposive behaviour. For in any concrete situation of goal-directed action, it is never enough just to be recognising that such and such is the case. When I reach out for the duster I need in order to wipe the blackboard, I may well already know that a duster is lying there on the desk in front of me. (Indeed, this is highly likely, given that I have worked in this lecture theatre many times before and so am very familiar with how it is organised.) In order to grab hold of the duster, I need to know something more than, or rather something qualitatively different from, the fact that a duster is lying there on the desk in front of me. I do not need any more judgements about the duster to the effect that it is thus or so; in order to set about reaching out for it in order to wipe the board, what I need to know, and what my eyes tell me when they fall upon the duster, is how it is what I already know it to be, namely, lying there on the desk in front of me. For the role of my eyes in so to speak setting me up to reach for the duster is to provide me with non-conceptually presented information about how the duster realises the predicate “… lying there on the table”. They supply me with a perceptual experience which shows what I could only articulate verbally, hence conceptually, by saying some such thing as that it is lying diagonally relative to the left corner of the table, with its own left corner lying about, say, five centimetres from the edge, and even with chalk all over it and indeed around it – the previous user has obviously placed it roughly onto the table so lots of chalk dust has been knocked out of it – , etc. And any such description, however long, is itself capable of being instantiated in all sorts of different contexts and all sorts of different ways. Its point is, of course, not to pin down the distinctively perceptual contentfulness of my perceptual experience without remainder, but to encourage its hearer to imagine some particular arrangement of duster, table and chalk dust which satisfies this description – in effect to imagine what it would be like to have the kind of perceptual experience that I have had. And if the point of my description should also be to enable my hearers similarly to find and reach out for the duster, then I intend them to use my description as a guide to reproducing for themselves the kind of perceptual experience I have had.

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Talk of my seeing how the duster is lying there on the desk in front of me as setting me up to reach for it intimates a crucial function played by the character of perceptual experience as a perceiving of how things are what they are: perceptual experience of this kind sets me up for engaging in behaviour which is itself directed or oriented towards things in the sense that its accomplishment involves perceptually tracking things through time. It is precisely because I see how the duster is lying there before me that I can begin to track the duster as I move towards it. Such perceptual tracking, which enables me continually to monitor and regulate the movement of my body and hands vis--vis the duster as I move towards it to pick it up, is a temporally extended perceptual process or, as Edmund Husserl would say, an ‘act’. As such, it is not an ‘act’ of perceiving at a time either how or that p at all. It seems, then, that to recognise that perceptual experience is first and foremost a matter of perceiving how rather than that p opens the way to acknowledging the existence of further kinds of non-propositionally yet still conceptually contentful perceptual experience, in particular, perceptual experience which itself ‘takes time’ and is awareness of items as changing or, as in the case of the duster towards which I am moving, enduring through time. At this point, we see how acknowledging that perceptual experience is primarily a matter of perceiving how rather than that such and such is the case promises to open up a whole range of perceptually intentional phenomena not seriously considered by McDowell or indeed analytic philosophy generally. One may suspect that at least part of the reason why McDowell and much analytic philosophy overlook a range of phenomena which, as soon as one’s attention is drawn to them, one recognises to be of fundamental importance for an understanding of intelligent, purposive behaviour in the real world, is their preoccupation with the linguistic as a model for all forms of intentionality. To the extent, then, that McDowell’s guiding thought that perceptual experience must be a genuine unity of receptivity and spontaneity brings him closer to recognising that perceptual experience is a matter of perceiving how things are what they are, it also pushes him towards better appreciating that it is mistaken to take the linguisitic as a model for all forms of intentionality. Since the phenomenological tradition of Edmund Husserl and others has always had a better appreciation of this point, we can already glimpse the potential in McDowell’s central idea for a substantive rapprochement with phenomenology. Of course, to insist that one primarily sees how rather than that p is not to deny the existence of propositionally contentful ‘perception’, i. e.,

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lowest-level, unmediated perceptual judgement. I come out of my house and suddenly see that my recently departed visitor has thoughtlessly left the gate open, thereby potentially allowing my dogs to get out onto the street, where they could get hit by a car. Note how this example suggests an important phenomenological observation: I judge perceptually that p precisely when I am not oriented towards the things I ‘see’ in the way I need to be in order to set about doing what I have to do with them.11 For clearly, I am concerned to have the gate closed and the fact that I notice its having been left open at all indicates that I am aware of the significance this fact has for me (and, in particular, my dogs). Precisely because ‘perceptual experience’ in this apophantic sense does not orient me towards, or suitably set me up to engage with, the items I need to deal with, I might have to deliberate about what to do next. Naturally, in the case at hand, what is more likely to happen is that I would look closer at the situation I have to deal with. This is not to say that I inspect the gate or even its openness for further details. Rather, it is to say that my concern to avert the danger, indeed my decision (prior intention) to close the gate, thereby averting the danger, moves me from seeing that to seeing how the gate is open: only slightly ajar, rather than flung right back against the fence upon which it hangs, with an empty milk carton lodged between it and the fence, no doubt blown there by the wind, etc. For these are the kinds of thing I need to see in order to initiate and consummate the process of closing the gate. Having perceived how it is open, I can then, and only then, begin first to move towards it, then to reach down and remove the milk carton, and lastly to raise my hand in order to push the gate closed while using the other to push the latch into place – all the while, of course, perceptually tracking the gate and its position as I deal with it. In this process, the resolve created by my decision and constitutive of my purposive activity – a resolve which ‘drives bodily movement’ but is only misleadingly called an intention-in-action – simply is my being orientated towards (eingestellt auf ) perceiving things in their relevance for what I am doing – which perceiv11 Note how this example, or rather the interpretation given of it here, conforms to Collins’ point that the form of words “seeing that” is not idiomatically used of perceptual experience, but rather of something at some remove from anything sensual, hence is idiomatically used of something non-perceptually cognitive – see Collins 1998, p. 379 f., and McDowell 1998b, p. 413. The ‘experience’ of “seeing that” I undergo does seem to be one simply of perceptually judging, a judging non-inferentially caused in me by the gate’s being open.

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ing enables me, of course, to adjust bodily movement ‘on the fly’ to changed or novel circumstances. ii. (b) How Perception enables Self-Evaluating, Rationally Self-Regulating Thinking By the bearing of empirical thinking upon reality McDowell frequently means the character of such thinking as a process of raising and accepting claims to knowledge which is self-evaluating, that is, rationally self-regulating and self-revising, in the light of how reality actually is.12 Clearly, the character of empirical thinking as in this sense in touch with external reality requires that the entities referred to in the various judgements and beliefs caught up in the process of empirical thinking be capable of identification and re-identification as the referents of these judgements. For only then can such judgements and beliefs be subject to rational evaluation and revision. Entities are obviously identified or re-identified through experience as the referents of an empirical judgement. But how exactly does experience fulfil this function? Let us imagine, firstly, a set of sentences or, if one prefers, propositions, which collectively constitute the description D of a certain scene, for example, a description of a house standing in a certain landscape (as perceived, of course, from such and such a position by such and such a subject under such and such contextual circumstances). Let us also imagine, secondly, that I request arbitrarily many persons each to come up with a ‘realistic’ picture, say, a photograph, showing D to be instantiated by some scene, that is, by a type of arrangement of entities as perceived and depicted from such and such a position – the position from which the painter or photographer perceives, hence the position from which the picture is painted, the photograph taken. Clearly, I could receive an arbitrarily large number of qualitatively different pictures and photographs all of which depict an instantiation of D, and all equally adequate as depictions of instantiations of D. Arbitrarily many qualitatively different pictures could present one and the same conceptual content as satisfied by the different scenes depicted. No conceptual content, no matter how rich and diverse, can so fix all the details of a scene instantiating it that there can be no difference between scenes depicted, hence between perceptions or pictures of these scenes.

12 See above, note 10.

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Let us now imagine, thirdly, that the purely discursive, purely conceptual description D applies to a scene I have recently seen. Let us also imagine, fourthly, that one of the photographs given to me by my suppliers depicts precisely this scene.13 That is, it depicts precisely the house I saw in precisely that setting in which I saw it under precisely those perspectival, contextual and subjective conditions under which I saw it. Although all the pictures and photographs I have received depict equally adequate embodiments of D, I will nonetheless immediately pick out this one picture as presenting what I saw then. What enables me to do this? Obviously not the fact that I know D to be true of what, objectively speaking, I saw since ex hypothesi all pictures depict instantiations of D equally well. But neither can it be that I know some extended description D + F (where F is some further conceptual determination) to be true of what I saw since conceivably any number of the pictures and photographs I have received (or might receive) could be qualitatively different depictions of different scenes which nonetheless all satisfy D + F. As we have already seen, no conceptual content, no matter how much it is augmented, can fix all the details of a scene instantiating it to the point where this possibility is excluded. So what enables me to pick out this one picture as depicting what I actually saw? What enables me to form the belief 14 that what the picture in question depicts is what I saw then, the referent of a certain past perceptual experience of mine and thus the referent of all empirical beliefs which depend for the identifiability of their referents upon this perceptual experience? I am able to do this because I am able vividly to recollect what the house I saw “looked like”, that is, how it instantiated D (or at least some sufficient part thereof ) as perceived from where I perceived it and in the particular circumstances in which I perceived it. No amount of pure knowing-that, no matter how extensive, suffices for my ability to identify what the picture depicts as what I saw. Rather, I must also know what it is like for something to satisfy D, indeed what it was like for what I saw to satisfy it. In other words, I am able to make my identification because I do not know simply that, but know, in vivid recollection quite different from 13 Or for that matter a scene qualitatively identical with, but in fact numerically distinct from, the scene I actually say. Nothing in this argument depends on whether I correctly identify the scene depicted as the one I saw. 14 Naturally, this belief could be false. Whether the identity I come to believe or assert is true or not is irrelevant to the issue at hand.

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memory in the sense in which I remember that the Battle of Hastings occurred in 1066, how what I saw satisfied, and showed itself as satisfying, D (as perceived from such and such a position in such and such perceptual circumstances). What I recollect is, of course, precisely the intentional content of my original past experience and this recollection enables me to recognise in the picture when I see it the general form or type of the intentional content of my past perceptual experience – that content which sets my experience apart from all others as the perceptual experience that it is. The role the picture plays in my identification, a role which no mere form of words could ever assume, thus confirms that the intentional content of both my recollection and the original perceptual experience from which it derives exceeds any purely discursive, hence purely conceptual characterisation of it. I see in the picture the general form of how what I saw instantiated, and perceptually appeared to me from such and such a position under such and such circumstances as instantiating, the description D. In cruder words, the picture replicates the character of my perceptual experience as revealing how something is what it is. And only because it does this am I able to make such claims as “This is (identical with) what I saw then”. The role the picture plays thus testifies to the character of my perceptual experience as a matter of perceiving how certain things there are, and show themselves from here as being, what they are.15 Note that my ability to identify in this one picture a house and landscape which I have actually seen does not strictly require that I should have seen the house in its setting as fulfilling (in a certain objectively, contextually and subjectively conditioned way) D in its entirety. Detectives not infrequently ask witnesses to revisit the crime scene and retrace their movements in it in the hope that the witnesses will recall things they did not become aware of when they perceived the crime scene. Thus, Jones, while retracing his movements, might suddenly recall there having been a now absent handkerchief bearing the initials N.N. lying on the floor next to the telephone table when he ran to the phone to ring the ambulance. It just is a phenomenologically ascertaina15 Note that this is not at all to construe perceptual experience as a matter of ‘pictures in the mind’. From the outset the particular accomplishment of my pictures and photographs has been characterised by appeal to the notion of perceptual experience. So little, therefore, does anything said here entail that perceptual experiences are ‘pictures in the mind’ that it actually assumes the inverse order of explication: ‘pictorial’ intentionality must be explicated by appeal to the concept of perceptual experience.

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ble fact about perception that it contains an indefinite amount of further information about the entities perceived over and above what, as a matter of fact, these entities are perceived as being – information that the perceiver can, at least insofar as it is capable of self-conscious, first person reflection, subsequently unpack or lay out (auslegen). So my description D might well be something I have arrived at precisely in and through unpacking my original perception of the house in its setting: originally I saw simply a house with a red roof and large green trees on the side, but subsequent reflection on this experience yields recognition that the roof was tiled, the trees eucalypts, etc. For this reason, my original perception may have had as its original conceptual content only some proper part of D – and yet I would still see in the picture presented to me how the house I actually saw instantiated, and showed itself to me as instantiating, this proper part of D. In what sense, then, is such further information implicit in my original perceiving? It is implicit precisely in the sense that it is contained not in the conceptual content of the act – that as which I see what I see – but in the ‘how’ in which I see what I see (as satisfying this conceptual content). Thus, perhaps originally I merely saw how a white house stands there, with a red roof and large green trees on the side. But when I reflect on how I saw this – how the clearly discursive content “a white house standing there, with a red roof and large green trees on its side” was made true by what I saw under the perspectival, contextual and subjective conditions under which I saw it – , I will extract from this the knowledge that the roof was tiled, the trees eucalypts, or indeed that I was seeing the house from the front. So what I unpack in this process of laying out my original perception is how more specifically (than in the actual conceptual content of my perceiving) the object of my perceiving objectively is what it is. But this example, too, illustrates the point made previously that such unpacking is only possible because the ‘how’ of perception does not merely have an objective, but also a ‘subjective’ sense or dimension. For this unpacking of how the house is what it is relies on how the house in its setting appears to me, that is, on the ‘how’ of perceptual givenness: it is only because the red of the house’s roof appears as it does that, on reflection, I recognise that the roof is in fact tiled. For the particular shading of the uniform red of the roof is, of course, due amongst other things to the shape and texture of the items out of which it is made, namely, tiles. And it is only because of the way the trees at the house’s side appear to me as trees that I subsequently recognise them to be eucalypts; the particular profile

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in which the trees appeared to me from where I stood is due, after all, to their possessing that distinctive kind of objective shape which singles them out as eucalypts. Finally, it is only because the house itself appears as it does that I subsequently recognise it to have its front side turned towards me. With this, we see that the fundamentally relational, perspectivally, contextually and subjectively determined way in which entities appear to me as what they are – a way of appearing which I can only aesthetically re-present, by showing another what it was like – , enables perceiving to present all those more specific objective features, properties and relations of things which I certainly can unpack discursively and which constitute how specifically and possibly quite uniquely the entities I perceive are what I initially perceive them to be. And so it is only in virtue of having this intuitive, non-discursive, hence non-conceptual character that my perceivings enable me genuinely to identify, distinguish and re-identify the referents of my strictly discursive intentional states, experiences and indeed speech acts. In other words, it is only because of its intuitive (anschaulichen), non-discursive character that my perception genuinely acquaints me with the referents of my empirical thoughts, therein putting me in touch with the world of these referents. At this juncture, a point already made needs to be reinforced. For perhaps one might want to conclude from the kind of argument just given not just that perceptual experience is contentful in a non-conceptual way, but that it is only contentful in this way. In other words, perhaps one might want to conclude that perceptual experience is only ever non-conceptually contentful. This would be wrong. The non-conceptual contentfulness of perceptual experience which this argument reveals essentially presupposes a conceptual contentfulness; in this sense, it is precisely a not even notionally separable contribution to a co-operation with ‘spontaneity’. There can be no perspectivally, contextually and subjectively conditioned way in which an entity appears to me unless there is something as which it appears to me (in this way). Perceptual appearings are, as we have already pointed out, appearings of something, and this is only because they are appearings of something as something. As soon as one denies them this ‘as’-character or -structure, the claim of perceptual appearings to epistemic relevance evaporates and perceptual appearings themselves are well on their way to becoming mere sensations. Of course, once they have been reduced to sensations, sense data and the like, they can occur, if at all, only on the margins of consciousness in any epis-

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temically relevant sense, precisely as items mediating causally between perceptual belief or judgement and the external causes thereof. As soon as one has thus assimilated perceptual appearance to sensation, one has, in effect, collapsed back into that generic conception of perceptual experience which underlies both Davidsonian coherentism and the Myth of the Given (since both maintain that perception is some non-conceptual item causing perceptual belief or judgement, the latter disagreeing with the former only in holding that the causality in question is rational). And this underlying generic conception of perceptual experience does precisely what McDowell says it does: it undermines, or fails to secure, thought’s bearing on reality in all its senses, narrow, wider and widest. Perceptual experience only genuinely acquaints me with the referents of my empirical thoughts insofar as its intuitive, non-discursive, non-conceptual character is inseparably intertwined with a conceptual character. Only insofar as perception is such a unity can it make identification and re-identification of referents possible, thereby securing this particular sense in which empirical thought, or rather empirical thinking, bears on empirical reality. Only so can it put me in touch with reality, that is, ensure that my empirical thinking is able genuinely to respond to, and revise itself in the light of, how things actually are. iii. Perception, Sensation, Recollection – Some Ancillary Considerations There are some ancillary reasons for thinking that there must be a kind of perceptual experience in which the conceptual and the non-conceptual – what traditionally but also very misleadingly has been called sensation – are inseparably intertwined. For surely, only if one conceives perceptual experience as a matter of things looking thus and so (in a quite non-Sellarsian sense), in which the sensual quality of perceptual experience is integrated into the internal structure and content of such experience, can one explain the phenomenon Evans marked with his notion of belief-independence. On the face of it, there appears to be nothing wrong with the suggestion that, under certain no doubt rather unusual circumstances, I can become or remain aware of how the sentence “an oasis stretches out there left and right before me” might be perceptually taken wrongly to apply there even though I have been told that there is no oasis there at all. This kind of thing is most likely to occur in sub-optimal perceptual

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circumstances. Thus, while walking with my dogs one day, I thought I saw, from some way off and through the fence and bushes, my neighbour’s dog peering at us from behind a small wattle tree. On coming closer, I saw that what I took to be the head of my neighbour’s dog was in fact the stump of a branch which had been cut off the wattle tree. Yet I could still in a certain sense see the branch stump as my neighbour’s dog peering at us, at least in the sense that I could see how in the circumstances one could be led to think that this is what one was perceiving. Indeed, this conception of perceptual experience appears able to explain another, related phenomenon: under certain circumstances, having mistakenly perceived how an oasis stretches out there before me, I might then perceive how the air is shimmering there in the heat before me. Yet in some sense, the sensual, qualitative character of both experiences remains the same. So the conceptual character of a perceptual experience can vary relative to its sensual, qualitative character – to what, or so one might misleadingly say, the former ‘apprehends’ or even ‘interprets’. Of course, it would be wrong to conclude from this that these characters could vary in complete independence of one another – as if any sensual character could be given any conceptual ‘apprehension’ or ‘interpretation’. This is in fact not really true even of the duck/rabbit kind of case which one is notoriously prone to adduce at this point – in blithe disregard of the fact that in these kinds of case neither ducks nor rabbits are being perceived at all, but merely at one moment a crude representation of a duck, at another a crude representation of a rabbit. But however things may be with duck/rabbits, the real-life sensual character of true perceptual experience has (a) such a completeness and fullness to it; and (b) occurs, so essentially integrated into an ongoing temporal flow of intentional experience, that arbitrary switches of interpretation are precluded.16 Of course, none of this entails that the sensual, qualitative character of perceptual experience can occur ‘in consciousness’ independently of any conceptual character at all, hence be referred to, or picked out, as 16 Cf. Husserl: “Indeed, in performing phenomenological reduction we obtain the general essential insight that the object tree in a perception can only appear at all as being objectively how it appears in this perception as determined if the hyletic moments [the sensually impressional character of a perception] … are precisely these ones and no others. Consequently, every change of the hyletic content of a perception, insofar as it does not simply undermine perceptual consciousness completely, must at least result in that which appears becoming something objectively “other”, whether in itself, or in respect of the orientation in which it appears to us, or some other way.” (Husserl 1992a, § 97, H 227)

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‘an item in consciousness’ in its own right. Is, then, this further claim true? Consider the following case: one night, while sleeping in a strange house, I am awakened by what I might retrospectively describe as a pitterpatter. Because I am in a strange house, and because I have just been roused from sleep, I am rather disoriented, so much so that I do not immediately gather my wits. So, having been roused by the pitter-patter, this is all I so to speak hear it as. Of course, no sooner have I shaken my drowsiness off and reflected a little than I realise that what I am hearing is rain hitting the tin roof of the house. It is tempting to interpret this kind of case as follows:17 before I come to full consciousness, before I reflect, I am not really hearing anything at all, but simply experiencing the sensually impressional character possessed by what, upon reflection, I realise to be rain hitting the tin roof. If this is right, then I can experience (in the German sense of erleben) the sensual character which would normally occur only in integral unity with some such conceptual content as is expressed by the sentence “rain is hitting the tin roof there above me” independently, not just of this particular conceptual content, but of any such content. For such apparently good, that is to say, apparently accurate phenomenological reasons, the claim that the sensual, qualitative character can occur ‘in consciousness’ independently of anything conceptual might appear to be true. Yet the suggestion that the sensual, qualitative character of perceptual experience could be independent in the manner presupposed by this idea must render it an object in, hence potentially for, consciousness. Surely, then, it would have be something which one could refer to, and pick out as, an item in one’s consciousness, not just in the curious, non-standard kind of case just considered, but whenever I might undergo a perceptual experience with this sensually impressional character. It is, however, false that whenever I undergo perceptual experience, I can identify some discrete sensual or qualitative character in the way in which I can identify and even, in a certain sense, describe an ache, pain or tickle I am currently undergoing. Clearly, this suggestion is tacitly assimilating the sensual, qualitative character of full-fledged perceptual experience to what is properly called sensation. Something has gone awry in the initial phenomenological interpretation from which the suggestion draws its motivation. 17 The account given of this kind of case in Christensen 1993 succumbs to this temptation.

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Nor is it hard to see what has gone awry: it is simply not true that in the example I am merely experiencing, on its own, the sensually impressional, qualitative side of the full perceptual experience I would have had had I been less disoriented. For it is simply not true that what I undergo in my disoriented condition lacks all “intentional relation to an object.” As this very form of words indicates, what I retrospectively describe as a pitter-patter is not (just) some subjective process occurring in me; rather, these words are intended to capture precisely how something or other out or rather up there sounded, something I initially know not what, but which I later realise to be rain hitting the tin roof up there. As disoriented by sleep and the strangeness of my surroundings as I am, I am still hearing something as something, namely, a pitter-pattering up there, even though the ‘how’ of my perceptual experience is attenuated and does not go beyond how this objective reality is affecting me – for which reason I hear it only as something very indeterminate, a mere pitter-pattering up there. This suggests the following more sophisticated interpretation of what is going on when I have this curious but not uncommon kind of experience: I am definitely hearing something, that is, definitely undergoing something with “intentional relation to an object.” (Note that I can still definitely assign a location distinct from mine to the pitter patter: “It’s coming from up there.”) But I am not hearing anything definite or determinate; I am simply hearing how something up there is occurring. It is not that I am undergoing something which lacks conceptual character, but rather that its conceptual character is highly indeterminate. Precisely this indeterminateness explains why, insofar as I wish to know more about just what is taking place up there, I must appeal to how it sounds, that is, affects me aurally. In other words, having undergone, or at least begun to undergo, this kind of perceptual experience, I am forced precisely by its conceptually impoverished but by no means conceptually empty character to appeal retrospectively to the causal transaction between what is taking place up there and myself as the only resource available for determining just what is taking place up there (and affecting me in this way). Its conceptually impoverished character throws me retrospectively back upon its sensual character, which is in this case, given its conceptually impoverished character, nothing more than a matter of how something up there affects me – precisely how it sounded (or has been sounding), that is, aurally appeared to me. (So the sensual character of this impoverished experience is itself impoverished!)

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The example does not, therefore, show the sensual, qualitative character of perceptual experience to be capable of occurring ‘in consciousness’ independently of any conceptual character at all. And of course it could not show this. For to interpret the example as showing that the sensually impressional and conceptual characters of perceptual experience can come apart would be to tacitly undermine the claim of both to be mutually supporting, complementary moments of a non-aggretative unity. With this, one would have lapsed back into conceptions of perceptual experience of a kind already argued to be defective. Note, incidentally, how the more sophisticated interpretation and diagnosis just given intimates an important general conclusion: only in retrospectively looking back on a perceptual experience I have just undergone (or have begun to undergo) of how such and such is objectively the case can I become explicitly aware of how what is objectively the case affected or is affecting me, i. e., how it causally impacted or is impacting upon me. Awareness (interpretation) of oneself as being causally affected by things distinct from, indeed external to one presupposes awareness (interpretation) of oneself as perceiving (how things are what they are), so it must be false to maintain that the latter could be explicated in terms of the former. Note, too, that the correctness of this more sophisticated interpretation is shown by the very point of the kind of description I undertake when I describe what I heard as a pitter-patter, or indeed, of the kind of ‘aesthetic’ showing I engage in when I mimic what I heard by drumming with my fingertips on the tabletop. For in uttering these words, or in making these finger movements, I am clearly trying to convey to another precisely how I was affected by what I heard. That this is what I am trying to accomplish is indicated by the fact that I could, in principle, be doing either of these things in order to get another to recognise what I do not, namely, what I heard, so that this person might then inform me. There is another issue, and thus another kind of example, to consider concerning the precise status of the sensual or qualitative character of perceptual experience: while looking out into the garden one night I might take myself to see a man moving about in the garden. On closer inspection, I realise that I did not in fact see or in any way perceive a man moving about there in the garden. Rather I saw, I perceived a bush moving about there in the wind, which I took to be a man moving about in

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the garden. So perception has a quasi-de re character:18 to be perceiving, there must be something which one is perceiving, even if one is in fact misperceiving it. For this reason, when I am subject to the kind of perceptual illusion of which mirages are examples, I am not perceiving at all, although I might be wrongly taken, either by me myself or by someone else interpreting me, to be perceiving. The account given here of the intentional structure of perceptual experience is well able to explain this quasi-de re character. For as we shall only see in full detail in Part II, the very character of a perceptual experience had by a self-conscious, rationally responsive subject S as a perceiving how such and such is the case entails the real possibility of S’s interacting in certain ways intimated by the conceptual character of the perceptual experience itself with what it is perceiving there. So the perceptual experience itself, as opposed to the mere semblance of such experience, only exists if there is something there to interact with in the way predelineated by the experience itself – which interaction of course confirms or disconfirms the character of the experience as veridical. Thus, I see what I take to be a man in the garden, but then doubt arises. And now my experience itself tells me what I need to do: I need to get closer to what I see. When I do so, I realise that in fact I merely saw a bush moving in the wind. One reason why this explanation is attractive lies in its intimating that the quasi-de re character of perceptual experience derives from the role it plays in enabling one and the same subject to track one and the same object across time – in the example, for the sake of confirming or disconfirming an initial perceptual experience. For this suggests that there might be a conceptual connection between perceiving, at a point in time, something as thus and so (in a certain subjectively, contextually and objectively modulated mode of givenness), and perceiving it as either it or the perceiver changes over time. Finally, let us conclude this part of our discussion by indicating another consideration in favour of this conception of perceptual experience, or rather, of perceptual intentional content. Recollection in the sense in which I vividly recollect the brilliantly illuminated theatre I went to yes18 Only quasi-de re because being de re is, strictly speaking, a property of reports about intentional phenomena, not a property of intentional phenomena themselves – see Searle 1983, esp. Ch.VII. The classic, because unambiguous form of such reports is “S believes (or desires or perceives, etc.) of A that it is V”. Often, reports of intentional phenomena can be ambiguous. Thus, sometimes one can intend the report “S saw A breaking into the house” to be taken in a way which would permit one to add “But S did not realise that it was A.”

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terday evening must obviously be distinguished from remembering in the strictly discursive, propositional sense in which I remember or, as one certainly may also say, recall that the Battle of Hastings occurred in 1066. Recollection in the former sense is somehow a matter of calling back past perceptual experience of some entity rather than simply or solely the entity perceived. Yet it would be wrong to say that I recall my perceiving of the brilliantly illuminated theatre. Quite apart from the fact that a vicious infinite regress may be lurking in this way of factoring reference to past perceptual experience into one’s account of recollection, it clearly does not do the job. For when I recall the brilliantly illuminated theatre I went to yesterday evening, I obviously do not recall or recollect that I perceived the (or a certain) brilliantly illuminated theatre yesterday evening. The task of securing a difference to recalling or remembering that such and such is the case has not really been addressed. It seems, then, that in order to secure this difference one must characterise the kind of recall or recollection at issue here in such a way that its content somehow hovers between the purely subjective and the purely objective. Here, ordinary, pre-philosophical usage provides a guide: it is quite acceptable to say that I recall how the theatre I went to, indeed saw, last night was brilliantly illuminated – a recalling-how which distinguishes itself from recalling- or remembering-that precisely in the sense that it represents (a) how, on this particular occasion, the conceptual content “the theatre I went to, indeed saw last night was brilliantly illuminated” was objectively true – there were more lights at the top than at the sides – ; and (b) how, partly but not exclusively as a causal result of the facts grounding (a), the entity which satisfies this conceptual content perceptually appeared to me. In order to do justice, therefore, to the intentional structure, not just of perception, but of recollection in the ‘vivid’, aesthetic rather than the colourless, apophantic sense, we need the notion of an intentional content in and to which receptivity and spontaneity make not even notionally separable contributions of the kind described and justified across this section.

§ 2: Perception as Rationalising rather than Justifying The general idea underlying the alternative, non-Davidsonian conception of perceptual experience just outlined is that in order for perceptual experience to enable intelligently context-sensitive, self-regulating behaviour, as well as self-consciously context-sensitive, hence rationally self-reg-

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ulating behaviour, it must not simply present certain things as thus and so, but do so in a potentially introspectable manner conditioned by the following three things: (i) the particular nature of the subject of perception, including its objective location vis--vis the things perceived and, of course, its own subjective (psycho-physiological) constitution; (ii) the objective context in which perception occurs, e. g., patterns of illumination; and (iii) the particular nature of the objects perceived themselves, e. g., the fact that the mountain range is, objectively speaking, obtusely jagged even though it appears acutely jagged from here. If perception did not convey objective information in such potentially introspectable, subjectively, contextually and objectively conditioned ways – if it lacked that ‘here-there’ character in virtue of which it is not simply indexical but demonstrative in the sense of being the appearing of something there to the perceiving subject here – , then it could not place the subject of perception in relation to how things objectively are, hence could not enable intelligent, context-sensitive behaviour with regard to how things objectively are. If, however, perceptual experience, in conveying what is objectively the case, must also convey how what is the case is the case, hence how it appears to be the case, then we must construe perceptual experience not as a matter of one discrete event (sensation) causing another (perceptual belief or judgement), but as one single, sensually yet also conceptually contentful event whose contentfulness eludes propositional representation according to the schema ‘that p’. For what so to speak embeds the conceptual content of perceptual experience into the entire experience is a ‘how’ rather than a ‘that’. What, then, of the role perceptual experience clearly must play in the provision of reasons for empirical belief and action? Let us return to Davidson’s dog. When considering this example, we noted how we were able, by ascribing to the dog aural perception of a ringing bell, to rationalise the dog’s salivation. In other words, we were able to cognise it as an intelligible behavioural response by a genuinely perceiving, desiring subject to an item in the “actual environment” – an item to which, given certain desires and interests, it makes sense to respond in this way. In this sense, then, the dog’s perceptual experience rationalises the behaviour displayed by the dog (and also caused, of course, by the perceptual experience). Yet this is not to say that the dog’s perceptual experience is in any way itself, or in any way provides the dog with, a reason for salivating. Nor does this have anything to do with the limitations of canine intentionality, in particular, the fact that dogs neither wield the concept of a

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reason nor indeed self-consciously wield any concepts at all. For the situation would not be essentially different in our own case: had we been conditioned to respond to a bell’s ringing in the manner of the dog, the same could be said of us. In our case, too, perceptual experience would not actually be or give a reason for salivating. We, too, would simply salivate, just as automatically and possibly as uncontrollably as the dog; no inferences would be taking place, conscious or unconscious, and so no actual reason (in the secondary, derivative sense distinguished in Chapter One) would be, or be given to us, in our cognitive economy. This indicates that one must distinguish between (a) the claim that perceptual experience rationalises behaviour (for an interpreter of this behaviour, whether this be the behaver itself or someone else); and (b) the claim that such experience is a reason for belief or action. Of perceptual experience in the sense at issue here, in which receptivity makes a not even notionally separable contribution to a co-operation with spontaneity, the former is always, the latter never the case because it lacks the crucial structure required for being a reason for belief or action (in the secondary sense): it is not an essentially truth-claiming cognitive state or experience, it is not contentful in any ‘judgemental’ sense, and does not instantiate the schema ‘that p’. As has been argued above, the truly definitive function and role of perceptual experience is to convey how things are (what they are), rather than simply that they are (what they are). Yet while this prevents such perception from being a reason for belief and action, it does not entail the falsity of describing it as something which conveys information to higher order cognitive processes. Consequently, it does not prevent such perceptual experience from giving, in the shape of perceptual belief or judgement, a reason for belief and action. After all, that perceptual experience should in certain cases be a matter of perceiving how rather than that p need not prevent it from engendering the perceptual belief or judgement that p. 19 Indeed, it clearly must 19 This is not to imply that such engendering, such ‘giving’ of reasons for belief and judgement, must be brutely causal. In fact, the causal relation here rests on the distinctive character of perceptual experience as fulfilling ‘signitive’, i. e., doxastic or apophantic forms of intentionality. Perceptual experience, because it is a matter of perceiving how things are what they are, can show how a certain sentence applies here and now. As such, it both supplies the merely linguistically meaningful sentence with a specific content – an occasional meaning in Grice’s sense – and exhibits the truth of this sentence under this interpretation (Deutung) or, as one might also say, in this application. This is not a matter of grounding either

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possess this capacity: although, on the account advanced here, such perceptual experience would not itself be a ‘truth-claiming’ intentional experience, its ascription would by its very nature presuppose that the ascriber (who need not be the perceiver itself ) could give some account of why, were one the perceiver, it would be rational to possess the perceptual belief or to make the perceptual judgement to which the perceptual experience could potentially lead. The fact that perceptual experience, when conceived as a unity of the conceptual and non-conceptual of the kind indicated, could no longer itself constitute a reason (in the secondary sense) for belief and action confirms that we have reached a conception of perceptual experience substantively, and not merely verbally, different from Davidson’s. This fact alone thus confirms that McDowell’s talk of perceptual experience as a co-operation between receptivity and spontaneity in which the former makes no inseparable contribution either comes to this or amounts to nothing much at all. Talk of perceptual impressions that p, such as we find particularly in McDowell 1998a, must be an oxymoron deriving from the prejudices McDowell shares with Davidson and the Myth of the Given. Only by giving the sensually or qualitatively impressional character of perceptual experience a genuine role in making a perceptual impression what it is, that is, in making it able to do what perceptual impressions naturally do, can one genuinely integrate it into the very fabric of perceptual experience. And only if one thus integrates the sensually impressional into perceptual experience does one secure real difference to Davidson, for unless the inseparable contribution which receptivity makes to its co-operation with spontaneity possesses a Peircean firstness, there is no genuine difference between perceptual impression and Davidsonian perceptual belief. Integrating this contribution of receptivity into the very contentfulness of perceptual experience requires one, however, to renounce the prejudice that conceptual content is always propositional content, hence always representable by the schema ‘that p’.

the sentence or the proposition expressed by this sentence. Rather it is something complementary to, and, on pain of infinite regress or ungroundedness, presupposed by, all relations of premise to conclusion. For it is a matter of showing entitlement to take a certain sentence, as applied here and now, or again, a certain proposition, as a reason for belief and judgement (in the primary sense). Husserl calls this entitlement ‘evidence’ and the experience of it – the self-conscious having of perceptual experience as showing this entitlement – the experience of evidence. We investigate these matters more fully in Part II.

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§ 3: The Right Kind of Confinement There is and must be, we have argued, perceptual experience in which things show themselves to a perceiver as thus and so in a certain subjectively, contextually and objectively conditioned mode of perceptual givenness. If, however, this is so, then such perceptual experience bears within itself a distinction between how reality objectively is and how it subjectively affects one: its very intentional structure entails not just that there is such a distinction to be made from outside, by another, but that perceptual experience is so structured as to enable its subject to make it. Such perceptual experience itself entitles the philosopher to say that perceptual experience is necessarily something caused here by that there in the one shared “actual environment”, the one shared spatiotemporal world. Of course, as the demonstrative singular term ‘that there’ indicates, the outer in question here (the “actual environment”, external reality, indeed the world) connotes the totality of possible objects of empirical reference – all those items which perception in some, possibly quite indirect way, makes available to empirical thinking. And the inner connotes the domain of empirical thinking itself, which is, as the demonstrative adverb ‘here’ indicates, enclosed by an outer of that perceptual and intentional rather than causal character which is indicated by the demonstrative adverb of place ‘there’.20 There is therefore a quite harmless sense in which one can speak of perception as something caused at, or just inside, a border between inner and outer, by things outside, and itself in turn causing further things further inside. The reason why this kind of “confinement imagery” is harmless is not hard to find: the inner is linked to the outer via perception rather than causation. In other words, the empirical reality upon which empirical thinking bears but which also contains it is understood from the outset to be that order which exists insofar as how external things perceptually appear to the subject of perception and empirical intentionality generally is, by and large, how they actually are. This is not simply the world which strikes the believer, but the world insofar as it strikes the believer, that is, the subject of perception and empirical intentionality. As such, the outer empirical reality which encompasses inner empirical thinking is primarily the world in the perceptual and intentional sense, not the world in the sense of that in which the causes of percep20 Now, of course, one can go on to say that the inner is located in whatever one currently holds to be the seat of thinking, the phrenes, the brain, or whatever.

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tual experience, hence of empirical intentionality more generally, occur. It is and is understood to be the latter only secondarily.21 If, however, this is so, then to insist, as McDowell frequently does,22 that the outer boundary between empirical thinking and the world must deleted entirely cannot be right. McDowell tends to call for the complete elimination of “confinement imagery” whenever he is thinking the thought which “…. Hegel tries to capture with the image of Reason as subject to no external constraint – the rejection of a sideways-on standpoint for philosophy … .” (McDowell 1998a, p. 490) But McDowell himself senses that this is not right, for at one point he concedes there to be a sense in which “confinement imagery” yields what he calls “the innocuous sideways-on picture,” (McDowell 1994b, p. 35) hence is harmless. So Davidson’s general idea of rendering such imagery harmless must be correct: in order to expose the usual sceptical questions as muddled, and to explicate what it is for empirical thinking to bear on the world, it suffices to appreciate that an otherwise harmless picture of the inner as enclosed by the outer (with perception mediating between the two) has been corrupted by certain substantive assumptions that are not at all uncontroversial commonplaces. In fact, the picture of empirical thinking as an inner realm enclosed by an outer realm which announces itself in the shape of perceptual experience at or just inside the outer periphery will be harmless just in case perceptual experience is conceived in such a way that the picture is entailed by the very structure of perceptual experience itself, such that anyone sufficiently reflective can extract it from this structure and this structure alone. Problems arise, however, if one does not conceive perceptual experience in this reflexive way. And of course this is precisely what has happened throughout the modern philosophical tradition. Thus, both Thomas Reid and Hermann von Helmholtz conceive of perceptual experience as a matter of receiving various merely sensual, hence completely non-conceptual inputs – sensations, sense impressions, sense data, or whatever – which the mind in some way processes into higher order empirical cognition. As soon, however, as one conceives perceptual experience in these traditional terms one must resort to “confinement imagery” of a kind which 21 This secondary status explains why one cannot analyse the notion of perceptual experience in terms of causality – see in this connection Snowdon 1988, esp. pp. 192 – 193. 22 See McDowell 1994b, p. 35; see also p. 138 and p. 179.

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unprejudiced first person reflection on the nature and being of perceptual experience could not motivate. This conception forces a picture of confinement upon perceptual experience whose applicability to such experience is not derivable ‘from within’, that is, solely from the structure of perceptual experience itself. It thus constitutes an externally motivated imposition ‘from without’, that is, from a viciously sideways-on perspective. And now, because the picture has been applied from a standpoint other than that of what it applies to, the empirical reality in which empirical thinking finds itself, while ‘open’, ‘disclosed’ or ‘transparent’ to the imposer of the picture, is not ‘open’, ‘disclosed’ or ‘transparent’ to what the picture is imposed upon. With this, all the usual sceptical questions become live options to be taken seriously. Note now how these considerations intimate there to be, in the midst of significant difference, an initially surprising affinity between Davidson and those influenced by classically empiricist doctrines of the kind just mentioned. Although Davidson rejects the idea that perceptual experience in the completely non-conceptual sense of classical empiricism, Reid, Helmholtz and the like could be reasons for belief; and although he rejects the suggestion that the mind somehow moulds this experience into empirical knowledge by applying a conceptual scheme to it, his account shares one crucial element in common with the more empiricist one. For on his conception of perceptual experience, no less than that endorsed by empiricism, Reid, Helmholtz and the like, none of the items mentioned in it as occurring within the inner realm are themselves so structured internally that they insinuate this conception and their place within it. In the picture of perceptual experience Davidson paints – thing outside causing sensation just inside, which in turn causes perceptual belief or judgement further inside – , none of the inner items is itself so structured that one could derive, simply by reflection on it, this picture itself. And if this is so, then neither does their mere causal coupling insinuate the whole picture in which it occurs. No inner item in the picture, nor indeed any causal coupling of the same, licenses one to paint the picture. So for Davidson as for empiricism, Reid and Helmholtz, perceptual experience does not bear the structure of its confinement on its face. This point intimates something very deep, namely, that Davidson might well have difficulties accounting for how the perceiving subject itself could ever come to apply this picture to itself, that is, understand itself as perceiving in the sense expressed by this picture. More precisely, this point suggests that Davidson will have problems accounting for how a subject of perceptual experience could ever grasp itself as a subject of per-

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ceptual experience and empirical intentionality generally, standing over and against an objective order in which the causes of its perceptual and empirical intentionality are located. We will come back to this in Part II. In the meantime, it suffices to note that not to conceive perceptual experience in Davidsonian terms, or rather, in terms common to Davidson and his more traditionally empiricist opponents, but rather to understand it as a genuine unity of concept and intuition in the sense described above, is to conceive it as bearing its “confinement” on its face. For if, as already intimated, perception is a matter of things showing themselves to us as thus and so in a certain subjectively, contextually and objectively conditioned mode of perceptual givenness, then our subjective, contextual and objective perceptual conditionedness is available to us in and through (at least post factum) reflection on ourselves as perceiving such and such. And now we can think of perception in straightforwardly causal terms, as a matter of things outside of us causing perceptual experience just inside our inner realm or conceptual sphere, thereby causing perceptual belief or judgement further inside, that is, moves within the space of reasons properly contained within our inner realm or conceptual sphere. In other words, a picture of decidedly causal “confinement” emerges – one that is, however, quite harmless. Crucially, this causal picture is harmless precisely because it emerges out of rather than being used to explicate the concept of perceptual experience. In other words, it is harmless precisely because it comes second: neither the inner nor the outer realm enclosing it has been understood solely, hence primarily, in causal terms. Or, to put the same point in another way, the contentfulness of empirical intentionality has not been assumed to be derivative upon, hence explicable in terms of, truth and causation. As interpreters, whether of others or indeed ourselves, we understand the term ‘world’ (or “actual environment”, ‘external reality’, etc.) in that non-Davidsonian, perceptual and intentional sense which we have previously argued to be the real bone of contention in McDowell’s critique of Davidson’s response to the sceptic. For as we have seen, the outer in this harmless sense is, and is understood to be, the totality wherein all possible objects (referents) of the interpretee’s perceptual and perceptually mediated (empirical) intentionality occur, rather than those potential causes of it which we interpreters can observe. Or again, it is the totality of objects (in their capacity as) cognitively available to the interpretee through its perception, rather than the totality of objects (in their capacity as) cognitively available to the interpreter through its perception as the causes of the interpretee’s beliefs and behaviour. The conception of per-

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ceptual experience as a unity of content and intuition in the sense described above in section one therefore entails, and is itself entailed by, the non-, indeed anti-Davidsonian notion of world (or “actual environment”, external reality, etc.). Conversely, to conceive the world as Davidson does is to deny oneself this conception of perceptual experience. And since this conception of perceptual experience is needed in order to accommodate thought’s bearing on reality, to conceive the world as Davidson does is to fail to secure thought’s bearing on reality. With this, our reconstruction expands to encompass McDowell’s specific worries to the effect that Davidson’s account of perceptual experience is insufficient to secure thought’s bearing on reality. Preserving the positive feature of Davidson’s position, namely, his recognition of the worldliness of empirical intentionality, as manifest in his response to external world scepticism, requires one not just to reject his conception of interpretation and content, but also his account of perceptual experience. Yet in rounding off our reconstruction of McDowell’s concerns about Davidsonian coherentism in the manner indicated, we can see two respects in which McDowell’s position requires correction: Firstly, Davidson is right to pursue the strategy of rendering “confinement imagery” harmless, rather than eliminating it entirely, as McDowell mostly, but not entirely, wants to do. Secondly and more importantly, elimination of all “confinement imagery” is not only unnecessary, it is also undesirable. For the conception of perceptual experience which yields harmless “confinement imagery” is a condition of the possibility of being able to distinguish ‘from within’, that is to say, in first person fashion, between things being objectively thus and so and their striking one (in some subjectively, objectively and contextually conditioned fashion) as objectively thus and so. Perceptual experience may therefore have to be a unity of conceptual and non-conceptual, sensually impressional dimensions in the sense outlined in section one in order for one to be able even to grasp the idea of one’s perceptual experiences as items caused inside by certain items outside. Correlatively, perceptual experience, when conceived as such a unity, precisely because it enables one to distinguish between things outside being objectively thus and so and their being perceptually given to one (in a certain subjectively, objectively and contextually conditioned way) as objectively thus as so, may also be a condition of the possibility of being able to distinguish between its being the case that p and its merely seeming to one that p. Perceptual experience, conceived as such unity, would then constitute a condition of the possibility of being able to distinguish between ‘appearance’ and ‘reality’ as Sellars understands this dis-

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tinction, hence between getting things right and getting things wrong. Indeed, it would be a condition of the possibility of self-consciousness as such – something we will return to in Part II.

§ 4: Reality as a Rational Constraint on Empirical Thinking According to McDowell, it is crucial to understand that bit of external empirical reality which causes a (veridical) perceptual experience not simply as providing a reason for belief (in the shape of the perceptual experience it causes), but as actually being this reason for belief itself. On the face of it, this view is strange. For one thing, it appears quite unmotivated: why should securing thought’s bearing on reality, in particular, in such a way that sceptical worries show themselves to be pseudo-problems, require one to understand empirical reality itself as falling within the space of reasons, rather than as merely the causal source of items within the same? For another thing, the view appears to be absurd: propositional contents are reasons in the primary sense, and in consequence, beliefs, judgements and the like are reasons in a secondary sense. But how could anything else, much less bits of external reality, be reasons in either sense? The ultimate explanation of why McDowell champions this idea has to do with those views on content, in particular, the notion of object-dependent thought, which, although they shape the course of Mind and World, are only made truly explicit in the third Woodbridge Lecture – see Lecture III, “Intentionality as a Relation”, McDowell 1998a, pp. 471 – 491. These views, or rather, the so-called disjunctivist notion of perceptual experience which McDowell bases upon them, are examined in the second section of the next chapter. There it is argued that McDowell’s disjunctivist conception of perceptual experience cannot do the job asked of it in Mind and World, in which case it and the views on intentional content which motivate it are superfluous, at least for the purposes of Mind and World. So no further comment shall be made on either here. Instead, we shall simply point out that when thought’s bearing on reality is understood in its true generality, without restriction to the epistemic, a sense emerges in which bits of reality themselves can be rational constraints without having to be reasons. If this is so, then the whole idea of bringing empirical reality itself into the space of reasons can be circumvented, as another case of seeing something important through a glass but darkly.

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For one should indeed be suspicious of the idea that for bits of external reality to be distinctively rational constraints is for them to be reasons. As soon as one understands thought’s bearing on reality in a sufficiently generic sense untrammelled by the traditional privileging of the epistemic, one sees that bits of external reality could not always rationally constrain by being reasons. When attempting to catch a ball, I perceptually track the ball as it flies through the air, adjusting the position and movement of my body precisely according to how it is flying through the air, say, over to my right and towards the boundary of the cricket field I am playing on. This very way of putting things suggests a clear sense in which my behaviour is rationally constrained by how the ball flies through the air: my behaviour across time is a genuine, more or less sensible response to the flight of the ball across time. In other words, my behaviour possesses ineliminably the character of unfolding across time according to how the ball is flying through the air. Such according-to-ness expresses the undeniable fact that my behaviour is essentially assessable or evaluatable according to how well, across time, it culminates in the realisation of the intention guiding it. In this sense, then, of temporal according-toness, the flight of the ball rationally constrains how I am bearing on this particular bit of external reality without its being in any sense a reason for belief or behaviour. This is, of course, not to deny that for interpreters attempting to understand and explain my behaviour the flight of the ball might be a source of numerous reasons (beliefs and judgements) in the sense of justifiers for explanations of my bodily movement and the various twists and turns I take as I move to catch the ball. It is merely to insist that the flight of the ball rationally constrains my behaviour even though it does not do so by causing anything in me which shapes my bodily movement in virtue of being, and being ‘processed’ by me as being, a reason for such movement. Of course, the beliefs which my interpreters acquire do not merely explain the twists and turns of my body, they also justify it; they explain not just why I did what I did, but also why I was right to do what I did. This is precisely how the character of the relevant bits of reality as constraining me in an objectively rational, more than brutely causal sense manifests itself for someone engaged in self-conscious, explicit interpretation of me and my behaviour. But in order to engage in this behaviour, I do not need to have or acquire these reasons, these justificatory explanations and explanatory justifications. Importantly, the character of my interpreter’s explanations as justifying my bodily movements in a way in which explanations of, say, the

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movements of a particle in a fluctuating electromagnetic field would not justify the particle’s movements, shows that it would be wrong to regard this sense in which reality itself rationally constrains behaviour as a purely derivative one that can be analysed away in terms of my undoubted ability retrospectively to provide the same kind of explanatory account, to form the same kinds of explanatory belief, as my interpreter. In fact, both the success and the intelligibility of the explanation rest upon the intrinsically rational character of my behaviour across time as a more or less sensible or suitable responding to the flight of the ball. Consequently, there can be nothing problematic in the suggestion that bits of reality can, in this non-logical but still rational sense, constrain behaviour even when the behaver in question is not capable, even retrospectively, of wielding the concept of a reason. My dog Ernie can perceptually track a ball as it flies through the air, adjusting the position and movement of his body until he is able to catch the ball. (Indeed, he is much better at this than me.) Yet Ernie, unlike me, does not and cannot wield the concept of a reason at all. In recognition of this difference let us say that his behaviour is an intelligently self-regulating rather than a potentially self-evaluating, retrospectively reason-wielding responsiveness to the flight of the ball. Even so, the flight of the ball is just as much a rationalising constraint on Ernie’s behaviour as it is on mine. No more than I does Ernie behave like a sophisticated American cruise missile as it homes in over hundreds of kilometres on its target. But in what way precisely do Ernie and I, when attempting to catch our respective balls, differ from the cruise missile? That is, in virtue of what is the flight of the ball a rational constraint on Ernie and me while the terrain over which the cruise missile flies is merely a causal constraint on it? It follows from the critique given in the previous chapter of Davidson’s account of interpretation that we must typically and originally identify the causes of perception and behavioural response by identifying the objects, hence contents of perception and behavioural response. We must therefore identify the causes of perception and behaviour via their identity as what the behaver is perceiving and behaviourally responding more or less suitably or intelligibly to, given the goal to which behaviour is essentially and internally directed. The character of bits of reality as that according to which behaviour more or less adequately occurs is thus prior to its character as causing behaviour, whether brutely or rationally, that is, through the provision of reasons. Now the cruise missile and its behaviour is certainly goal-directed, and indeed even in its case we could pick out what is causing it to

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move one way rather than another by understanding just what kind of behaviour it is ‘engaged in’, i. e., what external purpose it is serving. But of course this just brings out the point of difference between Ernie and me on the one hand, and the cruise missile on the other: the goal of the latter’s behaviour, with reference indeed to which we might identify what is causing it to do one thing rather than another, is not internal to the behaver itself, but rather is in fact the goal inherent in some quite distinct stretch of intentional behaviour, namely, the behaviour of firing it in order to destroy such and such a building. In fact, it would be more correct to describe this latter genuinely intentional behaviour as that of attempting to destroy such and such a building by striking it with a cruise missile – in which case the behaviour of the cruise missile is reduced to the status of a mere proper part of the genuinely intentional behaviour. And this indicates that to pick the guided missile out as a guided missile behaving as guided missiles do is precisely to see its behaviour as merely causally constrained by the terrain to achieve a goal external to it – however much the physical characteristics of the behaviour of the missile may resemble the physical characteristics of the behaviour of, say, a homing pigeon. For indeed in this case the only thing that is rationally constrained in the way in which the behaviours of Ernie and me are rationally constrained is the total intentional behaviour of the people who fired the cruise missile (which includes, of course, the behaviour of the missile itself, much as the trajectory of a ball bowled at a wicket is part of the intentional behaviour of attempting to bowl the batsman out). And the bit of reality which is the rational constraint is not the lie of the land over which the missile flies, but precisely the missile’s flying over this land (which is, of course, a constraint on the activity of the operators and designers of the missile). By contrast, the goal that Ernie and I are pursuing when attempting to catch our respective balls is internal to the very identity of the behaviour we are individually engaged in. One can therefore say that in each of our cases a bit of external empirical reality is itself a rational constraint on intentional behaviour in the sense that it determines such behaviour to be or not to be as it should, given how it itself is, and given what this behaviour is, i. e., what purpose it is inherently an attempt to serve. In order to have a name for this sense in which a bit of reality might be a rational constraint, hence constitute responsiveness to it as at least intelligent, let us say that a bit of reality acts as a standard or yardstick for empirical thinking (in the most generic sense).

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Of course, when the behaver itself understands external empirical reality as determining that behaviour is or is not ‘on track’, relative to the purpose of behaviour, so much so that the bit of reality in question only causally constrains behaviour in virtue of its character as such a yardstick, we may understand the behaver to be responding to reality not merely intelligently, but in rationally self-evaluating fashion. At this point, the situation upon which McDowell is exclusively focussed, in which a bit of reality constrains by providing the behaver with reasons for belief and behaviour then turns out to be a special case of rational constraint in the sense of being a yardstick. Moreover, it turns out to presuppose this generic, ‘yardstick’ sense in which reality itself shapes behaviour in objectively rational fashion. For in all cases of intelligent, context-sensitive behavioural response, the bit of reality contraining such behavioural response rationalises it, while in some cases – those in which behavioural response is distinctively rational and self-conscious – it does so in virtue of rationalising it. In the latter case, of course, the behaver is aware of reality as thus rationalising behaviour. Crucially, however, only because and insofar as it is aware of reality as a rationalising yardstick can it grasp the perceptual experience with which reality is providing it as yielding reasons for the cognitive and behavioural responses it is making. This generic ‘yardstick’ sense in which reality is an objectively rational constraint on empirical thinking is, unlike the most generic sense in which one can speak of empirical thinking and its bearing on reality, not in Davidson. After all, Davidson seeks to give an adequate account of what it is for empirical thinking, most generically understood, to bear upon reality which dispenses with the idea of reality as confronting one in anything more than a causal sense. Interestingly, what explains the presence of the one generic sense also explains the absence of the other. On the one hand, Davidson’s anti-subjectivist attempt to construe our concepts of the propositional attitudes as primarily notions wielded by an interpreter of belief and behaviour rather than by the believer and behaver itself yields a decidedly healthy tendency to shift the focus away from thinking, the inner and self-interpretation to behaving, the outer and interpretation by another. This shift explains Davidson’s ability to understand thought’s bearing on reality generically – in what we now see to be the character of the self-conscious, ‘I’-thinking, hence no doubt also ‘I’-saying subject as rationally self-regulating its behaviour in the light of how things are (what they are). On the other hand, Davidson’s anti-subjectivism pushes him in an all too deflationary direction. A commendable insistence on the internal

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connection between the inner realm of thinking and its outward behavioural visibility for another stands constantly in danger of sliding into a more instrumentalist and even behaviourist position. In the course of his own efforts rationally to reconstruct Davidson’s position, Rorty deliberately brings this tendency in Davidson’s ‘anti-confrontationalist’ rhetoric to the fore. Rorty celebrates Davidson’s hostility to the idea that external reality might exert rational constraint on empirical thinking precisely because he sees in the anti-subjectivism which underlies it a welcome tendency to construe the inner perspective as a useful theoretical construct imposed ‘from outside’ on behaviour by an interpreter. Against Rorty, McDowell objects that any such construal must misrepresent Davidson’s actual position. Yet as we shall see in Chapter Four, this objection misses the point: Rorty is seeking not to depict Davidson’s actual position but to reconstruct it in his preferred direction. What, then, might show the need to resist the tendency which, having found it in Davidson, Rorty then celebrates? How might one demonstrate that the bearing of empirical thinking on reality in the generic sense requires the generic sense in which reality rationally constrains empirical thinking? The key here is a conception of perceptual experience which integrates the sensually and qualitatively impressional into the very intentional contentfulness of such experience.

Chapter Four: The View from Sideways-on, Common Factors and Other Loose Ends But if the arguments of the previous two chapters are right, both in themselves and as accounts of how properly to develop the idea of receptivity as not making an even notionally separable contribution to its co-operation with spontaneity, why does McDowell not in fact develop the idea in this direction? There would appear to be two reasons for this: firstly, McDowell is too close to Davidson’s position to see clearly what is wrong with it. That this is so becomes evident when one examines how McDowell attempts to save Davidson from Richard Rorty. This examination is undertaken in section one of this chapter. Secondly and more importantly, McDowell adopts and adapts certain views from Evans on the nature of so-called singular thought which play a crucial role throughout Mind and World. 1 Principally this legacy explains why McDowell does not develop the demand that perceptual experience be conceived as a genuine unity of receptivity and spontaneity in a way which explicitly builds a sensual or qualitative dimension into the character of such experience as impressional. In fact, phenomenological colour seems to be something of an embarrassment for McDowell. He finds nothing for it to do and continues to construe it in traditional terms as the presence of sensations. But once the sensual or qualitative character of perceptual experience is conceived in this way, it is hard to avoid declaring it epistemically irrelevant. This appears to be the position implicit in the Woodbridge lectures. Yet McDowell never explicitly says this. In fact, McDowell seems to think that he need embrace no particular account of the nature and role of phenomenological colour since the distinctively ‘disjunctivist’ account of perceptual experience he derives from Evans’ and his own earlier views on the nature of singular thought accomplish all that needs to be accomplished. Coming to terms with this account of perceptual experience is therefore particularly important. This task is undertaken in section two. 1

As Evans acknowledges, these views were themselves shaped by McDowell’s own earlier work – see Evans 1981, p. 280.

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§ 1: McDowell contra Rorty on Davidson In the Afterword to Mind and World, McDowell attempts to save Davidson’s account of interpretation from Rorty’s reading of it. Rorty rightly sees that according to Davidson … the data available to a Davidsonian field linguist, when she begins on radical interpretation of a language, are restricted to vocal or otherwise putatively linguistic behaviours with its causal connections to the environment. As long as the language, if that is what it is, has not been interpreted, the linguist has no handle on what, if anything, its speakers count as a reason for what, though she can observe which environmental circumstances are likely to prompt them to which vocalizations or other putatively linguistic actions. While the interpreter is in this position, it cannot yet stand quite firm for her that what is in question is linguistic behaviour at all; that depends on the behaviour’s turning out to be interpretable – that is, capable of being intelligibly placed in the space of reasons. (McDowell 1994b, p. 152)

“But,” says McDowell, “that is how it is only at the outset of radical interpretation.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 152) Rorty thinks that the field linguist seeks simply to codify these causally connected data so as to generate a theory which permits one to derive theorems – in effect, individual Tsentences – articulating further connections of the same kind as at the beginning. But in this case, the theory would be functioning to explain and predict linguistic behaviour in much the same way as a theory in natural science explains and predicts what happens when such and such occurs. And this is precisely not what Davidson sees as the accomplishment of the theory: Davidson’s field linguist aims to work into an appreciation, as from within, of the norms that constitute the language she investigates: the specific sense of when it is right to say what according to which that language-game is played. That is what she aims to capture in a theory for the language that is disquotational in the extended sense. She begins as an occupant of the outside standpoint, but if she succeeds in her aim, she ends up equipped to give expression in her own terms to part of how things look from the inside standpoint her subjects occupied all along. When Rorty suggests that the results of the field linguist’s endeavours employ a notion of truth unconnected with norms, and hence separated – by the supposed gulf between the two standpoints – from, for instance, a conception in which the truth is seen as what ought to be believed (“the normative uses seized upon by James”), he obliterates the significance of the transition from starting predicament to achieved interpretation. The outside standpoint as Rorty conceives it is a standpoint from sideways on. (For that image, see Lecture II, § 4. [actually § 5]) Davidson’s radical in-

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terpreter starts with a sideways-on view of the relation between her subjects and the world. But she finishes with a theory whose point is exactly that it is not from sideways on: a theory that enables her to capture some of her subjects’ relations to the world from their own point of view, though in her terms rather than theirs. It is just the beauty of the notion of disquotation in the extended sense that it is available for this capturing of the inside viewpoint. When Rorty separates disquotation from the standpoint of the speakers of the language, as “earnest seekers after truth”, he precisely misses what makes a disquotational notion of truth suitable for summarizing the results of interpretation. (McDowell 1994b, pp. 152 – 153)

McDowell is no doubt right that this is how, as a matter of fact, Davidson sees the process of radical interpretation. But two points need to be made against McDowell: firstly, Rorty is himself engaged in rational reconstruction, hence is claiming that either radical interpretation is as he depicts it or is nothing at all – whether or not Davidson himself understands the notion as Rorty does. And Rorty may be right in his reconstruction, at least to the extent that he has identified and elaborated one of two different, incompatible strands of thought in eliding which the plausibility of Davidson’s position arguably consists. The one strand is that which Rorty picks out, namely, that the radical interpreter simply attempts to correlate linguistic (and indeed other responsive) behaviour with its causes from start to finish. And the other is the claim that – since to interpret just is to capture how an interpretee relates to the world ‘from its point of view’ – the interpreter, even though initially aware only that the interpretee A is perceiving, thereupon behaviourally responding to, and possibly even speaking about, certain items in the “actual environment”, must eventually work himself into knowledge of (some of ) what A is perceiving, responding to and even speaking about, these items as. Of course, if this much of a toehold can be gained, then the radical interpreter will also be able to advance to occupy “the inside viewpoint” in its entirety, albeit in his terms (words) rather than A’s. That is, having got this far, the radical interpreter will clearly also be able to advance to a ‘theory’ permitting effortless interpretation of projectively many instances of A’s linguistic and non-linguistic behaviour. Both strands are present in Davidson’s position because they reflect the way in which Davidson tries to have his cake and eat it, too: on the one hand, he tries to maintain that, properly understood, both the ‘contentfulness’ of speech and belief, and the character of behavioural response as a response to something as thus and so – their Fregean fine grain or sense (Sinn) – are notions primarily wielded by an interpreter in order to identify the speech acts, intentional states and intentional ex-

174 Chapter Four: The View from Sideways-on, Common Factors, Loose Ends periences which mediate causally between items in the environment and another’s behaviour. In other words, these notions are ones primarily employed in making sense of another’s behaviour, that is, in explaining it, which of course involves identifying how, given the cognitive and volitional standpoint of this other, its behaviour could be held to be justified. On this construal, the contentfulness of thought and talk, as well as the directedness of behavioural response, are things primarily available to another. On the other hand, however, Davidson tries to construe radical interpretation precisely as interpretation, that is, as a matter of working one’s way into “how things look from the inside standpoint”, the standpoint one’s interpretee has “occupied all along.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 152) And so the contentfulness of thought and talk, as well as the directedness of behavioural response, must be things available “all along”, that is to say, primarily to the interpretee, at least insofar as this latter is capable of interpreting itself (as itself ) in a way in which Davidson’s dog is not. In other words, these notions are primarily ones employed in making sense of one’s own behaviour for oneself, that is, in explaining it in a sense which involves justifying it to oneself. On this construal, interpretation itself assumes that the contentfulness of thought and talk, as well as the directedness of behavioural response, are things primarily available to the interpretee. In fact, McDowell is simply picking out that other of the two strands present in Davidson’s account of interpretation – strands which Davidson obscures through that lapidariness which gives his account its shifting countenance: looked at one way, it seems beguilingly plausible, tantamount indeed to pre-philosophical commonsense. Yet Davidson’s talk of stimuli, causes and the very fact that he has to worry about whether the dog is responding to vibrations of the air at all – all these things evoke another picture, one more philosophical and non-commonsensical, but also much less plausible and attractive. So while McDowell is doubtless right that Davidson would much prefer, and prefer us to understand him as preferring, the way McDowell reads him, it is not at all clear that Davidson can unproblematically say what McDowell has him say. The second and, in this context, more important point to be made against McDowell is that he does not really go far enough in what he says against Rorty. The lesson of our critique of Davidson is that one only ever occupies the sideways-on position when engaged in interpretation of a quite atypical, secondary and derivative kind; recall once again the example given in Chapter Two of the radically alien life form A*.

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Genuinely radical interpretation, in which one is forced to worked out what A* is perceiving, hence behaviourally responding to, by appeal to causes, cannot serve as a model for interpretation in the normal, more or less domestic case because it is only possible if there is some other interpretee whom one has always already understood without recourse to it. So it is beside the point to claim, as does McDowell (McDowell 1994, pp. 152 – 153), that the radical interpreter does not persist in, as Rorty de facto assumes, but merely starts from a sideways-on view of the relation between A* and the world in order eventually to relinquish it in the course of interpretation. What McDowell says here certainly does distinguish radical interpretation as it actually is from Rorty’s scientistic caricature of it. It also better represents what Davidson himself actually wants to say. But it does not say what really needs to be said against Rorty, which is rather that the necessity even simply of starting from sideways on betrays the strictly derivative character of such interpretation. McDowell’s failure to see this – more positively put, his failure to see that typically interpretation does not so much as start from side-ways on – shows that he is too close to Davidson’s position to see its limitations, even as his philosophical nose tells him that something is amiss.2

§ 2: Disjuncts and Conjuncts Why does McDowell think that his account of perceptual impressions that p constitutes a conception of perceptual experience substantively different to Davidson’s even though on this account the not even notionally separable contribution made by receptivity does not involve anything more than causal secondness? The answer goes back to certain views on content to which McDowell himself gave initial impetus, but which

2

McDowell all too readily dismisses Taylor’s criticism that Davidson cannot accommodate Gadamer’s notion of the fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung) – see McDowell 1994b, p. 153, note 28. Taylor’s general critique of Davidson is too coarse-grained, as is shown by his inaccurate characterisation of truth conditional theories of meaning as ‘denotational’ – see Taylor 1985c, esp. pp. 273 – 282. Nonetheless, its general thrust is correct: it is wrong to see more than superficial affinities between Davidson, for whom truth plus causality account for meaning, and Gadamer, for whom meaning must be prior to truth (in the sense in which Davidson understands the notion of truth).

176 Chapter Four: The View from Sideways-on, Common Factors, Loose Ends were subsequently elaborated by Gareth Evans.3 McDowell takes these views as a basis for putting a certain spin on what it is for the impressional impacts of reality upon empirical thinking to be furnished from the outset with conceptual content – see McDowell 1994b, p. 25. This spin explains why McDowell can claim that to regard the deliverances of receptivity as conceptually structured is already to overcome a certain philosophical interpretation of perceptual experience which he regards as engendering the usual sceptical worries and calls “the highest common factor conception.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 113) Indeed, this spin also explains why McDowell can think that to regard the deliverances of receptivity as conceptually structured is to regard bits of reality not just as providing, but as actually being, reasons for belief and action. i. Cancelling out the Common Factor: McDowell’s Disjunctivism A careful reading of many of the passages in which McDowell asserts the need to conceive perceptual experience as a unity in which the receptive, impressional element is not even notionally separable from the spontaneous, conceptual element reveals that McDowell is simultaneously tweaking this thesis to suit a certain conception of content. This tweaking begins with the claim that to understand perceptual experience as a unity of receptivity and spontaneity, of impression and conception, is already to overcome the picture of empirical thinking as processing within its own internal sphere inputs received from an empirical reality lying beyond its outer bound. In other words, it is already “to delete the outer boundary” posited by “confinement imagery” of the kind endorsed by Davidsonian coherentism and the Myth of the Given – which deletion entails that the facts made manifest to us in perceptual experience no longer lie “beyond an outer boundary that encloses the conceptual sphere.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 35; see also p. 138 and p. 179) One might well ask what reason there could be for claiming this. Let us grant that receptivity makes a not even notionally separable contribution to spontaneity, thereby bringing itself into the realm of the conceptual. Even so, the overall product of this co-operation, perceptual experience itself, must surely remain an item in consciousness distinct from the reality which it is, if veridical, both about and caused by. So surely the 3

McDowell indirectly intimates the importance these views have for him on p. 106 of Mind and World.

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outer boundary remains; merely integrating the contribution of receptivity with that of spontaneity cannot delete it. This objection, while understandable enough in itself, fails to take into consideration everything that is going in the background when McDowell claims that to construe receptivity as making a not even notionally separable contribution to a co-operation with spontaneity is itself sufficient to delete the boundary. This background comes to the fore in the following line of reasoning: only when we understand perceptual experience as a unity in which the impressional and conceptual dimensions are not even notionally separable can we understand such experience as “open to reality” (McDowell 1994b, p. 26). To understand such experience as “open to reality” is to understand it in such a way that the usual sceptical questions concerning the possibility of empirical knowledge are seen to rest on a misunderstanding of the very being of perceptual intentionality itself, so that any temptation to raise such question dissipates when this misunderstanding is overcome – see McDowell 1994b, pp. 112 – 113. We only understand the being of perceptual experience properly, in a way which raises no sceptical puzzles, if we understand it as putting us in immediate, i. e., non-mediated, contact with the world. Consequently, perceptual experience must not involve anything which mediates, as some kind of third thing (tertium) in any sense at all, between the subject experiencing and the objects experienced. Rather, perceptual intentional content, and thus perceptual experience itself, must be directly ‘relational’ – see McDowell 1998a, pp. 471 – 491 – , such that it cannot be unless its intentional object exists. At first, this might simply seem to be recognition of the quasi-de re character of perceptual experience, that is, the fact that one only perceives if there is something that one perceives (even if one should, in fact, misperceive it, say, as F when in fact it is G). But in fact McDowell wants to say something considerably stronger and much more puzzling than this. Just how much stronger, indeed just how much more puzzling, comes out in the following passage: as long as we retain the idea that even veridical perceptual experience involves any kind of tertium at all, the most we can understand by such perceptual contact with reality is the notion of … an explicably veridical presentiment of some fact about the layout of the environment. We cannot have the fact itself impressing itself on a perceiver.4 4

It would be wrong to take this claim as intimating the point Husserl is making when he says that in perceptual experience the intentional object (referent) is selbst da, literally, ‘itself there’ or even ‘there in person’, i. e., itself present,

178 Chapter Four: The View from Sideways-on, Common Factors, Loose Ends This [conception of how perceptual experience puts us in touch with reality] seems off-key, phenomenologically at least, and we can resist it if we can so much as comprehend the idea of a direct hold on the facts, the sort of position that the image of openness conveys. (McDowell 1994b, pp. 112 – 113)

In short, if we are to conceive perceptual experience in such a way that all temptation to raise the usual sceptical questions is nipped in the bud, then we must allow that perceptual experience, when veridical, permits reality itself, and not any third thing which merely re-presents reality, literally to appear in experience, i. e., consciousness. In this spirit, McDowell claims that (a)lthough reality is independent of our thinking, it is not to be pictured as outside an outer boundary that encloses the conceptual sphere. That things are thus and so is the conceptual content of an experience, but if the subject of experience is not misled, that very same thing, that things are thus and so, is also a perceptible fact, an aspect of the perceptible world. (McDowell 1994b, p. 26)

So if a perceptual impression that p is veridical, then not only does it have the (true or veridical) conceptual content that p, this conceptual content is itself identical with the state of affairs that p out there in the world; we have “the identity between what one thinks (when one’s thought is true) and what is the case.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 179) Not only is one only under the veridical perceptual impression that p if p; in this case, the content of one’s perceiving simply is the object of one’s perceiving. What, then, is one to say in the case of non-veridicality or falsity? If we must think of veridical perceptual experience as McDowell recommends, then regarding non-veridical perceptual experience as intentionally contentful in the very same sense as the veridical kind would make perceptual error or falsity impossible. Since this would be absurd, non-veridical perceptual experience cannot be intentionally contentful in the very same sense. It cannot be just the very same kind of thing as veridical perceptual experience, the difference between the two lying in how things are with the reality beyond either. Or, to put the same point in another way, hence not merely re-presented by anything else. That this is so is shown by the fact that Husserl uses the notion of being selbst da in order to distinguish perceptual experience from other intuitive acts, e. g., memory in the sense of vivid recollection (and not just remembering in the sense of recalling that, e. g., the Battle of Hastings occurred in 1066) or imagination – see, e. g., Husserl 1985, § 4, pp. 11 – 12. Husserl is thus not using the notion of the selbst da (leibhaft da or Selbstgegebenheit) to distinguish veridical perceptual experience either from non-veridical perceptual experience which mis-takes the object perceived, or from hallucination in the sense of the mere appearance of perceptual experience.

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the term ‘perceptual experience’ cannot be univocal across truth and falsity, veridicality and non-veridicality. Perceptual error consists not in undergoing a perceptual experience which, although contentful in just the same way as veridical perceptual experience, hence just as capable of being true or veridical, just happens to be false or non-veridical. Rather, it is a different, albeit related kind of intentional experience, one which consists in its seeming wrongly to us that we are having or undergoing a (necessarily veridical) perceptual experience. Perceptual experience thus does not consist in having some one kind of experience which is true or false, veridical or non-veridical, depending on how things objectively are. Rather, for each of these two possibilities there is one distinct intentional experience such that the intentional experience one undergoes in the case of falsity or non-veridicality is a matter of its seeming (wrongly) to us that we are genuinely (and veridically) perceiving that p, which is, of course, the intentional experience one undergoes in the case of truth or veridicality. So across truth and falsity, veridicality and non-veridicality, there is no one common factor, but only a disjunction of different, albeit related factors. Perceptual experience must be understood, not conjunctivistically, as some one thing which is either true or false, veridical or non-veridical, but rather disjunctivistically, as either one or the other of two different but interrelated events, the one a veridical perceiving, the other a seeming-wrongly to be a veridical perceiving. ii. Disjunctivism and Scepticism In earlier writings, e. g., McDowell 1986, McDowell embraced a neoRussellian view about the nature of singular propositional content, that is, the content expressed by a sentence containing a singular term which cannot plausibly be taken to be functioning as a Russellian definite description. In particular, he extended the object-dependence restricted by Russell to the propositional contents expressed by sentences containing logically proper names so that it now included contents expressed by sentences containing those kinds of apparently singular referring term which Russell held to be covert definite descriptions. Thus, whereas Russell would have regarded the term ‘Hesperus’ in the sentence “Hesperus is a planet” as in fact expressing a definitely descriptive content true of the planet Venus, McDowell wanted to say that the term functioned just as Russell had regarded genuinely logical, and not merely grammatical proper names as functioning: it referred directly to the planet Venus,

180 Chapter Four: The View from Sideways-on, Common Factors, Loose Ends without the help of any definitely descriptive sense, such that if the planet Venus did not exist, then the term would not only lack a referent, but also referential properties. In consequence, any whole sentence in which it was embedded, e. g., “Hesperus is a planet”, would not express any distinctively singular thought at all, although a person who asserted it in the belief that the term did have a referent might well think (wrongly) that it did express a thought. In this sense, then, sentences containing singular terms, when genuinely functioning as such terms, and not as covert Russellian definite descriptions, are object-dependent. In Mind and World McDowell continues to work with this notion of singular propositional content (singular thought) as object dependent, but in the more refined and elaborated form given to these views by Gareth Evans, who had systematically elaborated McDowell’s general idea – see Evans 1982, esp. Part Two. Consequently, McDowell now thinks that there are several kinds of such object-dependent singular thought: those expressed by sentences containing demonstratively singular terms, as in “This book here is well written”; those expressed by sentences containing indexically singular terms, as in “You look tired” and “I am tired”; and of course those expressed by nominally singular terms, as in “Hesperus is a planet” or “Adolf Hitler was insane.” At first sight, McDowell’s conception of singular propositional content (singular thought) as object-dependent might seem to be sufficient for the disjunctivist conception of perceptual experience which underpins McDowell’s conception of what it is to regard perceptual experience as a co-operation between receptivity and spontaneity to which the former does not make an even notionally separable contribution. For surely the propositional content of a perceptual experience is demonstratively singular in some shape or form. Here, however, one must be careful. For one thing, throughout Mind and World McDowell never makes really clear just what kind of propositional content he regards a perceptual impression as having. For another and more important thing, this earlier view of singular thought as object-dependent is not in fact sufficient for the disjunctivism of Mind and World. Recall that McDowell’s disjunctivist conception of perceptual experience follows from his very strong thesis that to perceive veridically is to undergo an experience whose conceptual content is strictly identical with its object, i. e., its truth condition (in the sense of an actually existing or obtaining state of affairs). One is not committed to this very strong thesis by the claim that perceptual experience has an object-dependent

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kind of content, hence is itself object-dependent, for this only entails that to perceive is to be related in perceptual experience to some actually existing referent. And this would permit one to understand perceptual experience in residually conjunctivist fashion: there would be no common content, no common factor, across referential success and failure but, given referential success, there would be a common content, hence a common factor, across veridicality and non-veridicality.5 And this is not, or at least not all of, what McDowell means when he speaks of so conceiving (veridical) perceptual experience that all common factors, all tertia, are eliminated. Now in Mind and World McDowell gives the very same reason for endorsing his disjunctivist, anti-common factor conception of perceptual experience as he had earlier given for adopting the weaker view that singular thought in general, hence perceptual content in particular, is object5

Note that this position, which is weaker than the account of perceptual intentional content present in Mind and World, is still stronger than the observation that perceptual experience has a quasi-de re character. From the claim that for one to be perceiving there must be something one is perceiving it does not follow that when there is not something perceived, the content of whatever one is actually undergoing is not the same as the content of the perceptual experience one would be having were there something perceived. If I take myself to be perceiving a man walking there towards me, and if there should in fact be nothing that I either perceive or misperceive as a man, then I am not perceiving, but undergoing some kind of illusion. But this is precisely a matter of my undergoing an intentional experience which is clearly contentful in exactly the same way as the perceptual experience I would be having were there in fact something I were perceiving or misperceiving. The difference lies not at the level of content, but at the level of the ‘act’: what I am having is not such as either to confirm or to disconfirm itself vis--vis the one object (or objects) persisting as one and the same across the course of further perceptual experience, from the initial perceptual experience to the experience which either confirms it or shows what it really was that I perceived. Rather, it dissolves itself in the course of further perceptual experience, showing itself to be not even so much as an erroneous perceptual experience, but merely an illusion. Here, we are touching upon what Husserl calls the essentially horizonal character of perceptual experience, which we only discuss in Part II. Note, however, that it is this horizonal character, a feature of perceptual experience qua intentional experience, which explains its quasi-de re character; this latter character thus has nothing to do with the identity of intentional content. And what explains the horizonal character of perceptual experience is, as we shall see in Part II, that it is a condition of the possibility of there being some one subject of intentionality and behaviour, displaying a more or less coherent, hence interpretable inner intentional life and a more or less coherent, hence interpretable pattern of outer behavioural response.

182 Chapter Four: The View from Sideways-on, Common Factors, Loose Ends dependent. In his earlier essay, McDowell writes, “I want to maintain nevertheless that … the point of recognizing object-dependent thoughts outside Russell’s restriction [of the class of such thoughts to those expressed by sentences containing logically proper names] … lies in the way it liberates us from Cartesian problems.” (McDowell 1986, p. 146) Thus, what in the earlier essay justifies McDowell’s distinctive claims about singular thought also justifies the views advanced in Mind and World concerning the intentional structure of perceptual experience: an ostensible capacity for undercutting the assumptions by making which the usual sceptical worries become live options to be taken seriously. Since it is by no means obvious how failure to recognise either the distinctively object-dependent character of singular thought or the disjunctivist character of perceptual experience could generate sceptical worries, McDowell is under some obligation to show how this is so. In his earlier essay, McDowell attempts to fulfil this obligation, that is, positively to show how ‘Cartesian philosophy’ made the usual sceptical questions possible because of failure to recognise the distinctively objectdependent character of singular thought. But his account is hard to understand: McDowell gives no plausible account of (a) how the distinctive features of ‘Cartesian philosophy’ arose; (b) how these features conspired together to yield a conception of empirical intentionality which precludes recognition of the object-dependent character of singular thought; and (c) how failure to recognise the object-dependent character of singular thought turns the possible non-existence of the external world even as I (at least seem to) experience it into a live option in a way it could never have been before the rise of ‘Cartesian philosophy’. In Mind and World, however, the situation is actually worse: McDowell gives no account at all. He simply does not explain why he now thinks a ‘disjunctivist’, anti-common factor conception of perceptual experience is needed in order to ensure that “openness to reality” which nips scepticism in the bud. Rather, he relies on what he takes to be the intrinsic plausibility of the claim that any tertium, any common factor of whatever kind, will engender sceptical worries. McDowell’s reliance on the mere sketching of an ostensibly plausible picture is easy to explain: it is already questionable whether, as McDowell had maintained in his earlier essay, the usual sceptical questions become live options to be taken seriously because or only because one fails to acknowledge the object-dependent character of singular thought in general and of perceptual intentional content in particular. All the more questionable must it be, then, to maintain, as McDowell does in Mind and

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World, that these questions become live options either because, or only because, one fails to recognise the disjunctivist character of perceptual experience. A ‘common factor’ or ‘conjunctivist’ conception of perceptual experience is neither necessary nor sufficient for generating sceptical worries. Relatedly, a disjunctivist conception of perceptual experience is neither necessary nor sufficient for undercutting the substantive basis upon which the coherence of such worries rests. That a disjunctivist conception of perception experience could not conceivably suffice to undercut the assumptions about empirical intentionality and its subject under which the usual sceptical worries become live options is quite easy to show. The sceptic’s target is our right to claim to know, of certain events we are currently undergoing, that they are indeed veridical perceivings, rather than mere seemings to perceive veridically induced in us, say, by sleep, by Descartes’ genio maligno, or more latterly, by some mad computer scientist. Once one appreciates that this is the sceptic’s target, one sees immediately that for the sceptic it must be quite irrevelant whether one thinks of perceiving conjunctivistically or disjunctivistically. The way in which the sceptic’s target has just been formulated is de facto tailored to suit the standard conjunctivist conception of perceiving. For this reason, the adjective ‘veridical’ and the adverb ‘veridically’, which would be redundant on a non-standard, disjunctivist conception, appear in its formulation. But just this fact indicates what one needs to do in order to turn perceptual experience, even when disjunctivistically conceived, into an equally good target for the sceptic. One has only to reformulate this target as our presumed right to claim to know, of certain events we are currently undergoing, that they are perceivings rather than mere seemings to perceive induced in us by sleep, Descartes’ genio maligno or the mad computer scientist. With this trivial modification, the sceptic’s argument can now go through with whatever validity it had before. Curiously, McDowell not only foresees the possibility of reformulating the sceptic’s questions in this way; in attempting to come to terms with it, he de facto concedes the irrelevance of whether perceiving is conceived disjunctivistically or not. Any account of perceptual experience must allow for some sense in which experience can be said to mislead us – which fact might, he says, lead one to argue as follows against his disjunctivist conception of perceptual experience: You grant that experience can be misleading. That is to grant that what you are pleased to call ‘glimpses of the world’ can be subjectively indistinguish-

184 Chapter Four: The View from Sideways-on, Common Factors, Loose Ends able from states or occurrences that cannot be glimpses of the world, since they would lead one astray if one took them at face value. So surely the problems of traditional epistemology are just as pressing as ever. In your terminology, they come out like this: how can one know that what one is enjoying at any time is a genuine glimpse of the world, rather than something that merely seems to be that? (McDowell 1994b, p. 112)

This is, of course, precisely that reformulation of the sceptic’s target considered above which accommodates McDowell’s disjunctivist conception of perceptual experience. To this move McDowell replies as follows: the attempt to reformulate things in such a way that the sceptic still has a target even under a disjunctivist reading of perceptual experience misses the point. The move would be appropriate, he says, were he “… aiming to answer traditional sceptical questions, to address the predicament of traditional philosophy.” But, says McDowell, talk of openness, which is underpinned by the disjunctivist thesis that the content of veridical perceptual experience is its object, is precisely “…a rejection of the traditional predicament, not an attempt to respond to it.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 112) Evidently, McDowell is wrong to accuse the sceptical response to talk of openness of having missed the point. This response does not in the least misunderstand McDowell as attempting to answer sceptical questions when in fact he is not; it fully appreciates that McDowell’s ambition is to reject entirely “the traditional predicament” which these questions constitute by undercutting the presupposition upon which the predicament rests. Rather, the sceptical response is claiming that McDowell has failed in this ambition because his disjunctivist conception of experience represents a failure to identify and negate what the sceptic presupposes in order to place us in the traditional predicament. And it seeks to demonstrate this claim by showing how, even under a disjunctivist conception of experience, the sceptic can still create (an admittedly correspondingly modified version of ) the traditional predicament. No answer to this is given simply by reasserting what is being challenged in the first place, namely, that to conceive experience as disjunctivistically ‘open’ is to nip sceptical questions in the bud. This underscores a point already implicit in our discussion of how McDowell reads Davidson’s response to scepticism about the external world: McDowell does not see clearly what the traditional sceptical predicament is, that is, what the would-be sceptic about the external world is attempting to call into question. The target of attack is our right to claim, of certain events that we are having now, that they are as they seem to us

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to be rather than the products of some kind of global deception – for the conjunctivist, mostly veridical as opposed to entirely non-veridical perceivings, for the disjunctivist, mostly perceivings as opposed to being entirely mere seemings (i. e., seemings-wrongly) to perceive. In making this the target of attack, the sceptic presupposes that (we rightly claim to know that) we are now having certain inner events of which we are asking and can ask whether they are as they seem to us to be. Consequently, the sceptic must implicitly deny that we can only rationally claim to know what inner events we are having, hence what contents these events possess, if we can rationally claim to know the truth or falsity, the veridicality or non-veridicality of at least some inner events and contents – those, naturally, of the plainest and methodologically most basic kind. So to ‘refute’ the sceptic, that is, to expose the nonsense, or rather, countersense (Widersinn), in the sceptic’s position, we must deny this denial. And we do this not by ‘proving’, of such and such events we are now having, that they are as they seem and not products of global deception,6 but rather by showing that the sceptic is absurdly requiring us both to presuppose something and call it into question at the same time. So, what the sceptic absurdly denies is not that the identity of the contents of one’s perceptual experiences, and thus of these perceptual experiences themselves, is fixed by the identity of their objects. Rather, what the sceptic absurdly denies, hence must be re-asserted in order to expose this absurdity, is that the right to claim to know the identity of experience and its contents is bound to the right to claim to know the identity of their objects.7 Or, in other, clearer words, what must be re-asserted against the 6

7

For of course we cannot do this; the situation into which the sceptic is trying to put us is precisely one which logically excludes the possibility of such a proof. The only way I can ever ‘tell’ whether I am ‘in’ a dream is to get out of it, i. e., to wake up. The same goes, mutatis mutandis, for being a brain-in-a-vat. The only conceivable response to the sceptic must therefore consist in showing that there is no such situation. Note that this is not at all to dispute the logical possibility of our being brains-in-a-vat, but merely the sceptic’s interpretation thereof. The logical possibility of our being, even right now, brains-in-a-vat, no more creates epistemic problems than does the logical possibility of snow’s being black, even right now, create difficulties for our claim to know that snow is white. Precisely because, through his focus on interpretation, Davidson de facto appreciates this point, he is able effectively to respond to the sceptic. Of course, precisely because he appreciates this point, it is, strictly speaking, imprecise to regard him as understanding the order with reference to which a subject of empirical intentionality exists and must be interpreted as existing as simply the order with-

186 Chapter Four: The View from Sideways-on, Common Factors, Loose Ends sceptic is the tie between the right to claim to know what one’s experience and its contents are and the right to claim to know one’s experience and its contents to be veridical (by and large).8 One must show that these two entitlements, these two forms of certainty, do not float free of one another – as if a dream question, in particular, the question whether this is all a dream, could still be a real question even as one concedes that a dream walk could not be a real walk. Of course, a dream question is a seeming-to-question, but it is so in just the same sense in which a dream walk is a seeming-to-walk. Consequently, neither creates any epistemic problem. Were I dreaming, then of course I could not tell “within my dream” whether I was or not – not, however, because my attempt to tell must always fail for want of criteria necessary for successful telling, but because I cannot attempt to tell at all.9 Perhaps nowhere better than here, in the claim that a disjunctivist conception of experience prevents traditional sceptical questions from arising, does one encounter those features of Mind and World which make it such a puzzling work. For precisely here McDowell also says what needs to be said. Having accused the argument given above of failing to recognise that he is attempting not to answer, but to undermine the very possibility of, sceptical questions, he goes on, in the very next sentence to say that the traditional predicament is one “in which we are supposed to start from some anyway available data of consciousness, and work up to certifying that they actually yield knowledge of the objective world.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 112) As we have just seen, this is quite right. We have also seen, however, that if this is the traditional predicament, one does not avoid it by conceiving experience disjunctivistically rather than conjunctivistically.

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in which the causes of intentionality and behavioural response occur. Because for Davidson the order in which such a subject exists is eo ipso the order in which it must be interpreted as existing, this order is more accurately characterised as the order which an interpreter can perceive as containing the causes of the subject’s beliefs, judgements and behaviour. As has already been pointed out – see Chapter Two, p. 83, note 20 – , we have here the important difference between Davidson and thinkers like Dretske and Fodor. Kant appears to be getting at this tie when he says, “The reality of outer sense is thus necessarily bound up with inner sense, if experience in general is to be possible at all; that is, I am just as certainly conscious that there are things outside me, which are in relation to my sense, as I am conscious that I myself exist as determined in time … .” (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B xli, Anmerkung) As already indicated, that I am now dreaming, or a brain-in-a-vat, is always a logical possibility – see above, note 6.

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iii. Seeing Light at the End of the Tunnel McDowell is simply giving expression to his disjunctivism when in Mind and World he insists that we must not think of perceptual intentionality as involving ‘emissaries’ (McDowell 1994b, p. 143), that is, items mediating between the perceiver and the objects of its perception, in any sense at all. However we conceive these ‘emissaries’, whether as Reidian sense data or simply as intentional contents distinct from their objects, if we admit them, then the most we can hope for is “… an explicably veridical presentiment of some fact about the layout of the environment.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 112) And this, says McDowell, is not enough to capture what we mean by that openness to the world in which perceptual experience consists. But, one wants to ask, what more could one coherently hope for than an explicably veridical presentiment of reality? Is the worry that unless one demands more, one will not be able to distinguish perceptual experience from such things as premonitions or McDowell’s trompe l’oeil painting?10 But why should we think that the latter are ever explicably veridical? Or does ‘veridical’ simply mean ‘true’ here? In this case McDowell would be simply re-asserting his conclusion rather than giving a reason for endorsing it. One does fail to secure empirical thinking’s bearing on, and the character of its perception as openness to, reality if one thinks of experience as involving ‘emissaries’ in that decidedly early modern sense which critics from Reid to Rorty have thought they had found in Descartes’ way of ideas.11 If perceptual experience consists in the receipt of mere sense data on the basis of which we make some inductive or abductive inference back to their causes, then of course perceptual experience must constitute a veil which conceals rather than discloses the world. But this has nothing to do with the character of sense data simply as common factors, i. e., as present whether or not the perceptual experience they constitute is veridical. Rather, it has to do with their character precisely as sense data, i. e., common factors of such a kind that they do not genuinely present the reality causing them. With this, we see that a conjunctivist conception of perceptual experience is not sufficient to generate the usual sceptical worries – in which case McDowell’s disjunctivist 10 See McDowell 1998a, p. 474, and below, pp. 195 – 196. 11 For an effective critique of the Reidian reading of Descartes uncritically accepted by, e. g., Rorty (in Rorty 1979), see Perler 1996.

188 Chapter Four: The View from Sideways-on, Common Factors, Loose Ends conception is not only insufficient, as we have previously seen, for nipping such worries in the bud, it is also not necessary. It is time to put disjunctivism behind us, as a red herring which distracts us from what is right in McDowell’s exposition. Thought’s bearing on reality is not secured by construing perceptual experience as a disjunction of two distinct kinds of intentional experience, one’s either perceiving-veridically or its seeming to one that one is perceiving-veridically. Nor, conversely, is it put at risk simply by not thinking of perceptual experience in this way, that is, by construing it conjunctivistically as a single intentional state or experience which can be either true or false, veridical or non-veridical. In order to imperil this bearing, one must conceive perceptual intentionality as much more radically isolated, as much more radically cut off from the world, than this. In particular, one must construe it as something which is indifferent, not simply to its mere truth or falsity, but to whether it is or is not a product or case of global deception. If one wishes to use the language of conjunction and common factors at all, one might put the matter this way: in order to imperil thought’s bearing on reality, one must conceive the very being of perceptual intentionality in particular, and empirical intentionality in general, as a “common factor”, not across mere truth and falsity, but across that “openness to reality” itself which characterises the entire intentional life to which any individual intentional state or experience belongs, and the mere semblance of such openness, induced, perhaps, by sleep, by a genio maligno, or by an evil computer scientist. Evidently, this is in effect to say that the kind of conjunctivism or common factor view which undermines thought’s bearing on reality and engenders sceptical worry is not a conjunctivism concerning individual intentional states or experiences, but rather one concerning the whole intentional life to which any individual state or experience belongs. So in order to secure what McDowell calls thought’s bearing upon the world, we must indeed reject a highest common factor and embrace a certain kind of disjunctivism. But what we must conceive disjunctivistically is perceptual and empirical intentionality as a whole. Of course, since one’s whole intentional life is neither true nor false, this cannot be a disjunctivism with regard to, or across truth and falsity. Rather, it is a disjunctivism with regard to, or across, the very existence or non-existence of the world which presents12 itself to us in individual empirical inten12 Or rather appresents itself as the continuous background whole to which what genuinely presents itself in perceptual experience presents itself as belonging.

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tional states and experiences – in which case one’s intentional life does not exist merely contingently, but necessarily in this world. This life is thus so much in the world that if one really were a brain-in-a-vat, then one could not even wonder whether one was, for there would only appear to be something with regard to which one could or could not tell. At this point, one will want to ask what motive there could be for denying this kind of disjunctivism about perceptual and empirical intentionality – for denying precisely that worldliness which we have found to be the real heart of Davidson’s response to the scenario of brains-in-a-vat. What could induce one to maintain that if, “at this very moment” we were “dreaming all that passes through our minds,”13 there were nonetheless something really passing through our minds of which we could coherently ask whether it were deceiving us or not, and if so, how we could tell – a position which, once granted, demands one answer only, namely, that on pain of logical contradiction we could never tell? What could lead one to think that if one were globally hallucinating, either in sleep or in some other way, there really were a passing of items through one’s mind – that ‘streaming’ of intentional states and experiences which is one’s self-conscious, precisely one’s ‘waking’ intentional life – as opposed to the mere appearance of the same to one (in one’s capacity as lying in one’s bed or floating in one’s vat, and precisely not in one’s capacity as thinking, specifically, as wondering of all this appearance whether it could be genuine or not)? What could permit Descartes and the sceptic who follows his lead to be definitive about an issue on which Theatetus remains more tentative?14 We return to these questions, or rather, what yields an answer to them, in the Conclusion. For the moment, we shall put them to one side in order to reflect a little more on what insight into the kind of disjunctivism which genuinely secures, and the kind of conjunctivism which genuinely imperils, thought’s bearing on reality tells us about where McDowell goes right and where he goes wrong. If, as this insight suggests, what is really at issue is a disjunctivist conception of a subject’s entire intentional life vis--vis the world which presents itself in this intentional life, then perhaps we should see McDowell as conflating two charges, one illegitimate, the other legitimate. The first charge is that Davidson, no less than Descartes and the sceptic, still permits the world to vary indiscriminately, notwithstanding the anti-Cartesian and anti-sceptical sop 13 Theatetus 158c. 14 See Theatetus’ reply to Socrates at Theatetus 158c-d.

190 Chapter Four: The View from Sideways-on, Common Factors, Loose Ends that truth and reference would remain untouched by such variation. This charge is wrong, a misunderstanding both of Davidson’s argument against the sceptic and of his off-hand remark about what we would be referring to if we were brains-in-a-vat. For Davidson does appreciate the worldliness of perceptual and empirical intentionality, that is, that such intentionality and indeed the entire intentional life to which it belongs can only occur in the world into which it refers. The second charge is that Davidson miscontrues the world with regard to which we must conceive the whole intentional life of a subject ‘disjunctivistically’. More accurately, he misconstrues the sense we must give to the term ‘world’ (or ‘environment’ or ‘external reality’, etc.) when we construe perceptual and empirical intentionality ‘disjunctivistically’ vis--vis the world which presents itself in and through it. This charge is right. Davidson does get the sense wrong in which perceptual intentionality in particular, and empirical intentionality in general, is worldly: the relevant sense of world is not “that spatiotemporal and causal order which presents itself perceptually to us interpreters of a certain believer as containing the causes of this latter’s beliefs, behaviour and assertions,” but rather “that spatiotemporal and causal order which presents itself perceptually to the believer as thus and so.” To the world in this sense a subject’s intentional life is bound, and so it is the world in this sense to which we as interpreters appeal when we seek to understand its intentionality, behaviour and speech.

§ 3: Scepticism and Externalism The central claim of this chapter is that the conception of perceptual experience developed here is the one really needed if perception is to be a genuinely non-Davidsonian co-operation of receptivity and spontaneity which addresses the deficits in coherentism towards which McDowell is gesturing in his critique of Davidson. This claim can, however, only stand if two important loose ends are tied up. The first loose end concerns the issue of scepticism about the external world: it must be shown how this conception of perceptual experience permits one to expose the absurdity of such scepticism by showing to be essentially linked what Descartes and the sceptic hold asunder: certainty about the outer (world) and certainty about the inner. The second loose end concerns the conceptual relations between the thesis that empirical intentionality and its subject are inherently worldly and the general externalist commit-

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ment that the identity of content, and thus of intentional states and experiences with such content, is fixed by some kind of relation of the state or experience to some external item. For some might think that talk of the worldliness of empirical intentionality either comes to nothing or is simply a kind of externalism. Showing in some detail why this objection is false not only gives us the opportunity to clarify the notion of world, it also enables us to show that the order of clarification and explication is, if anything, exactly the converse. That is, it enables us to show that kernel of truth in all forms of externalism is the worldliness of empirical intentionality. i. Nipping Scepticism in the Bud Driving McDowell’s critique of Davidson, at least as reconstructed here, is a concern to show that while Davidson sees what is required in order to expose the incoherence of scepticism, he derives it in the wrong way: his conception of empirical intentional content and interpretation gets the sense wrong in which empirical intentionality and its subject are worldly, hence deny the sceptic the toehold this latter needs. In consequence, Davidson is only able to tell the sceptic to get lost at the cost of endorsing an ultimately incoherent conception of empirical thinking and the interpretation thereof. Empirical intentionality and its subject cannot be worldly in Davidson’s causal sense, but rather in a perceptual and intentional sense which reverses the priority Davidson gives to the interpreter over the interpretee. If, however, this is so, then the conception of perceptual experience implicit in this alternative sense of world must also entail what imparts to Davidson’s account of content and interpretation its commendable sceptic-busting potential. In other words, an essential link between certainty about the outer (world) and certainty about the inner must be demonstrably implicit in the very being of perceptual experience as it has been conceived here. A full consideration of this issue can only be undertaken in Part II since what ultimately explains this link is, to use Husserl’s plastic term, the horizon imparted to perceptual experience in virtue of the distinctively aesthetic way it is contentful and without which there could be no one subject of empirical intentionality, displaying across time a coherent, hence interpretable intentional life of inner intentional experience and outer intentional behaviour. Nonetheless, some general remarks can and must be made. The key here lies in appreciating what has been called,

192 Chapter Four: The View from Sideways-on, Common Factors, Loose Ends in section two of the preceding chapter, the ‘here-there’ character of perceptual experience, which articulates its more-than-indexical demonstrativeness and which derives from its character as involving not just Peircean thirdness and secondness, but also Peircean firstness. In other words, what shows perceptual experience, hence all empirical intentionality (belief and judgement) deriving from it, to be worldly is the character of perceptual experience as a concept-involving intentional experience which is not simply causally but also sensually and qualitatively impressional. Recall that to perceive is, in the kind of case illustrated by Peacocke, to perceive how things are what they are. More precisely, perceptual experience in this aesthetic rather than apophantic sense is the appearing of something as objectively thus and so in such and such objectively, subjectively and above all contextually conditioned way. In order for perceptual experience to play its role in enabling thought’s bearing on reality (in the generic sense which covers both intelligently self-regulating, contextsensitive intentional behaviour and rationally self-regulating, self-conscious empirical knowledge-claiming), it cannot be solely conceptual, a purely discursive matter of believing or judging that such and such is the case. Rather, its informational character must include a non-conceptual dimension which strictly complements its conceptual dimension inasmuch as its defining function is to show how something there is what it is as perceived from here. Did it not have this more than conceptual intentional structure, perceptual experience would not accomplish its essential function of enabling its subject to act intelligently and to evaluate its actions and empirical truth-claimings rationally. It would be as if the contents of one’s empirically intentional states and experiences lacked all adverbial demonstrativeness of place and were all tensed in the historical present. One would not know where or when one was, hence could not act. In this sense, then, perception places its perceiver in a manner not dissimilar to the way in which the inscription “You are here” on a map places the latter’s user.15 15 I owe this analogy to Jennan Ishmael – see Ishmael 2007. The analogy has its limits, however, and these limits are instructive. For the placing function of perceptual experience is intimately bound up with the latter’s uniquely conceptualcum-non-conceptual contentfulness in a way in which the placing function of the inscription is not bound up with the map on which the inscription occurs. The inscription “You are here” is not itself part of the map, as is shown by the fact that it must be added to the already more or less complete map.

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One might put the matter this way: perceptual experience is inherently self-contextualising: in virtue of its character as showing how things are what they are (material mode), it shows to its subject, at least insofar as this subject is capable of self-conscious, first person thought, how a certain sentence in the present tense and containing demonstrative expressions, in particular and most originally, the demonstrative adverb of place ‘there’, is correctly applied there (now) from here (now) (formal mode). If, however, this is so, then perceptual experience always brings its context with it since its being, objectively speaking, in such and such a context, is implicit in the distinctively perceptual, more-than-conceptual way it is contentful. In other words, perceptual experience must always occur (in the one now) at some here relative to a there, that is, that point in the one space-at-the-one-time at which the object of experience must be found insofar as one is having a genuine perceptual experience with such and such a (typically adverbially demonstrative) conceptual content, as opposed to a hallucination with this same content, i. e., a hallucination in the sense in which mirages are hallucinations.16 And this is so because its more-than-conceptual, more-than-indexical sensual character as a showing of how things there are what they are (as perceived from here) is itself implicit in the way it is contentful. As a causal ‘transaction’ between an ‘object’ there (now) and a subject here (now), the character of perceptual experience as such a transaction is itself implicit in this ‘herethere’ structure itself. It is therefore constitutive of the very identity of perceptual experience that it should occur at some point in a spatiotemporal continuum17 to which that point belongs at which the object putatively perceived must occur if it occurs at all. If, however, the subject and object of perception must occur within a common context whose identity is implicated in the content of perceptual experience itself, then the identity of this common context and the identity of perceptual content and of perceptual experience itself stand or fall together. Consequently, perceptual experience, and with it, all thoughts deriving from, or had about, perceptual experience, are inherently worldly in this ‘here-there’ perceptual sense. The existence at least of that spatiotemporal point at which the object putatively perceived oc16 So hallucinations in the sense in which mirages are hallucinations are just as worldly as veridical and non-veridical perceptual experiences – see below, note 19. 17 Naturally, this continuum need not be of precisely the same kind as the spatiotemporal continuum in which we humans find ourselves as a matter of fact.

194 Chapter Four: The View from Sideways-on, Common Factors, Loose Ends curs if it occurs at all is just as certain as the existence of perceptual experience itself. And of course this spatiotemporal point, since it is a point there relative to this perceptual experience here, belongs to the very same spatiotemporal order as the perceptual experience itself. Consequently, the worldliness of perception and its subject (in its capacity as such a subject), hence of all intentionality based on upon it, when understood in this non-Davidsonian perceptual sense, suffices to bind certainty about the inner to certainty about the outer. Lest at this point the temptation arise to assert, with sceptical intent, “But perhaps it merely seems to you that you are having perceptual experience,” one must recall a point already made, mutatis mutandis, in connection with Davidson’s response to the sceptic:18 the decisive claim here concerns entitlement to know the identity of act-contents (percepta) rather than acts (perceptiones) themselves. My entitlement to claim to know that it seems to me that I am having a perceptual experience with perceptual content P is just as bound to my claim to know what the content P is as is my entitlement to claim to know that I am having a perceptual experience with perceptual content P. Consequently, to assert parity of certainty is necessarily to assert it at or for any level of seeming (in that sense of seeming which genuinely constitutes a passing-through-my-mind, as opposed to the mere semblance thereof I have when dreaming in my bed or floating in my vat). My entitlement to claim to know that it now seems to me that I am now having a perceptual experience with content P is thus no less tied to the identity of the context which this content brings with it than my actually having a perceptual experience with content P. Insofar as its seeming-to-me-now that I am now having a perceptual experience with perceptual content P is genuinely something passing through my mind of which I can ask whether it is deceiving me or not, it no less possesses the ‘here-there’ character of perceptual experience than perceptual experience itself.19 This conclusion already suffices to tie the loose end up with which we began. It is worth pointing out, however, if only for the sake of intimating what is to come in Part II, that in perceptual experience ‘subject’ and 18 See Chapter Two, pp. 76 – 77. 19 In general, the only seemings-to-me which can genuinely ‘pass through my mind’ or be a genuine target for my wondering whether they are true or veridical are, apart from strictly discursive judgements, perceptual experiences or seemings-toperceive in the sense in which my seeming to perceive a life-saving oasis there on the sandy horizon is a seeming. Seemings-to-perceive in this latter sense can always reveal themselves as such in the course of further experience.

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‘object’ are bound together in a richer sense. As we have already seen, one only perceives if not merely the ‘there’ of the object of perception exists, but also this object itself. In this sense, then, not merely the existence of the world wherein the object putatively perceived occurs (if it occurs at all) is as certain as the existence of the perceptual experience itself; the same goes for the existence of the object. What explains this quasi-de re character of perceptual experience? Primarily in this regard does Husserl’s notion of the perceptual horizon get its grip. To say that perceptual experience is horizonal is to say that each actual perceptual experience implies, in virtue of the distinctively ‘aesthetic’, more-than-conceptual way it is contentful, numerous series of further possible perceptions of this same thing there, some of them brought about by the subject moving through the one space and time, occupying other heres, which possible perceptions confirm or disconfirm the original perception of this one and same object as thus and so. On the one hand, possession of such a horizon of possible further perceptions explains both the de re and the worldly character of perceptual experience. That is, it explains why entitlement to claim there to be one and the same external object existing there (now) relative to the ‘here (and now)’ of perceptual experience, hence commitment to both the object of experience and the experience of it as occurring in the one space and time, is implicated from the outset in one’s entitlement to claim that one is undergoing perceptual experience at all. On the other, this horizonal character can itself be explained as what makes it possible for an individual perceptual experience to occur within, indeed to play a role in enabling, the one more or less coherent temporal ‘stream’, or rather ‘streaming’, of intentional states and experiences had by the one intentional subject caught up in the one temporally extended behavioural engagement with the one intentional object – as when one is confirming or disconfirming an initial perceptual experience of such and such, e. g., by moving around it, bringing it closer, rotating it, etc. There are deep issues here concerning the perception of change across time, and indeed the unity of consciousness and the self across time, and we will return to them in Part II. Suffice for the moment to say that this horizonal character explains why, when a person “is screened off from a red cube by a successful trompe l’oeil painting in which an indistinguishable red cube is depicted as being precisely where the unseen red cube is” (McDowell 1998a, p. 474), this person is not really seeing a red cube to be lying there even though there is a red cube lying there. Each actual perceptual experience implies a temporal series of further possible percep-

196 Chapter Four: The View from Sideways-on, Common Factors, Loose Ends tions had from other heres by this same subject of this same thing there, possible perceptions which confirm or disconfirm the original perception of this same as thus and so. Clearly, in the case at hand, no such series of further possible perceptions is actually, but rather only apparently, available or realisable.20 One’s original intentional experience thus shows itself to be merely a case of ostensible rather than actual seeing. (In no way, then, does explaining why this is a case of ostensible rather than actual seeing require recourse to McDowell’s view that perceptual intentionality is, as he puts it in the work from which the example of the painting is taken, ‘relational’, or again, that it is disjunctivist in character.) ii. Externalism in Disguise or Demise? The second loose end to be tied up concerns a general objection to which talk of empirical intentionality and its subject as worldly might give rise. If the arguments of Chapter Two, section two, are right, then Davidson’s causally externalist conception of content is wrong. But surely, one might argue, to contradict this particular form of externalism is not to contradict the general idea thereof. Moreover, or so one might further argue, since by world all we can mean is a certain set of entities which stand in various spatiotemporal relations to one another,21 all that could be meant by talk of empirical intentionality as worldly is some form of externalism, hence given the inadequacy of Davidson’s, some other form thereof. Our first response to this must be to ask what other form. 20 A perceptual experience is typically not only “an explicably veridical presentiment of reality” (McDowell 1994b, p.112), it is also a presentiment which itself prescribes how it can actually be ‘explicated’ as veridical (confirmed or disconfirmed in the sense of Bewhrung). So it is the horizonal character of perceptual experience which explains (a) why, in the case imagined by McDowell, the presentiment is only actually explicable as veridical in a ‘deviant’ manner, hence is not the perceptual experience it purports to be; and thus (b) why the causal pathway along which the presentiment is generated and itself generates the corresponding belief is a ‘deviant’ one. The fact that the horizonal character of perceptual experience explains (a) and thereby (b) shows that disjunctivism is not only not needed in order to nip the temptation to raise sceptical questions in the bud, it is also not needed in order to account for the kind of issue involving ‘deviant’ paths of verification and causation which McDowell is perhaps also intimating with his example of the successful trompe l’oeil painting. 21 Or something analogous to spatiotemporal relations of the kind we are familiar with.

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Here is not the place to discuss in any detail the recent externalist debate. Suffice to say that the arguments proffered for most forms of externalism apart from Davidson’s consist in various kinds of thought-experiment. And in the opinion of many,22 none of these thought-experiments are particularly decisive or unequivocal. The fact that many find these thought-experiments unconvincing is a reason for thinking that the general externalist idea is a good idea badly stated. It is not hard to confirm this. The general externalist idea is obviously not that the identity of content is fixed by an external relation to items merely numerically distinct from the intentional state or experience with this content. The relation in question is, after all, supposed to fix the identity of content and thus of the state or experience which stands in this relation. It must therefore be a relation internal to the state or experience itself. The ‘externality’ appealed to in all externalist conceptions of content can only be an externality of the item or items to which the intentional state or experience is related. But what, then, does it come to? As an inspection of the thought-experiments used to justify externalism shows, the term ‘external’ does not simply mean numerically distinct, but rather spatiotemporally distinct: all standard externalisms share the generic claim that identity of content, thus of anything with this content, is fixed by relations of some kind to some item or items existing at a certain spatiotemporal point or points <s,t> in the same spatiotemporal order of entities as that to which the state or experience with this content belongs such that <s,t> is numerically distinct from the spatiotemporal point at which the state or experience occurs. Clearly, implicit in this generic characterisation is the thesis that empirical intentionality and its subject are worldly. This thesis is therefore entailed by all externalisms – without, however, entailing any one of them, as is shown by the fact that it makes no mention of any kind of external item internal relation to which fixes the identity of content. Recognition of worldliness underlies all externalisms, whatever kinds of external item they regard as fixing the identity of content: the causes of empirical intentionality (Davidson, Dretske and Fodor), one’s linguistic community and the norm-governed linguistic practices thereof (Burge), the microstructures found around here (Putnam), etc. To the extent, then, that one finds none of the arguments and thought-experiments upon which defenders of the various species of externalism rely to be 22 See, e. g., Searle 1983, esp. Ch. VIII.

198 Chapter Four: The View from Sideways-on, Common Factors, Loose Ends plausible, one may fall back upon the worldliness of empirical intentionality and its subject as the kernel of truth in all externalist claims. There is another ancillary reason for rejecting the suggestion that what is really meant by talk of the worldlessness of empirical intentionality is simply some kind of externalism. For if one takes this view, then one loses a rather nice way of explaining what is surely a feature of our pre-philosophical understanding of, and talk about, ‘the world’. When in everyday discourse we speak of the world, we do not mean a whole merely in the sense of a sum of parts or a set of members, for we regard the world as one and the same even as the entities it contains pass out of existence and new ones come into being. What explains this? Why will it not do to think of the world as a mere sum or set of entities? Because by world we mean primarily that wherein subjects of empirical intentionality such as we are must exist23 and be interpretable as existing – in which case the world not only contains entities which bear properties and stand in relations of such a kind that subjects of empirical intentionality like us can perceive and behaviourally respond to them, it is also that as referring us to which, as pointing us towards which (woraufhin wir verwiesen werden), entities appear in our perceptually guided behavioural engagement with them.24 If this is so, then the world is, like the one space and time for Kant, a whole given equiprimordially with, hence not posterior to, the individual things occurring within it. It is therefore not the mere sum of the things that make it up.25 So properly understood, the thesis that empirical intentionality and its subject are inherently worldly is not just externalism by another name. While obviously consistent with externalism – in Davidson’s account it follows directly from his causally externalist conception of content – , it does not require it. This is fortunate because, as we have already 23 If subjects such as us exist at all, as obviously they need not. 24 This is part, but only part, of what Heidegger is getting when he says, “That wherein Dasein always already understands itself in the mode of referring itself beyond itself (im Modus des Sichverweisens) is that with respect to which it initially lets entities show themselves. That wherein such understanding refers itself beyond itself, as that with respect to which Dasein lets entities show themselves in the ontological mode of being more or less suitably deployed (in der Seinsart der Bewandtnis), is the phenomenon of the world. And the structure of that with respect to which Dasein refers itself outwards away from itself is that which constitutes the worldliness of the world.” (Heidegger 1979b, § 18, H 86; my rather free translation) 25 This is not to say that the world is prior to its parts, as if it could exist without containing any individual empirical entities.

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seen, if one inverts the way Davidson understands the order relative to which any subject of empirical intentionality must exist and be interpreted as existing, then one must also understand empirical contentfulness in an inverse, non-Davidsonian, indeed non-externalist sense. For as soon as one regards the outer to thought’s inner – “actual environment”, world, external reality, etc. – as that order which, as McDowell puts it, strikes the believer, then one ties the very identity of the “actual environment” of one’s interpretee to that of the contents and concepts implicated in the latter’s perception: the “actual environment” just is, so to speak by definition, a spatiotemporal order containing items which satisfy such and such concepts and contents wielded by one’s interpretee in its perception. Consequently, the identity of an interpretee’s empirical concepts and of the contents in which they occur cannot be fixed by relations to external items in this world. When the worldliness of empirical intentionality and its subject is understood in perceptual and intentional rather than Davidson’s causal terms, it not merely does not entail any externalist conception of content, it positively entails a non-externalist one. At this point, an interesting question arises: does the worldliness of empirical intentionality and its subject, when understood in perceptual and intentional rather than causal terms, entail an internalist conception of content? This depends on what one means by internalism. Typically, internalism has been understood as the thesis that intension fixes extension even as the content of an intentional state or experience had by a Cartesian solus ipse. This is, for example, how Putnam understands it.26 Clearly, internalism in this sense breaks down into two claims about the very being of empirical intentionality, and thus of the subject of such intentionality. The first is a point about content: any empirically intentional state or experience is such that intension fixes extension, understood as the claim that content determines object irrespective of any relations in which the state or experience might stand to external things. The second is a point about the act, or perhaps rather what Searle calls representational mode:27 the existence of an empirically intentional state or experience presupposes the existence of nothing else apart from the subject which bears or undergoes it (so that a subject could have this intentional state, or undergo this intentional experience even if the state or experience was one deceptive part more of global error). 26 See Putnam 1975, pp.219 – 222, esp. p.220, where Putnam effectively identifies internalism with “methodological solipsism.” 27 See Searle, op. cit., esp. Ch. I.

200 Chapter Four: The View from Sideways-on, Common Factors, Loose Ends Consequently, the conception of empirical contentfulness to which one commits oneself when one understands notions of world, “actual environment”, external reality, etc. in the non-Davidsonian, perceptual sense indicated, is not an internalist one since this conception, while differing from Davidson28 in embracing the first point, joins with him in rejecting the second. In order not to be an externalist, one does not have to be an internalist, any more than in order to secure thought’s bearing on, or rational responsiveness towards, reality, one has to be a disjunctivist. A conjunctivist, non-externalist conception of empirical intentionality and its contentfulness, provided only that it acknowledge, as Putnamian internalism does not, the perceptually based worldliness of empirical intentionality and its subject, secures just as well as anything else thought’s bearing on, or rational responsiveness to, reality.

§ 4: The Results of Reconstruction Thus Far On the basis of a critique of Davidson’s account of interpretation, in particular, of his attempt to solve the problem of distal causes, we have elaborated McDowell’s notion of thought’s bearing on reality as rationally self-regulating, self-revising responsiveness to items in the “actual environment”.29 This widest sense in which empirical thinking bears on reality permitted us to intimate a correspondingly widest sense in which reality might be (and not simply provide) a rational constraint on empirical thinking: reality is primarily a yardstick against which whole stretches of behavioural response to it, whether ‘internally’ cognitive or ‘externally’ behavioural, are ‘measurable’. The character of reality as a cause of behavioural response is derivative upon its character as such a rational constraint – derivative in the sense that an interpreter of behavioural response, whether the behaving subject itself or another, must, in the most fundamental and original cases, identify the causes of behavioural response by appeal to the objects thereof, which latter thus have from the outset the significance of being that in the light of which what is going on there is more or less rational. 28 And also from Putnam and Kripke. 29 Which items in the “actual environment” will depend, of course, on whether they are relevant to what empirical thinking is currently doing – perhaps even when these items are not, in the relevant respect, anticipated in whatever habits or rules of behaviour empirical thinking brings into the environment.

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This conception of what it is rationally to bear on reality and its correlate notion of reality clearly accords perceptual experience a crucial role and significance. We have argued that this requires it to be precisely the result of a co-operation between receptivity and spontaneity in which the former is inextricably intertwined with the latter. To this extent, the general point urged by McDowell is correct. Yet we have also argued that if the general point is to be spelt out in a manner both coherent and significantly different from anything Davidson either does in fact or could say, then the co-operation cannot be as McDowell conceives it. If the general point is to be genuinely anti-Davidsonian, then the contribution made by receptivity to its co-operation with spontaneity cannot be simply a matter of Peircean secondness, but must also encompass Peircean firstness. McDowell’s inability to see this has been explained as due to his view that a disjunctivist conception of perceptual experience is enough both to yield a significant difference to Davidson and to secure that bearing of empirical thinking on reality which prevents sceptical worries from arising. Yet this view could not misshape McDowell’s argument in the way it does were it not for other unclarities, in particular, unclarities concerning just what is wrong with Davidsonian coherentism. As we have seen, McDowell misunderstands the Davidsonian response to scepticism. He knows it would be wrong to take Davidson’s throw-away line about what we as interpreters would have to take the discourse of brains-in-avat to be about as a basis for accusing Davidson of merely replacing a first order scepticism about our knowledge of the objects of belief with a higher order scepticism about the contents of belief. But just what difficulty this throw-away line reflects is never made clear; we are left only with highly general remarks about how Davidson’s conception of interpretation and content fails adequately to depict how a believer is in touch with the world, this because it somehow does not do justice to how things strike the believer. This lack of clarity explains the ambivalence McDowell displays towards coherentism and the various moves Davidson makes in order to show how, for all its coherentist confinement within itself, empirical thinking still very much bears on reality, that is, is rationally responsive to items beyond itself, and no mere self-contained game. Similarly, it explains McDowell’s ambivalence about “confinement imagery”: for the most part, he calls for the deletion of the outer boundary within which empirical thinking would otherwise remain confined, yet at one point he acknowledges that there is an innocuous variety of such imagery. And because he is not clear about what is wrong with Davidsonian coher-

202 Chapter Four: The View from Sideways-on, Common Factors, Loose Ends entism, he can give no real argument for his key claim that it endangers thought’s bearing on reality – this because he cannot explain how it does so. Or, to come at the same point from another, more expansive direction, McDowell has no real account of why one only secures thought’s bearing on reality if one conceives perceptual experience as a genuine unity of the conceptual and the impressional, and indeed of why Davidson could not himself embrace this conception. Nonetheless, McDowell’s intuition that Davidson’s coherentism does endanger thought’s bearing on reality is sound. The Davidsonian conception of content and interpretation has the signal virtue of enabling one to tell the sceptic to get lost, just as McDowell demands. It also enables Davidson to render “confinement imagery” harmless, a virtue which is, of course, at bottom really only the first in another form: what makes “confinement imagery” harmful is precisely that kind of confinement which so radically confines empirical intentionality to its own domain that its subject can rationally claim to know this ‘subjective’ domain without rationally claiming to know its objects, or rather the world in which these objects individually occur. “Confinement imagery” is, after all, simply a metaphor for a conception of what it is to be an intentional state or experience,30 a conception which becomes harmful when understood as entailing that an empirically intentional state or experience need not exist in the very same spatiotemporal order in which its referents must occur (insofar as the state or experience has referents at all). In other words, “confinement imagery” becomes harmful when understood as giving metaphorical expression to an understanding of empirical intentionality as worldless. But the Davidsonian conception of empirical content also entails that empirical intentionality is worldly in a specifically causal sense: according to Davidson the reason why an empirically intentional state or experience must occur in the very same world in which, given truth or veridicality, its referents would occur is that it must refer into the world in which its causes occur.31 Just this is the problem with the Davidsonian conception since the internal structure which perceptual experience must display if it is to enable thought’s bearing on reality entails that empirical intentionality must be worldly in a non-Davidsonian, non-causal, intentional and 30 At least of the kind we ourselves have, and assume from the outset ourselves to have. 31 Strictly speaking, one should say here, as already pointed out, “in which its causes are perceivable by such and such an interpreter as occurring.”

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indeed perceptual sense. An empirically intentional state or experience must indeed occur in the very same world in which, given truth or veridicality, its referents would occur. But this is because it must occur in a world in which things of such kind occur as it can perceive and respond behaviourally to (as of such kind). Just this explains why Davidson’s account of content and interpretation, which seeks to give the causal sense of world priority over the intentional and perceptual one, founders on what lurks behind, indeed is masked by, the problem of so-called distal causes: the fact that radical interpretation, understood as a process in which we work back from behaviour to objects and contents via the causes of behaviour, can only ever be a secondary, derivative procedure appropriate only in the case of an interpretee so unfamiliar to us that we cannot from the outset perceive its behaviour as intrinsically meaningful, that is, cannot from the outset perceive it to be behaving consistently across time in a way which makes sense to us as rationally self-regulating, perceptually guided self-comportment towards entities. Radical interpretation thus shows itself to be possible only insofar as it is useless for Davidson’s philosophical purposes. McDowell, however, does not see this with sufficiently clarity – for which reason he fails to see that Rorty is not simply misunderstanding Davidson, but reconstructively emphasising the first of two strands in Davidson’s thinking which find themselves in constant tension with one another. McDowell wants to emphasise the second, but fails to recognise the presence of the first. This specific failure is symptomatic of a general failure to grasp what is wrong with Davidson’s position: the priority it gives to causality over intentionality, a priority which puts it at odds with its own insight into the worldliness of intentionality. Indeed, it puts it at odds with Davidson’s insight into the character of empirical thinking as bearing on reality in the widest sense, that is, the character of empirically intentional states and experiences as essentially belonging to a rationally self-regulating process of responding (whether ‘internally’ and cogitatively or ‘externally’ and practically) to how items in the “actual environment” perceptually appear as thus and so, hence relevant for the goal towards which the process is directed. But what could lead Davidson to find the idea of prioritising the causal over the intentional so attractive? McDowell himself asks this question although he does not pose it clearly. Thus, for McDowell, it is a question of why Davidson finds “confinement imagery” so compelling that the choice can only be to construe it in a harmless rather than harmful fashion, instead of seeking to delete or erase the outer boundary en-

204 Chapter Four: The View from Sideways-on, Common Factors, Loose Ends tirely, thereby rendering thought “unbounded” – see McDowell 1994b, p. 35, p. 138 and p. 179. At this point, Mind and World passes from an exploration and dissolution of the antinomy which allegedly exists between the Myth of the Given and Davidsonian coherentism to an ideology-critical investigation of the conceptual horizon that ostensibly engenders this antinomy and occludes the way beyond it.

Chapter Five: Two Senses of Nature? With the question of why Davidson finds it so compelling, indeed obligatory, to prioritise the causal over the intentional, Mind and World takes a historically reconstructive turn. It turns from its efforts at reconstruction of positions in the present to a historically oriented effort to identify just why this present, in all its contradictoriness, has come about. These historically oriented efforts are as hard to pin down as the previous issue-oriented ones, this because McDowell is unable to free himself sufficiently from the historical presuppositions of the positions he seeks to transcend.

§ 1: Reason and Nature – Roots of an Antinomy? The conceptions of perceptual experience advocated by Davidson and Evans, for all their specific difference, are identical at a higher, more generic level: both conceive of the conceptual sphere, understood as the realm of belief and judgement (doxa and apophansis), as causally mediated in its interactions with the external empirical reality enclosing it by the products of receptivity – sensations, sense impressions, informational states or whatever else might constitute the most immediate impingements of external reality upon and in consciousness. For both thinkers, these most immediate impingements are non-conceptual in nature. Of course, for Davidson, these most immediate impingements, because they are not beliefs or judgements, cannot be reasons since for Davidson the space of reasons coincides with the conceptual sphere in the sense of doxa and apophansis. With Evans, the situation is more complicated: Evans, unlike a standard adherent of what McDowell understands by the Myth of the Given, does not regard the immediate impingements of reality upon us, the informational states into which the perceptual mechanisms we share with non-linguistic animals put us, as eo ipso reasons. Rather, these have to become items to which belief and judgement can rationally respond, and they become such rationally motivating intuitions, that is, “experiences, in the somewhat Kantian restricted sense that Evans employs, only by virtue of the fact that they are available to spontaneity.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 51) Even so,

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spontaneity does not enter into determining their content. So the independent operations of the informational system figure in Evans’s account as a separable contribution made by receptivity to its co-operation with spontaneity. (McDowell 1994b, p. 51)

For Evans, the deliverances of receptivity, although not conceptually contentful, nonetheless possess a rationally motivating capacity vis--vis belief and judgement, at least for creatures sophisticated enough to be capable of such conceptually contentful states and experiences in the first place. In this sense, then, a sense which is more sophisticated but also far less straightforward than the Myth of the Given as McDowell depicts it, Evans regards the space of reasons as extending beyond the conceptual sphere in the sense of doxa and apophansis. Thus, says McDowell, both thinkers are united by their failure to consider the possibility that the most immediate impingements of reality upon our senses might be conceptually contentful. “It is not that they argue that there is no such possibility; it simply does not figure in their thinking.” And so they have no choice but either to construe the justifications provided by experience as rationally constraining thinking “in a way which makes it unintelligible that they might exert rational influence at all” or to deny that “empirical thinking is rationally constrained by experience.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 67) Evans embraces the former, Davidson the latter horn of this alleged dilemma. And each, says McDowell, is right in his own complementary way: Evans is right, as against Davidson, in the implicit belief that … if thoughts are not to be empty, that is, if they are to be thoughts at all, they must be rationally responsive to intuitions. … Davidson is right, as against Evans, that if experiences are extra-conceptual, they cannot be what thoughts are rationally based on. (McDowell 1994b, p. 68)

So given their common failure to “consider the possibility that conceptual capacities might be already operative in actualizations of sensibility” (McDowell 1994b, p. 67), both thinkers “… are confined to the pair of positions between which they choose. And each has what looks like a completely cogent argument against the other.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 67) McDowell’s claim that an advocate of the kind of position occupied by both Evans and the Myth of the Given has a telling argument against Davidsonian coherentism is, as we have seen, dubious. Nonetheless, it is true that neither Evans nor Davidson ever consider that perceptual experience might be a genuine unity of the conceptual (spontaneity) and the

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impressional (receptivity). So while the claim that the positions occupied by Evans and Davidson constitute an antimony is at best undemonstrated, it still makes sense to ask what fundamental assumptions prevent them from considering the possibility McDowell recommends. One can still sensibly set out, with McDowell, to uncover “the presumably deep-rooted mental block that produces this [allegedly] uncomfortable situation.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 69) According to McDowell, there are two reasons why Evans and Davidson are unable to consider the possibility he advocates: neither thinker “… is tempted by a bald naturalism” which would deny “that the spontaneity of the understanding is sui generis in the way suggested by the link to the idea of freedom.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 67) Thus, neither thinker believes that one could, say, reduce the normative language used in everyday life to describe the operations of empirical thinking to the non-normative language of some natural science or sciences, or eliminate it in favour of the latter. The language in which we pre-theoretically describe the operations of empirical thinking reflects the spontaneity of the latter, which is, at least on McDowell’s reading of the term ‘spontaneity’, its character as subject to norms of assessment and evaluation as right or wrong. And there is no way of capturing this normativity without loss or remainder in the non-normative language of natural science. In this sense, then, the spontaneity of the understanding is indeed sui generis. Yet at the same time Evans and Davidson both agree with the bald naturalist that nature is to be equated with what McDowell calls “the realm of law.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 71, and elsewhere) That is, they believe that all causal relations in which items in empirical reality stand are expressions of the kind of lawfulness (whatever this kind might be) which natural science uncovers and articulates in its descriptions, explanations and theories. More precisely put, they both believe that all causal relations in empirical reality satisfy some description in terms of the kind of law which natural science wields. In this sense, both Evans and Davidson remain naturalists even though they are not crassly or baldly so, in the manner typified by, say, reductionist naturalism. How, then, are these assumptions supposed to prevent Evans and Davidson from construing the immediate sensory inputs or impressions of external reality as themselves conceptually contentful? That is, how do they force upon Evans and Davidson the picture of empirical thinking as taking place within an inner sphere which is causally embedded in an outer sphere of external empirical reality in such a way that this latter can only impinge upon it via sensory inputs lacking conceptual structure

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or content? McDowell argues as follows: the perceptual sensitivity we display towards items in our environment – our receptivity – is a form of sentience, and as such is natural. Since the rise of modern natural science, however, nature has been understood as a realm of law of the kind ascertained by natural science, hence as excluding all forms of spontaneity. So if one endorses this modern identification of nature with the realm of strict, natural-scientifically ascertainable law, as Evans and Davidson in fact do, then one cannot regard the products of our receptivity – the various sensory impressions passively induced in us by the environment outside of us – as involving any trace of spontaneity. Distinctively conceptual capacities – our spontaneity – cannot be implicated in our perceptual sensitivity towards items in the environment, so the products of this sensitivity must lack all conceptual structure and character – see McDowell 1994b, pp. 69 – 70. Consequently, claims McDowell, “it can seem impossible to reconcile the fact that sentience belongs to nature with the thought that spontaneity might permeate our perceptual experience itself, the workings of our sensibility.” And if it does seem to us impossible to reconcile the character of sensibility or receptivity as natural with its possessing conceptual content, we find ourselves … forced to suppose intuitions must be constituted independently of the understanding, by the senses responding naturally to the world’s impacts on them. And then we are in the space of options that Davidson and Evans locate themselves in. (McDowell 1994b, p. 70)

In other words, ‘intuitions’ in the sense of the most immediate impingements of external empirical reality upon empirical thinking must be conceived precisely as Evans and Davidson conceive them, namely, as occurring just outside the boundary of the conceptual sphere qua realm of doxa and apophansis, from which position they cause, whether in some rational sense, as Evans maintains, or brutely, as Davidson insists, lowest level moves within the sphere of belief and judgement.1 1

Or if, as McDowell claims in his Afterword (McDowell 1994b, p. 145), this does not strictly require one to conceive perceptual experience as the causal coupling of distinct impressional and conceptual items – sensation and perceptual belief or judgement respectively – ; if indeed the impressional and conceptual characters of perceptual experience could in principle be conceived as borne by some one thing or process: nonetheless these characters must still be understood as separable, hence not as integrated with one another. It is not easy to see what view McDowell has in mind when he makes this claim. Certainly, he gives no illustration of what he means although he may be thinking of Peacocke’s account of per-

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In subsection one of section four below, we will examine McDowell’s claim that the space of options within which Davidson and Evans locate themselves is determined both by their assumption that to be natural is to occur in (what McDowell characterises as) a realm of natural-scientifically ascertainable law and by their conviction that spontaneity cannot be dealt with in any baldly or crassly naturalistic way. In the meantime, we will grant him this claim in order to see how he responds to it. For clearly, if both of these assumptions prevent one from conceiving perceptual experience as a genuine unity of the impressional (the products of receptivity) and the conceptual (the products of spontaneity), then one of them must be dropped. One might, of course, respond by dropping the second, that is, by embracing so-called bald or crass naturalism. Bald naturalism … aims to domesticate conceptual capacities within nature conceived as the realm of law. This approach need not deny that conceptual capacities belong to a faculty of spontaneity, a faculty that empowers us to take charge of our lives. But the idea is that if there is any truth to talk of spontaneity, it must be capturable in terms whose fundamental role lies in displaying the position of things in nature so conceived. Perhaps we should grant that the relations that constitute the structure of the space of reasons, relations of justification and the like, are not visibly there, as such, in nature as the paradigmatic natural sciences depict it. But according to this approach, we can reconstruct the structure of the space of reasons out of conceptual materials that already belong in a natural-scientific depiction of nature. And then modes of thought that place their subject matter in the space of reasons, for instance, reflection that brings spontaneity into view as such, can after all count as natural-scientific too. No doubt they are not paradigmatically natural-scientific, but only because it takes work to show how their distinctive concepts serve to place things in nature. (McDowell 1994b, p. 73)

McDowell’s talk of reconstructing the space of reasons out of conceptual materials belonging in a natural-scientific depiction of nature is perhaps misleading because it might insinuate that McDowell conceives bald naturalism as essentially reductionist. This is not so: although it is the most straightforward kind of a baldly naturalistic approach, he says he does ceptual experience– see Peacocke 1992, esp. Ch.2. Fortunately, there is no need to attempt to make sense of McDowell’s claim since – leaving aside any question as to whether it is coherent – one can readily reformulate the argument here in such a way that it can be directed just as easily against the idea of an indifferent association of the conceptual (the product of spontaneity) and the sensually or qualitatively impressional (phenomenological colour, which is one product at least of receptivity) as against the idea of a causal coupling of the same. For either way the conceptual and the impressional are conceived of as independent parts rather than dependent moments.

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“not want to limit the approach to such reductionism.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 73) Unfortunately, he never makes clear just what he understands by a non-reductionist, yet still baldly naturalist approach. Clearly, eliminativism would be one such.2 So, too, would perhaps be that kind of functionalism which, while not insisting on type-type identity, takes in seriously non-holistic fashion the notion of a causal role with which it identifies the psychological (so that psychological properties become ‘causal powers’ of certain physiological states, powers which they possess independently of other such states and which enable these states to interact with one another in processes that count as psychological only because they are interactions of states with such distinctive ‘causal powers’). Now arguably, these kinds of naturalist approach do fail to do justice to the ‘normative’ character of the psychological, i. e., its character as either right or wrong, rational or irrational, and such failure is presumably what McDowell is getting at when he speaks of bald naturalism as denying “that the spontaneity of the understanding is sui generis in the way suggested by the link to the idea of freedom.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 67) But surely that kind of naturalism cannot be bald which asserts simply that natural scientific facts fix all non-scientific ones such that two possible universes with the same natural scientific laws and initial conditions would contain the same non-natural-scientific facts. For if it were, then Davidson and Evans would count as bald naturalists. Since McDowell is unforthcoming, the issue is not unequivocally resolvable. Fortunately, resolving it unequivocally is, as we shall see, not necessary. In principle, then, there are, according to McDowell, two ways of overcoming the constraints under which Davidson and Evans work. One could renounce the conviction that “(t)he structure of the space of reasons stubbornly resists being appropriated within a naturalism that conceives nature as the realm of law.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 73) One would then seek to integrate the realm of spontaneity into nature qua realm of law, that is, “domesticate conceptual capacities within nature conceived as the realm of law” (McDowell, p. 73) in the manner of bald naturalism. But one might also target the generic commitment which Davidson and Evans share with the bald naturalist, that is, the equation of 2

Rorty’s “debunking suggestion that intentionality is a matter of “organisms that have been programmed to respond with linguistic utterances to, among other things, the impact of [the?] environment upon their sense organs”” sounds “a note of bald naturalism” in that sense of the term in which McDowell wishes us to understand it. (McDowell 1998b, p. 425)

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nature with the realm of law. For this background commitment is needed, says McDowell, in order “to make it appear that we can acknowledge a sui generis character for spontaneity only by locating ourselves in the framework of possibilities that Davidson and Evans move in.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 77) That is, he thinks that this background commitment is a necessary condition of finding oneself only able to accommodate the sui generis character of spontaneity by adopting the picture of perceptual experience and empirical thinking with which Davidson and Evans work. It would, says McDowell, be a cheat, a merely verbal manoeuvre, to insist that this generic naturalist commitment is beyond question – see McDowell 1994b, p. 77. What, however, would it be to call this understanding of nature into question? At its most abstract, it would be, claims McDowell, to refashion the concept of nature in such a way that, rather than integrating the realm of spontaneity and conceptual capacities into nature qua realm of law, one could go in the other direction, i. e., integrate sensibility and indeed the external empirical reality which sets sensibility in motion into the realm of spontaneity and conceptual capacities. Or, to put the point another way, it would be to refashion our concept of nature, more accurately, of the external empirical reality upon which empirical thinking bears via sensibility, in such a way that one could regard the operations of our perceptual capacities as what McDowell now calls “responsiveness to meaning” (McDowell 1994b, p. 77). The sense of the phrase “responsiveness to meaning” is evidently fixed by the term ‘meaning’ contained within it. And the sense this term has for McDowell appears to derive from Charles Taylor’s reading of Max Weber’s well-known thesis that, with the rise of modern science, nature becomes ‘disenchanted’. Like Taylor, McDowell interprets this thesis as the claim that the understanding of nature associated with the rise of modern natural science robs nature of ‘meaning’.3 But neither McDowell nor Taylor understand by ‘meaning’ what one might first expect, namely, meaning in an existential sense, as when one speaks of the meaning of life. Rather, by the ‘meaning’ lost to nature with the rise of modern science they both mean the character of nature as intelligible in the manner in which speech, texts, artefacts, works of art, historical events, cultural happenings and intelligent, purposive behaviour generally are intelligible. Thus, McDowell speaks of “the idea that the movement of the planets, or the fall of a sparrow, is rightly approached in the sort of way we approach a text or utterance or some other kind of action.” (McDowell 1994b, 3

See McDowell 1994b, p. 70.

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p. 72) According to McDowell, if not necessarily Taylor, what makes something approachable in this way is its character as subject to certain conditions of normative assessment. To be ‘meaningful’ is thus to have a certain normative constitution or character in virtue of which normative assessment is possible. For the most part, when McDowell speaks of items with meaning in this sense – of “meaningful doings” (McDowell 1994b, p. 97) – , he has the specifically ethical case in mind. Yet the notion of ‘meaningfulness’, of normative constitution or character, is not restricted to the specifically ethical. That this is so becomes evident in the claim that the “(m)oulding [of ] ethical character”, that is, of the ability to wield ethical concepts and to perform actions as subject to ethical norms, is “… a particular case of a general phenomenon: initiation into conceptual capacities, which include responsiveness to other rational demands besides those of ethics.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 84) Clearly, whatever this claim means precisely, if it is true, then responsiveness to what is ‘meaningful’ in the specifically ethical sense must be a particular case of responsiveness to what is ‘meaningful’ in a generally normative sense. Distinctively ethical ‘meaningfulness’ must be a specific case of being ‘meaningful’ in the generic sense of possessing some normative constitution or character, whether the norms at issue be ethical ones or, say, the legal norms which constitute certain bits of plastic as five dollar notes, and the exchange thereof as buying and selling, or again, the rules of cricket which constitute three vertical sticks as a wicket, and the ball’s hitting the wicket as out, etc. At this point, we can understand a little better just what McDowell has in mind when he speaks of questioning the generic naturalist commitment to equating nature with the realm of law. Responsiveness to meaning is responsiveness to items and events which are ‘meaningful’ in the sense that they possess some kind of normative constitution or character in virtue of which they are capable of the appropriate kind of normative assessment. So sensibility and even external empirical reality itself are to be brought into the orbit of spontaneity and the conceptual by regarding empirical reality as containing, irreducibly, uneliminably or at least nonderivatively, items and events which are ‘meaningful’ in the generically normative sense of which ethically ‘meaningful’ items and events are a specific case. According to McDowell, if we refashion the concept of nature in this way, then we will find ourselves able to acknowledge the sui generis character of spontaneity without having to construe empirical thinking and perceptual experience according to the picture de facto accepted by

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both Davidson and Evans. For by refashioning the concept of what human empirical thinking bears upon in the manner indicated, we refashion our conception of such bearing itself: this now becomes a matter of perceiving and responding to normatively constituted items and events; the operations of sensibility itself thus become operations upon such ‘meaningful’ bits of reality. If we admit meaningful items into nature – the external empirical reality upon which human empirical thinking bears – as primitive, irreducible constituents of it, then we break out of the space of options within which Davidson and Evans move because to perceive and respond to items in such a nature must be to respond to ‘meaningful’ items. It must be precisely a “responsiveness to meaning,” (McDowell 1994b, p. 77) and, as such, a responsiveness to reasons. In particular, it will be a responsiveness to reasons in the dual sense that both perceptual experience itself and the items in nature experienced will constitute reasons for belief and action. Consequently, it will be a rational responsiveness to reality, and the reality responded to will itself be rational. McDowell appeals to Aristotle’s notion of practical wisdom (phronesis) in an effort to clarify how this refashioning of nature, and thus of the external empirical reality upon which human empirical thinking bears, permits us to understand human perception as involving spontaneity and conceptual abilities. As McDowell interprets it, practical wisdom is a skill possessed by the mature human being directly and non-inferentially to see what is and is not ethically appropriate in the circumstances. According to McDowell, Aristotle regards distinctively ethical thinking as a competence which presupposes “requirements of reason that are there whether we know it or not,” requirements to which “our eyes are opened … by the acquisition of “practical wisdom.”” (McDowell 1994b, p. 79) Aristotle’s picture of the ethical, at least when modified to include more recognition than Aristotle himself allowed of “a standing obligation to reflect about and criticize the standards by which, at any time, it takes itself to be governed” (McDowell 1994b, p. 81), is a picture of … a domain of rational requirements which are there in any case, whether or not we are responsive to them. We are alerted to these demands by acquiring appropriate conceptual capacities. When a decent upbringing initiates us into the relevant way of thinking [i.e., imparts to us the locally relevant kind of practical wisdom], our eyes are open to the very existence of the tract of the Space of Reasons. Thereafter our appreciation of its detailed layout is indefinitely subject to refinement, in reflective scrutiny of our ethical thinking.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 82; emphasis added)

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Aristotelian phronesis or practical wisdom can therefore serve us as a model for conceiving “the understanding, the faculty that enables us to recognize and create the kind of intelligibility that is a matter of placement in the space of reasons.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 79) This reading of Aristotle’s notion of practical wisdom as an inculcated skill at seeing what is and is not ethically appropriate in the circumstances now permits McDowell to make a further move, one which, as he thinks, will account for how ‘meaningful’ items and events can be primitive constituents of nature, of empirical reality itself, without this amounting to a “rampant platonism.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 77 f. and pp. 91 – 95) For as an inculcated skill, practical wisdom is a practical ability acquired through ‘acculturation’ (Bildung) into a necessarily linguistically mediated socio-cultural tradition – see McDowell 1994b, p. 84 and pp. 87 – 88. Only through such acculturation does a human being emerge as a human being, that is, as an animal rational in the sense that it is able to exercise practical wisdom in the determination of what it is and is not, in the given social, cultural and traditional circumstances, ethically appropriate to do. Having made this move, McDowell can now exploit a central term and, as we shall see, a central concept both of German Romanticism (Herder, the Humboldts and others) and of German Idealism (Fichte, Schelling and in particular, Hegel): practical wisdom, because it distinguishes humans as distinctively human, constitutes ‘human nature’, indeed is a second nature (zweite Natur) in Hegel’s sense. Pedagogy, says Hegel, “… regards the individual human being as natural and points out the path of his rebirth, of the transformation of his first into a second, rational (geistigen) nature, so that the rational in him (dieses Geistige in ihm) becomes habit.”4 So for McDowell, practical wisdom is second nature both in the sense that its exercise is something that comes naturally to us acculturated human beings; and in the sense that it comes second, i. e., only in and through processes of acculturation, in particular, of language-acquisition, which work upon, hence presuppose a non-human animal first nature (sentience) as what they transform into second nature. But in speaking of second nature, McDowell is not just appropriating a distinctive bit of Romantic and Idealist terminology; he also appropriates, without ever making this clear, a crucial feature of the Romantic and Idealist concept. For Hegel and the Romantics, the term ‘second nature’ did not simply connote a disposition possessed by individual human be4

Hegel 1821 (1970), Zusatz zu § 152, p. 302; my translation.

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ings, that is, what Hegel called subjective spirit (den subjektiven Geist). It had simultaneously an objective sense according to which second nature was the linguistically-mediated totality of society, culture and tradition – what Hegel and, following him, Dilthey called objective spirit (den objektiven Geist), what Wittgenstein, following Simmel, called a form of life (Lebensform) and what Brandom and others, following Wittgenstein (more or less), call social practices, linguistic community, etc. Crucially, Hegel and the Romantics gave the term ‘second nature’ this dual meaning of subjective and objective spirit in order to bring out the ontological dependence of the former on the latter. Meanwhile, the latter itself was conceived as a genuine feature of reality which could not be accounted for in the manner of what McDowell calls bald naturalism. So the resistance of second nature in the subjective sense (‘subjective spirit’, i. e., the human subject and its intentionality) to any baldly naturalistic handling ultimately derives from the impossibility of subjecting second nature in the objective sense (‘objective spirit’) to such treatment. One can now see why Hegelian and Romantic notions of second nature and Bildung are so important to McDowell. For the Hegelian and Romantic insinuation that subjective spirit only comes into being and exists within objective spirit permits McDowell to see in the Hegelian and Romantic concept of second nature a second concept of nature. As McDowell sees it, his refashioning of the concept of nature qua realm of law is the introduction precisely of a second concept of nature – second in the sense that it does not replace, but rather supplements and complements first nature, i. e., the realm of law. Individual empirical thinkers are necessarily entities possessed of second natures in the subjective sense, hence only occur within some particular second nature in the objective sense. That is, they only occur within some linguistically-mediated totality of society, culture and tradition that gives them the particular ethical outlook (McDowell 1994b, p. 80) in which their practical wisdom consists. Consequently, the external empirical reality which constitutes the outer to any individual sphere of empirical thinking is nature qua realm of law, conceived, however, as primitively containing items and events which are meaningful in the sense that they constitute the products and processes of the norm-governed, value-guided practices constitutive of a particular second nature in the objective sense. Each individual sphere of empirical thinking must be a second nature in the subjective sense precisely because it exists only as perceiving and rationally responding to such products and processes of a second nature in the objective

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sense, which in turn exists irreducibly within first nature as containing such products and processes. So recognition of the concept of second nature as a second concept of nature gives one a notion of the natural which does not exclude meaningful items and “meaningful doings” (McDowell 1994b, p. 97). We have found a way, thinks McDowell, of resisting the modern equation of nature with the “realm of law”, this by partially restoring, in a quite literal sense, meaning to nature: ‘meaning’ has returned to nature as a primitive constituent, but only insofar as some second nature in the objective sense can answer for it. Or, to put the same point in another way, external empirical reality, the outer to empirical thinking’s inner, has been expanded to include however many linguistically mediated second natures in the objective sense there are. So it now primitively contains all the meaningful items and events constituted by these diverse forms of life and the norm-governed social practices out of which they are woven. Because it now contains the ‘meaningful’ products and processes of some second nature in the objective sense, empirical reality contains items and events into whose constitution conceptual capacities have always already entered, hence items and events which are not merely sources of reasons for belief and action, but themselves such reasons. Moreover, because this constitution by conceptual capacities is always already accomplished (by the particular second nature in the objective sense in which any second nature in the subjective sense finds itself ), these items and events are ones of which individual empirical thinkers can become directly and non-inferentially aware. Meaningful items and doings thus occur in the outer to thought’s inner as items that empirical thinking directly perceives and behaviourally responds to. So although an individual empirical thinker’s conceptual capacities would have to be brought to bear in such perception, one can now conceive of how this actualisation of conceptual capacities might nonetheless be a ‘passive’, impressional receptivity; the contribution made by receptivity to its co-operation with spontaneity would not be so much as notionally separable. Finally, because, when one veridically perceives, the content of one’s perception just is its object, perceptual experience of these items and events literally takes them in. So there are no third things involved which could threaten the openness of empirical thinking to reality and the openness of reality to empirical thinking. This supplementation and extension of the notion of empirical reality beyond its naturalist equation with nature qua realm of law thus constitutes, according to McDowell, a necessary and sufficient condition for

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construing perceptual experience as the kind of co-operation between receptivity and spontaneity which he recommends. It therefore solves, or rather dissolves, the problem of how to conceive spontaneity as an ability exercised by a natural, perceiving being. For by understanding the outer to which empirical thinking perceives and responds as containing the ‘meaningful’ items and events of second nature, one is able to understand spontaneity as responding in the only way it can to anything, namely, rationally. And so one can understand how spontaneity, the ability to wield concepts in judgements, can occur as a result of, and in rational response to, the deliverances of sensibility. At last, then, we have the full explanation and diagnosis of why thinkers such as Davidson and Evans fail so much as to consider the conception of perceptual experience which McDowell recommends. They equate nature with the realm of law rather than seeing, firstly, that external empirical reality in fact includes more, viz., second natures in the objective sense; and secondly, that it is only within some such second nature in the objective sense, and as relating to such, that any individual case of empirical thinking occurs. And so they fail to grasp empirical thinking as second nature in the subjective sense, this because they fail to see the need to extend the notion of empirical reality beyond first nature to something which includes however many second natures in the objective sense there are. This failure to see the need to extend the notion of empirical reality beyond first nature to include second nature thus constitutes the “mental block” which constrains the space of options within which Davidson and Evans locate themselves.

§ 2: What Good is Second Nature? There is something perplexing about McDowell’s appeal to second nature and in particular, his claim that failure to acknowledge it explains the “deep rooted mental block” (McDowell 1994b, p. 69) preventing Davidson and Evans from conceiving perceptual experience as he recommends. Thus, one might object to the notion of ‘meaning’ and ‘meaningfulness’ which both McDowell and Taylor use in order to cash Weber’s claim that modern natural science disenchants reality. As we have seen, for McDowell as for Taylor, the ‘meaning’ apparently denied us by the modern understanding of nature is the character of natural reality as understandable and interpretable in the manner of speech, texts, artefacts, historical events, cultural happenings, intelligent, purposive behaviour and the

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like. One would have thought, however, that ‘meaning’ in an existential sense was a more plausible and certainly more dramatic candidate. Certainly this candidate would have more accurately reflected what Weber himself intended. But this is a side issue. More relevant for current purposes is the claim that the modern understanding of nature robs the same of ‘meaning’ in the sense that it prevents one from understanding nature as irreducibly and primitively containing items and events in the very identity and being of which norms are implicated, which are thus intelligible in the manner of texts and utterances. What is puzzling about the claim is neither its content nor its truth but its role in McDowell’s argument overall. McDowell says he is attempting to identify a “deep rooted mental block” (McDowell 1994b, p. 69) which encourages Davidson and Evans to view empirical thinking as ‘confined’ to an inner sphere in a sense that prevents one from adequately explicating thought’s bearing on reality. He says that this “deep rooted mental block” constrains Davidson and Evans to move within a “space of options” which has no place for the idea that perceptual experience might be a genuine unity of receptivity and spontaneity. In consequence, it engenders a ceaseless oscillation between their positions. The “deep rooted mental block” responsible for all these limitations on the thinking of Davidson and Evans is thus an intellectual assumption, a cognitive claim, and no mere psychologically explainable blindness. So what is this intellectual assumption and cognitive claim? It is, or so McDowell seems to say, the modern equation of nature with “the realm of law”, that is, the thesis that empirical reality as such is ‘at bottom’ nature qua “realm of law”, in other words, empirical reality as it is under natural scientific description. What constrains the thinking of Davidson and Evans is precisely modern “naturalism about nature”5 as such, whether of the ‘smooth’ variety they themselves advocate, which acknowledges the sui generis character of spontaneity, or of the crass ‘bald’ variety, which does not acknowledge this character. The “deep rooted mental block” fixing the intellectual space within which Davidson and Evans move is “naturalism about nature” generically conceived, hence irrespective of whatever more specific stripe its different proponents might give it. But if “naturalism about nature”, generically conceived, is the “deep rooted mental block” responsible for the limitations on the thinking of Davidson and Evans, then surely what McDowell proposes as overcoming 5

For this phrase see McDowell, op. cit., p. 77.

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this mental block misses its mark. There is, after all, nothing particularly novel in the idea that second nature in the objective sense and second nature in the subjective sense are primitive, non-derivative constituents of empirical reality. This Romantic and Idealist idea has been a standard, if not uncontested philosophical staple for the last two hundred years. True, the notion of second nature, particularly in the objective sense, has been given different names at different times: der objektive Geist by Hegel and Dilthey, Lebensform by Simmel and Wittgenstein, Kultur by Rickert and other Southwest German neo-Kantians, and, more recently, social practices, linguistic community, etc., by Sellars, Rorty, Taylor, Brandom, Wright and others. Moreover, the general idea has been inflected in different ways at different times and by different thinkers, so that, for example, the precise sense in which intentionality presupposes community differs from Brandom to Wright. Even so, there has been an underlying unity: on the one hand, rejection of all forms of bald or crass naturalism combined often, if not necessarily always,6 with endorsement of the modern equation of nature with “the realm of law”, or as one should more accurately say, of empirical reality with nature qua “realm of law”. Just this indicates what the problem is: the introduction of second nature as a second concept of nature is surely something with the substance of which Davidson surely does agree and Evans certainly could agree. In other words, so completely consistent is it with the thinking of both Davidson and Evans that they could endorse it without any loss whatsoever; indeed, it embodies precisely the smoothness of their naturalist commitments. But then the appeal to second nature as a second concept of nature could not explain why Davidson and Evans are constrained to picture empirical thinking as they do. Nor could it overcome these constraints, that is, overcome the picture of empirical thinking as confined within an inner sphere, receiving merely causal, non-conceptually structured inputs from an external empirical reality within which it is contained. The closer one looks at McDowell’s rehabilitation of second nature as a second concept of nature, the more apparent it becomes that what passes for a bold challenge to something endorsed by Davidson and Evans merely reaffirms what they themselves endorse. McDowell sets out to challenge that generic commitment to “naturalism about nature” as such which unites Davidson and Evans with the bald naturalist. 6

Dilthey does not endorse the modern equation of nature with “the realm of law”, understood as modern “naturalism about nature”, generically conceived.

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But in the end we seem to be left simply with their rejection of a baldly naturalist stance towards empirical thinking.7 In fact, McDowell seems unclear about just what it is to challenge the naturalist equation of nature with “the realm of law”, that is, what is required in order to show, not so much that the equation is false, but that there is no good philosophical reason for making it. In this regard, the sentence on p. 84 of Mind and World, with which McDowell moves from second nature in a specifically ethical sense to the general notion of second nature as such, proves symptomatic. This sentence seems to indicate how and why McDowell thinks introduction of second nature as a second concept of nature amounts to more than merely topping first nature up with items belonging irreducibly and primitively to second nature. For the move made in this sentence restores meaning to all items in nature – without, however, denying the human origin of the meaning restored to them. For this reason, or so McDowell seems to think, his introduction of second nature really does challenge modern “naturalism about nature” as such, hence is not something Davidson and Evans would themselves endorse. In this crucial passage, McDowell argues that “(m)oulding ethical character, which includes imposing a specific shape on the practical intellect, is a particular case of a general phenomenon: initiation into conceptual capacities, which include responsiveness to other rational demands besides those of ethics.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 84) Now ethical character, which is a dimension of second nature in the subjective sense, one would normally take to be a disposition to behave, specifically, a disposition to engage in behaviour as subject to ethical norms.8 It is thus a standing disposition and ability not simply to wield ethical concepts in ethical judgements, but to perform actions as subject to ethical norms. Of course, as thus understood, ethical character presupposes a capacity to wield ethical concepts in ethical judgements, and no doubt the converse also holds good. Even so, it is not to be identified with the ability to wield ethical concepts. McDowell appears to acknowledge this point when, in the first 7

8

In the essay “Two Senses of Nature” (McDowell 1995) the concept of second nature is introduced in a way which indicates much more clearly than in Mind and World that it can really only be understood as challenging bald or crass naturalism, rather than naturalism as such. This is not to say, of course, that the actions performed must actually conform to, or be performed as conforming to, ethical norms. The idea is of a disposition to engage in behaviour in which one is mindful of ethical norms, whether one intends to conform to them or not.

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non-determining relative clause, he says merely that the moulding of ethical character includes imposition of specific shape upon the practical intellect, i. e., acquisition of a capacity to wield ethical concepts in ethical judgements, rather than that the former simply is the latter. But in the whole sentence McDowell says that the moulding of ethical character is a particular case of initiation into conceptual capacities, which conceptual capacities9 include responsiveness to other rational demands besides those of ethics. Thereby he appears to retract what is implicit in the first relative clause. According to the whole sentence, ethical character just is a specific kind of capacity to wield concepts in judgements, viz., ethical concepts in ethical judgements. A disposition or ability to behave has been surreptitiously assimilated to a disposition or ability to judge. And this has a remarkable effect: since ethical character is a disposition or ability to respond to distinctively ethical ‘meaning’, that is, to items and events whose identity presupposes the ethical norms entailed by the ethical concepts wielded, if ethical character is just a particular case of the disposition or ability to judge or cognise, then any disposition or ability to judge or cognise is a disposition or ability to respond to some kind of ‘meaning’ possessed by the items or events judged about. Whenever one wields an empirical concept in an empirical judgement, what one is judging about is ‘meaningful’ in the sense that it embodies rational demands, whatever it might be, and in particular, whether it implicates specifically behavioural norms, hence belongs to second nature at all. All items and events in empirical reality are ‘meaningful’ in a generic sense of which McDowell uses ethical items and events as mere examples. So the identity of anything found in empirical reality presupposes conceptual norms, that is, the norms entailed by the concepts wielded in judgement of it. Clearly, the initial slide from ethical character qua disposition or ability to behave to ethical character qua disposition or ability to judge has led to a related slide from behavioural norms entailed by ethical concepts to conceptual norms implicit in the use of ethical concepts (in the sense that they fix the correct use of the relevant terms in linguistic judgements). And the nett effect of this latter slide is to make it look as if elaboration and generalisation of a sufficiently Aristotelian understanding of ethical character permits one to conclude, firstly, that conceptual capacities as such are a matter of responding to rational demands; and then sec9

That this is the subject of the relative clause is shown by the plural form of the verb ‘to include’.

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ondly, that therefore the reality to which conceptual capacities are applied in judgement is fundamentally rational. Reality as such, and not just distinctively ethical reality, consists of “requirements of reason that are there whether we know it or not.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 79) One most charitably and coherently interprets this second part of the conclusion as the claim that necessarily objective reality conforms to the general kinds of concept we wield, that is, our categories (which is not to say that it must always conform to our individual concepts themselves). This is the classical objectively idealist thesis of the identity of thinking and being. Is McDowell really making these fallacious moves? That he is is suggested by his endorsement of the objectively idealist thesis at which they arrive. Thus, he says that “the natural world [and not just the conceptual contents with which we represent the natural world] is in the space of logos.”10 (McDowell 1995, p. 161) And he certainly seems to use this objectively idealist thesis to accomplish, as he thinks, some central goals. In particular, he seems to use it in order to bring, not just sensibility, but reality itself, into the conceptual sphere. Perhaps, too, he thinks it explains the absurdity of sceptical worries (by showing them to rest on an understanding of what it is to be objectively real which wrongly construes whatever ‘match’ there might be between empirical thinking and empirical being as merely a happy coincidence).11 More important, however, in the current context is that McDowell apparently regards the objectively idealist thesis as enabling a more sophisticated understanding than might first seem possible of what it is partially to restore ‘meaning’ to empirical reality: the partialness of this restoration need not be understood in the merely additive sense of topping first nature up with items 10 For McDowell, the term ‘the space of logos’ is simply another name for the space of reasons, as is shown by his comment that “(i)f something utterly outside the space of logos forces itself on us, we cannot be blamed for believing what we do.” (McDowell, op. cit., p. 163) This comment only makes sense if ‘logos’ is taken as connoting here ‘reason’. 11 If McDowell really thinks this, he would not be right since the classic ‘problem’ of the external world does not rest on understanding the idea of a ‘match’ between empirical thinking and empirical being as at best a happy coincidence. The suggestion that objective idealism could explain the absurdity of scepticism about the external world surely confuses the claim that the reality I think I am in conforms to the categories I wield with the claim that the reality I think I am in actually exists. To put the point another, rather more sloganistic way: the ‘is’ implicit in talk of the identity of thought and being is the ‘is’ of (categorial) predication, not the ‘is’ of existence.

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from second nature, but rather as the restoration of ‘meaning’ to all items in nature across the board – without, however, there being anything other than a human origin to the ‘meaning’ thereby restored. For the ‘meaning’ now possessed by all items and events in empirical reality is there solely in virtue of the conceptual capacities of human beings and the norms to which their use of terms expressing these concepts is subject. Whether McDowell is arguing in this dubious way is hard to determine unequivocally. But there is no need to resolve this issue here. Of importance is merely that whatever positive features the objectively idealist thesis might otherwise possess, one feature it does not: in no way does it call into (or, for that matter, out of ) question the modern equation of nature with “the realm of law.” Whatever precisely is going on when McDowell moves from specifically ethical second nature to second nature in general and from there to the idea that empirical thinking in general responds to “requirements of reason [in general] that are there whether we know it or not” (McDowell 1994b, p. 79), it has nothing to do with any challenge to “naturalism about nature.” For the modern equation of nature with “the realm of law”, or rather, of empirical reality with nature qua realm of law, does not consist in denying that items and events ‘in nature’ are ‘meaningful’ in the sense ostensibly made possible by the introduction of second nature as a second concept of nature. McDowell’s talk of “the realm of law” is, as we shall soon see, misleading enough. Nonetheless, it gets one thing right: it accurately reflects the fact that the core of modern “naturalism about nature”, understood as the commitment undertaken by all naturalists, smooth or bald, consists in the claim that all causal relations or interactions in empirical reality are instances of the kind of lawfulness sought by natural science. Even if such causal relations and interactions cannot, as smooth naturalists maintain, be described in natural-scientifically natural terms without irreparable loss, all naturalists, whether smooth or bald, insist that all causal relations satisfy some description of the kind wielded by natural science (which kind of description McDowell, perhaps following Davidson,12 assumes to be strictly lawful). This generic claim of all naturalists, smooth or bald, is in no way touched by the objectively idealist thesis that empirical reality must necessarily conform to the categories we wield in our thought and talk. Consequently, all McDowell can really mean by the restoration of ‘meaning’ wrought by the introduction of the concept of second nature 12 See Davidson 1993, p. 8.

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is a mere topping up of empirical reality with items and events constituted by some second nature (in the objective sense). And this is a restoration of meaning with which Davidson and Evans would have no problem, indeed, which they themselves have arguably already undertaken, at least implicitly, in their rejection of bald naturalism. On any coherent, less dubiously grounded reading of it, McDowell’s introduction of a second concept of nature accomplishes no more than the smooth naturalism of Davidson and Evans. And if it does no more than this, we have no real explanation of how Davidson and Evans are so mentally blocked by their generically naturalist commitments that they must picture empirical thinking in the way they do. Is, then, the concept of second nature nothing but the illusion of difference to Davidson and Evans, an illusion which rests upon conflating two distinct objectives, namely, challenging, against Davidson and Evans as much as the bald naturalist, the equation of nature with “the realm of law”; and defending, with Davidson and Evans against the bald naturalist, the sui generis character of spontaneity? This apparent conflation and the unclarity of the appeal to second nature giving rise to it leave us with no choice: we must apply the same radically reconstructive strategy to McDowell’s discussion of modern “naturalism about nature” as we applied to his critique of Davidson and attempted refashioning of the notion of perceptual experience. The point of departure for our reconstruction must be an investigation of just what it is to equate nature with “the realm of law” and how it might force one to embrace a picture of empirical thinking as confined within its own inner sphere, responding to the completely non-conceptual causal impingements of an external empirical reality lying beyond its outer boundary. To show this will be, of course, to show how this equation prevents one from construing perceptual experience as a unity of receptivity and spontaneity in the sense developed here – that conception of perceptual experience which McDowell ought to have recommended rather than the one he recommends in fact.

§ 3: Origins of Ontological Naturalism McDowell recognises from the outset that the equation of “something’s way of being natural” with “its position in the realm of law” (McDowell 1994b, p. 74) is a historical phenomenon. What is at issue here, he says,

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… is a conception of nature that can seem sheer common sense, though it was not always so; the conception I mean was made available only by a hard-won achievement of human thought at a specific time, the time of the rise of modern science. Modern science understands its subject matter in a way that threatens, at least, to leave it disenchanted, as Weber put the point in an image that has become a commonplace. (McDowell 1994, p. 70)

In a general sense, then, McDowell recognises the importance of considering origins and history when attempting to understand and transfigure epochal concepts. Yet he does not implement this general principle extensively enough. As a result, there is persistent ambiguity and unclarity in how he treats of “the naturalism that equates nature with the realm of law” (McDowell 1994b, p. 77). “(A) clear-cut understanding of the realm of law” (McDowell 1994b, p. 78) is not obviously an understanding of the subject matter of modern science which “threatens, at least, to leave it disenchanted”. (McDowell 1994b, p. 70) Nor is either understanding necessarily identifiable with what was characterised above as modern “naturalism about nature” generically conceived, the thesis, namely, that all causal relations or interactions in empirical reality are instances of the kind of lawfulness ascertained by natural science. Given this, one could understand the “hard-won achievement of human thought” (McDowell 1994b, p. 177) which arose with modern science in three different ways. Moreover, one could ask in what sense this achievement arose with modern science. Did it merely accompany the rise of modern science without being shared by science itself ? Or is it an understanding possessed then and now by modern science as a matter of historical fact? Finally, is it an understanding necessarily possessed by modern science, i. e., something without which nothing could claim to be modern science? It is thus not clear what the equation of nature with the realm of law actually is. In order to resolve this issue, let us look at the origin of the core commitment of modern “naturalism about nature”, understood as the claim endorsed by Davidson and Evans, and indeed by bald naturalists as well, that all causal relations or interactions in empirical reality are ‘ultimately’ instances of the kind of lawfulness sought by natural science. Our starting point must be Descartes, who is clearly one of the first thinkers, and certainly the most influential, to articulate the kind of picture of empirical thinking which according to McDowell constitutes the space of options within which Davidson and Evans move.13 Proceeding 13 That Descartes embraces a version, or at least a close relative, of this picture is, as

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from Descartes has some independent benefits: we get to see how Descartes stands to the core commitment of “modern naturalism” about nature – what we shall henceforth call ontological naturalism in order to distinguish it clearly from more epistemological notions of naturalism.14 As Gaukroger points out, Descartes’ friend and colleague Marin Mersenne sought a coherent, non-Aristotelian notion of soul as separable from, and independent of, the body and he thought he could achieve this goal precisely through a mechanistic natural philosophy. Mersenne’s mechanism centred in the claim “that matter is completely inert.”15 In insisting on the inertness of matter, Mersenne was obviously not claiming that matter does literally nothing. The claim that matter is “completely inactive” is rather to be understood as follows: “the natural realm” is to be stripped “not merely of the various sympathies and occult connections postulated by [pre-modern, Renaissance natural philosophy], but also of the Aristotelian forms and qualities that provided the original inspiration for these.”16 The thesis of the inertness of matter can be put in a less eliminativist sounding way. Crucially, this alternative way of putting the thesis suggests a potential for generalisation beyond Mersenne’s mechanist and corpuscular conception of natural science: those properties and relations of material entities which are not of a kind appealed to in Mersenne’s preferred brand of natural science are not efficacious in their own right, that is, in any way not explicable in terms of how the matter composing their bearers is ordered. Consequently, such properties and relations can be efficacious in their own right only if they are immaterial, i. e., properties and relations of something not material. So if they are efficacious in their own right, then material entities can only possess such properties and relations derivatively, namely, by standing in some particularly intimate relation to their true bearer (without, however, this relation being so intimate that it amounted to supervenience since this would deny them efficacy in their own right). Most intuitively and plausibly, this relation is a two-way causal one although, as is shown by such historical reactions to interactionist we shall see in the Conclusion, evident from the Sixth Meditation, in which Descartes discusses how the mind is connected, in the first instance, to the brain, and thereby to the body and the environing world. 14 By epistemological naturalism is meant the conviction, held even by such ‘dualist’ thinkers as Popper and Eccles, that the methods of natural science are appropriate in all forms of theoretical inquiry. 15 Gaukroger 1995, p. 149. 16 ibid., p. 150.

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dualism as epiphenomenalism and mind-body parallelism, it need not be thought of in this way. Now Descartes, who had already become attracted to the thesis of the inertness of matter for strictly natural-philosophical reasons, sought to elaborate the metaphysico-theological potential of Mersenne’s mechanism. For as we have just seen, this latter’s distinctively “metaphysical version of mechanism”17 entails that if there is such a thing as an autonomously efficacious soul – and about this neither Descartes nor Mersenne stood in any doubt – , then this can be no mere form or organising principle of the body. Rather, it must be a genuinely distinct, separable existent. So given that the soul bears at least those psychological properties which constitute self-conscious ‘mindedness’, the inertness of matter, construed as a genuinely metaphysical claim, rules out the Aristotelian halfway house of construing such properties as causally efficacious in their own right even though they are materially dependent upon, hence not possessable separably from, a certain disposition or arrangement of matter (the ‘body’). So the psychological, as least insofar as it constitutes self-conscious ‘mindedness’,18 can only be granted a causal efficacy of its own if one also grants it an immateriality which constitutes an at least necessary condition of its bearer’s being soul-like (since to regard a property, state or condition as immaterial as opposed to non-material is to regard it as something which only a non-material entity could truly and most originally be said to bear). And so one may now take whatever autonomous causal efficacy psychological phenomena, in particular, those constitutive of self-conscious ‘mindedness’, might have as manifesting its soul-like character. At this point, a natural philosophy based on the assumption that to be ‘in nature’ in the primary and most original sense is to be able to interact with other entities across time only in the manner of a Galilean physics of material constitution looks much more congenial to a Christian conception of the soul than one based on Aristotelian assumptions about causation.19 Those most learned and distinguished gen17 ibid., p. 149. 18 Neither Descartes nor Mersenne wanted to deny that some psychological properties, relations and dispositions could be accounted for mechanistically. 19 Descartes’ commitment to (a particular mechanist and corpuscularist version of ) this claim comes out in his conviction that all explanation of events ‘in nature’ must be in terms of the laws of interaction implicit in the size, shape and motion of the ‘corpuscles’ which constitute the ultimate constituents of these events – see Gaukroger, op. cit., p. 150.

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tlemen of the Sorbonne need to understand that one should promote, not proscribe, natural philosophy in the style of Galileo. It is clear, however, that what one gains on the swings, one loses on the merry-go-round. Crucially, the problem does not lie in the idea that psychological properties, states or conditions might have an irreducible causal efficacy of their own – as if this idea were intrinsically, conceptually or analytically incoherent. Rather, the problem lies in the separate existence such properties, states and conditions acquire when one thinks of them as having a causal efficacy in their own right and takes as one’s primary sense of the natural the idea of something which interacts with other entities only in the manner ascertained by natural science. For this separate existence makes it impossible to understand how anything which instantiated psychological properties and relations, in particular, those which constitute ‘mindedness’, could also be something which bore properties, and stood relations, of a kind investigated by natural science. Of course, this is not how Descartes would construe the ‘mind-body problem’. Mersenne and he welcomed the result that at least those kinds of psychological property and relation which imply self-conscious, rational ‘mindedness’ cannot be borne by the kind of thing investigated by their preferred brand of natural science, namely, something ‘material’ in the sense that it can interact with other entities only in the manner explored by a mechanistic and corpuscular physics. This result shows, thinks Descartes, that our everyday, pre-philosophical habit of taking the full human being to be what bears those psychological properties and relations which constitute ‘mindedness’ is a loose one. This habit is certainly legitimate, but only to the extent that it acknowledges its derivative character. For in reality the full embodied human being is a causal coupling of what possesses a material constitution – the strictly physicophysiological human body – with what in the primary, non-derivative sense bears the properties and relations characteristic of mindedness – the immaterial mind/soul. (As is well-known, Descartes locates this causal coupling in the pineal gland.) Descartes’ idea of the substantial union of mind and body has always been recognised to be problematic. It is, however, absolutely crucial to understand what precisely is problematic about it – not the least because otherwise one will not appreciate how complex the equation of nature with “the realm of law” is when understood, not as the default metaphysics of contemporary analytical philosophy, but precisely as a historical and cultural phenomenon occurring concurrently, or rather, as a historical

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and cultural process beginning with the rise of modern science. In particular, one will not see that, as thus understood, it involves a number of moves only some of which Descartes makes. Nor will one see that and precisely how close Descartes comes to what was called above ontological naturalism without, however, embracing it. There are two senses in which Descartes might speak of something’s being an item ‘in nature’, hence natural, physical or indeed even material. On the one hand, to be an item ‘in nature’, hence to be natural, is to be something capable of standing in causal relations only of a kind investigated by some preferred brand of natural science – in Descartes’ case, a corpuscularly mechanistic physics. (This is the thesis of the ‘inertness’ of matter in its most general form.) On the other hand, to be an item ‘in nature’, hence to be natural, is to be something capable of standing in causal relation, at particular points in space and time, to various items ‘in nature’ (and not others), hence with various items which are natural (and not with others). Note that the second sense is a derivative one in that it presupposes some prior, independent sense of what it is to be an item ‘in nature’, hence natural; one must plug some more substantive, stand-alone sense of nature and the natural into it, precisely at the point where it speaks of various items ‘in nature’. Otherwise it will hang ungrounded in the air. Now in order to secure the metaphysico-theological benefits he is seeking, Descartes plugs the first sense into the second, thereby grounding the latter in the former. Descartes makes this move with the ontological naturalist against Aristotle and it constitutes Descartes’ understanding of how theoretical inquiry into empirical reality must from the outset understand empirical reality if it is to be truly successful. One might say that it constitutes Descartes’ conception of how one must initially conceive empirical reality in order for this latter to become a tractable object domain or universe of discourse for theoretical inquiry. So this move constitutes the first step towards what McDowell is getting at when he speaks undifferentiatingly of the modern equation of nature with “the realm of law”, understood as something which underpins the thinking of Davidson and Evans. The fact that Descartes takes this step shows that it is a merely necessary, not sufficient condition for this equation since Descartes is obviously not an ontological naturalist in the sense in which Davidson and Evans are. Clearly, Descartes would lose the metaphysico-theological benefits he is seeking were he to embrace ontological naturalism in this sense. And so he refuses to make that further move which is constitutive for ontological

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naturalism: he refuses to identify the extensions of the two senses of nature just distinguished. There are, after all, all those human mind/souls out there, existing ‘in nature’ in the second sense because of their substantial union with human bodies. But they themselves do not occur ‘in nature’ in the first sense. Indeed, given Descartes’ refusal to identify the two senses of nature, and given that he has only the first sense with which to ground the second, mind/souls can be natural only in the second sense. So it is the identification of the extensions of these two senses of the natural which distinguishes ontological naturalism in the sense embraced by Davidson and Evans from Descartes’ position. To put the same point another way, only when one makes the decidely un-Cartesian move of identifying the two extensions does one truly and most unequivocally equate nature with “the realm of law”, or rather, empirical reality (the world) with nature qua “realm of law”. We can now state precisely why Descartes’ notion of the substantial union of mind and body, or rather, as we shall see in the Conclusion, of mind and brain, is so problematic. By refusing to identify the extensions of the two senses of nature distinguished above, Descartes dissolves the causal unity and closure of empirical reality. For Descartes does not have any sense in which mind and matter are equally ‘in nature’; minds and their ‘mindedness’ are ever only ‘in nature’ in the second, formal sense – so to speak by courtesy of matter. Indeed, he cannot have such a sense; the very way he has set things up precludes from the outset the possibility that mind and matter could be of the same ‘substantial nature’, that is, only able to interact with one another because, at some sufficiently general level, they are instances of the same kind of thing. Just this is the real reason why Descartes’ account of the relation between mind and body is problematic: constitutive of the doctrine of substantial union is the complete evaporation of causal unity and closure. Just this is the ‘mind-body problem’ as it presents itself to Descartes. Indeed, we may also say that this evaporation accounts for the ‘substance’ character of his dualism. For this ‘substance’ character simply is its character as denying causal unity and closure, that is, as denying that something A can be cause or effect of something B only if it shares, at some sufficiently general but nonetheless more than formally ontological level, the same kind or nature with B. But why is causal unity and closure important? Because it simply is the idea of there being definite conditions under which things of A’s kind will and will not interact with things of B’s kind. Thus, without some kind of universally applicable principle of causal closure the idea

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of causal interaction between mind on the one hand and body or brain on the other is rendered mysterious. More accurately, the idea of causal interaction between mind and anything at all becomes problematic. This intimates that the real problem with the doctrine of substantial union does not specifically concern the mind at all. The real problem is that the doctrine puts at risk the very idea of causal connection and interaction between any items at all. Precisely for this reason Leibniz recognised that causal closure of empirical reality must be preserved. And so he spun out of his point about the invisibility of thoughts to natural scientific observation the strange idea of parallel ‘natural’ and ‘non-natural’ causal webs, each independent of, yet harmonising with, the other.20 It must be emphasised that two interconnected moves are involved in generating the mind/body problem as it presents itself to Descartes: (a) refusal to identify the extension of the two senses of nature distinguished above based on (b) prior grounding of the second sense in the first. Both are essential to generating a picture of (at least certain21) psychological properties and relations as causally efficacious in their own right only if they are immaterial, that is, not borne by something material or natural in the first sense. So both moves are essential to generating an account of (at least certain) psychological properties and relations which is at once both metaphysico-theologically attractive and deeply problematic. Appreciating this is important because of what it entails: in order to avoid this account and its problems,22 one does not have to identify the extension of the two senses of nature distinguished above, thereby embracing ontological naturalism. One has only to refuse to ground the second sense of nature by plugging the first into it. More precisely, one has only to ground the second in another ‘concept of nature’. We will explore this thought further in the next chapter. But already we can see that what makes unthinkable the thought of causally efficacious psychological properties, states, conditions and relations which are not identical with (or indeed ‘constituted’ by) anything natural-scien20 By regarding only the ‘natural’ web as causal, and the ‘non-natural’ web as merely logical or inferential, one can turn a weird doctrine into a more orthodox one, namely, into a smoothly naturalist dualism of the ‘natural’ and the ‘normative’. Now one has no problem in explaining how something which bears the relevant kind of psychological property could also be something which bears physical or material properties. 21 Those, namely, which are constitutive of self-conscious ‘mindedness’. 22 Of course, in avoiding this position, one not only evades its problems, one also loses its metaphysico-theological benefits.

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tifically natural is not any absurdity inherent to the thought itself. Rather, it is the thesis that how material reality is at higher levels, in particular, at the everyday ‘folk’ level, never shapes or conditions how it evolves at the natural-scientifically natural level of ‘material’ make-up. Note that this thesis – in effect, what Descartes and Mersenne would describe as the ‘inertness’ of ‘matter’ – is not commitment to ontological naturalism as this was generically characterised above. Rather, it is merely the first towards it. Yet it is also the most crucial step because once it has been taken, the stage is set for ontological naturalism. This latter now becomes the destiny of all who equate nature with “the realm of law” in the general sense defined by this first step since ontological naturalism is the least unsatisfactory of the available options. In this sense, then, to take even this first step is already to prejudice metaphysical speculation in favour of ontological naturalism. For it forces one to move within the following space of options: either one attempts, in the fashion of ontological naturalism, to specify some sense in which how empirical reality is at higher levels, in particular, at the psychological level, is fixed across time by its underlying natural-scientifically natural make-up and this latter’s evolution across time. This involves that identification of the two senses of the natural distinguished above which Descartes refuses to make. Or one follows Descartes and Leibniz in refusing to make this identification, thereby construing the causal efficacy of the psychological (at least of a kind which constitutes self-conscious mindedness) as not fixed across time by how things are at the level of material reality. That which primarily and non-derivatively displays such psychological properties and relations, namely, the ‘mind’, becomes a separate, hence immaterial existent – this whether or not one regards it as primitively acting upon, and being acted upon by, the natural in the primary, non-derivative sense.23

23 Leibniz only intensifies the separateness of the psychological (at least of the kind constitutive of ‘mindedness’). Parallelism denies us that causal way of understanding the connection between the psychological and the physical which Descartes’ interactionism retains as a non-derivative, primitive notion. More accurately, it treats this causal way of understanding the connection as derivative because grounded in the pre-established harmony of the psychological and the physical. Only once this doctrine is in place can Leibniz bring the ‘mind’ into ‘nature’ (in the second sense distinguished above). And only then can he explain and justify our everyday talk of the full embodied human being as bearing the psychological properties constitutive of ‘mindedness’. This more radical break with how we

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The dialectic implicit here is clear: one is struck by the absurdities of the second disjunct and is thrown into the arms of the first. Then, when the simplest ways of accounting for how the psychological supervenes on natural-scientifically natural make-up – the various forms of bald naturalism – are perceived to fail, one resorts to smooth naturalism. Perhaps one turns to Davidsonian anomalous monism and global supervenience. Or perhaps one attempts to specify how the psychological might be ‘constituted’ by the natural-scientifically natural in a sense which does not merely rebadge either material sufficiency of the natural-scientifically natural for the psychological (in which case constitution would be too weak to capture the supervenience of the latter on the former)24 ; or type-type identity of the psychological with the natural-scientifically natural (in which case ‘constitution’ would be too strong to capture this supervenience smoothly). Clearly, this dialectic has actually played itself out in the history of modern philosophy and this history suggests its futility. Yet one should find no cause for despair in this assessment: already our reconstruction of the origins of the dialectic suggests that it is not merely futile, but also unnecessary. Nothing requires one to say, in advance of results to the contrary from concrete empirical inquiry, that the natural-scientifically natural ‘constitutes’ or, as one might say, subvenes under, the psychological in any sense richer than material sufficiency, that sense, namely, unproblematically wielded in pre-metaphysical discourse, as when clinical psychiatrists say that schizophrenia is caused by an imbalance in brain chemicals. Indeed, our reconstruction intimates what one must do in pre-philosophically understand the psychological and the physical to be connected, namely, causally, is the greater weirdness of Leibniz’s parallelism. 24 Rudder-Baker’s account of ‘constitution’ (in Rudder-Baker 2004, esp. p. 101) is in this fashion too weak. ‘Constitution’ as she analyses it is of no use to those who would like to construe the supervenience of the psychological and other higherlevel orders of reality in terms of some (irreflexive and asymmetric) relation weaker than identity. Constitution in the sense in which the bricks of a house constitute the house is a merely formally ontological, mereological notion which one can happily endorse however one answers the question of how mental states stand to brain states. The notion can thus have no bearing upon this question – as is shown by the fact that in this sense of constitution it is brain states rather than mental ones which are constituted by certain arrangements of cells, neurons, DNA molecules or whatever. Atomistic and molecularistic accounts of material things no doubt encourage the view that the relation between a mental state and whatever state or states of the brain are materially sufficient for it is like that of a house to the bricks which make it up. But the view is fundamentally mistaken.

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order to be able coherently to deny the existence of any richer sense: one must imagine what it would be like to negate what for Descartes and Mersenne was the thesis of the ‘inertness’ of ‘matter’. That is, one must imagine what it would be like not to take that crucial first step towards ontological naturalism which consists in the claim that how empirical reality is at higher levels, in particular, at the psychological level, never shapes or conditions how it evolves at the natural-scientifically natural level of ‘material’ make-up. Or to put the same point in another way, one must imagine what it would be like to deny that what occurs ‘in nature’, hence is natural, is capable of interacting causally with other entities only in manner investigated by some preferred brand of natural science. This task of (re-)imagination is undertaken in the next chapter. For the moment, we must return to the central issue of this section, the question, namely, of the different senses in which one might equate nature with “the realm of law.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 77) We are now able to distinguish generic and specific senses in which this equation might be made. One equates nature with “the realm of law,” or rather, empirical reality with nature qua “realm of law” in that most generic sense which unites Descartes with Davidson (against Aristotle) when one endorses the general idea underlying Descartes’ and Mersenne’s thesis of the ‘inertness’ of ‘matter’. This is in effect the first and substantive sense in which Descartes might speak of something’s being ‘in nature’ (or in empirical reality, the world, etc.), hence as being natural, physical or material: to occur ‘in nature’, hence to be natural, physical or material, is to stand in interaction with other things solely in the manner ascertained by one’s preferred brand of the new science – in Descartes’ case, a corpuscularly mechanistic physics. By contrast, one equates nature with “the realm of law,” or rather, empirical reality with nature qua “realm of law”, in that more specific sense which distinguishes Davidson and all other ontological naturalists from Descartes when one identifies the extension of this Cartesian sense of being ‘in nature’ (or in empirical reality, the world, etc.) with that of the second sense in which Descartes understands being ‘in nature’. In this second, formal sense something occurs ‘in nature’, hence is natural, physical or indeed material, just in case it is capable of interacting, at particular points in space and time, with various items ‘in nature’ and not others. This second and formal sense is formal precisely because it presupposes some first, substantive sense of occurrence ‘in nature’ – in Descartes’ case, that generic sense of occurrence ‘in nature’, of being natural or physical or even material, otherwise known as the thesis that ‘matter’ is

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‘inert’. Once this identification has been made, what was characterised above as the core commitment of “modern naturalism” about nature, namely, that all causal relations ‘in nature’ (in empirical reality, the world, etc.) are of a kind ascertained by natural science follows immediately. The advantage, indeed the necessity of this identification is clear: it preserves causal closure, hence the very concepts of causality and causal explanation themselves. One question remains, however: is either equation to be identified with that “hard-won achievement of human thought” which arose with modern science and which constitutes “a clear-cut understanding of the realm of law” (McDowell 1994b, p. 78)? The answer to this question depends on whether either the generic or specific senses in which one might equate empirical reality with nature qua “realm of law” are understandings of the subject matter of modern science possessed by modern science itself, as opposed to impositions from without. Since the general equation of nature with “the realm of law” is dialectically fated to assume the specific form of ontological naturalism, both questions may be answered simultaneously by determining whether ontological naturalism is something to which natural science is inherently or essentially committed. This is another task for the next chapter.

§ 4: Pictures of Thinking, Concepts of Nature and Realms of Law We are out to determine whether McDowell is right in the claim that Davidson and Evans are constrained to picture empirical thinking as they do by their naturalist equation of nature with “the realm of law.” In particular, we want to determine how this commitment might prevent them from construing perceptual experience as a unity of receptivity and spontaneity in the sense determined to be what McDowell ought to have meant by this. In this regard, everything turns on whether McDowell has correctly understood just what the traditional picture of empirical thinking as confined to its own inner sphere really comes to or signifies.

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i. What Does the Traditional Picture of Empirical Thinking Depict? McDowell argues as follows across §§ 2 and 3 of Lecture IV in Mind and World: the perceptual sensitivity we display to our environment, that is, our receptivity, is a form of sentience, and as such is natural. (McDowell 1994b, p. 70) When, however, nature is understood as “the realm of law,” it excludes all forms of spontaneity. So to endorse the modern equation of nature with the realm of natural-scientifically ascertainable law is to render oneself unable to regard the products of receptivity – the various sensory impressions passively induced in us by the environment outside of us – as involving spontaneity. (McDowell 1994b, p. 71) The fact that sentience belongs to nature thus cannot be reconciled with the thought that spontaneity might permeate our perceptual experience itself, the workings of our sensibility. How could the operations of a bit of mere nature be structured by spontaneity, the freedom that empowers us to take charge of our active thinking? … (W)e are forced to suppose intuitions must be constituted independently of the understanding, by the senses responding naturally to the world’s impacts on them. (McDowell 1994b, p. 70)

In other words, we cannot regard spontaneity, the exercise of conceptual capacities, as involved in the operations of our receptivity, nor can the products of our receptivity themselves possess any conceptual structure or character. Therefore, concludes McDowell, we find ourselves forced to adopt a picture of empirical thinking as confined within its own inner sphere, receiving merely causal inputs from an external empirical reality lying beyond its outer boundary – precisely “the space of options that Davidson and Evans locate themselves in.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 70) Let us grant that the premises of the argument entail that spontaneity cannot be involved in the operations of receptivity, the products of which must therefore lack all conceptual structure. Then surely these premises must equally entail that spontaneity cannot be so much as causally related25 to receptivity. After all, if spontaneity is excluded from nature, then surely it cannot be causally related to anything in nature since such causal relation must surely permit one to say that it occurs in nature along with that to which it is causally related. On the picture subscribed to by both Davidson and Evans, however, spontaneity is causally related to receptiv25 Or be indifferently associated with one another, as distinct properties of the one thing or process. This is said in order to cover the concession McDowell makes in his Afterword – see McDowell 1994b, p. 145, and above, note 1.

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ity. Consequently, McDowell’s argument, if valid, so little creates the space of options within which Davidson and Evans move that it in fact destroys it. Something is wrong with McDowell’s account of how the picture of empirical thinking to which Davidson and Evans are committed arises – but what exactly? The argument just extracted from §§ 2 and 3 of Lecture IV in Mind and World seeks to portray the generic naturalist commitment to equating nature with “the realm of law” as at odds with a commitment to the sui generis character of spontaneity. This means, however, that, properly understood, it is an argument to the effect that the only coherent naturalism is a bald one. As such, it is an argument whose validity Davidson and Evans would dispute, but whether they would be right to dispute it is not of interest here. Here, only two considerations are relevant. Firstly, the fact that McDowell can adduce this argument illustrates and confirms the point made above that he is unclear as to whether he is out to challenge naturalism as such or merely bald naturalism. No doubt this unclarity has arisen because he never really clarifies just what it is to equate nature with “the realm of law”. Secondly, identification of what McDowell’s argument really comes to shows that as far as generating the space of options within which Davidson and Evans move is concerned, the issue of whether spontaneity is or is not sui generis in character is irrelevant. McDowell is wrong to maintain that two commitments force Davidson and Evans to picture empirical thinking as they do, viz., commitment to equating empirical reality with nature qua realm of law and commitment to the sui generis character of spontaneity. Of these two commitments, only the former can conceivably impose, if at all, this picture upon Davidson and Evans. The “deepseated mental block” which prevents Davidson and Evans from countenancing the possibility of construing perceptual experience as a unity of receptivity and spontaneity has nothing to do with their refusal to deal with spontaneity in baldly naturalist fashion. Historical considerations confirm this. It is not, after all, as if only Davidson and Evans picture empirical thinking as confined within its own inner sphere, responding to conceptually unstructured inputs caused on the margins of the psychological by an external empirical reality beyond its outer boundary. So do all those thinkers, past and present, for whom talk of spontaneity (as sui generis) would be anathema, from Hobbes to Smart and Fodor. The picture does indeed constitute an image of confinement, but precisely for this reason it presupposes that the inner sphere of empirical thinking is unproblematically contained

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within empirical reality as a whole and only for this reason stands in causal relation to that proper part of empirical reality which lies beyond its outer boundary. Consequently, to assume that empirical reality is nature qua realm of law is to assume from the outset that the inner occurs in the realm of law just as unproblematically as the outer. The picture thus could not possibly embody or reflect any problem as to whether empirical thinking is ‘in’ a naturalistically conceived ‘nature’ – this irrespective of whether such being ‘in nature’ is baldly or “smoothly naturalistic” (McDowell 1994b, p. 51), or indeed whether it so much as makes sense to speak of a smooth, that is to say, non-bald naturalism. From the outset, the picture depicts as a fact the integration of empirical thinking into empirical reality as it is for natural science; the only problem it creates, the only challenge it throws down, is that of explaining more specifically what this integration is. Is it to be understood in classically reductionist terms? Or can it be understood in the non-reductionist manner of, say, Davidson’s anomalous monism? Indeed, must one understand this integration in terms of supervenience at all, or can one appeal, as Descartes thought, to some notion of substantial union? In the previous section we saw that if one refuses to understand this integration in terms of supervenience, but rather resorts to Descartes’ doctrine of substantial union, one absurdly denies causal closure.26 In this sense, the picture of empirical thinking as confined within its own inner sphere, responding to conceptually unstructured inputs received from outside, is fated by the dialectic inherent to this equation to be interpreted in ontologically naturalist fashion. What the traditional picture of empirical thinking most coherently depicts is therefore what it is to be a process of empirical thinking occurring in empirical reality, and what it is to be the subject of such thinking, when the totality constituted by both – by the internal reality of empirical thinking itself and the external empirical reality lying beyond its borders – is equated with natural-scientifically natural reality. (One might therefore say that it depicts that ontological conception of empirical thinking and the subject of such thinking which is determined by the equation of that wherein they occur with na26 It could also be shown that one only exchanges this absurdity for another if one refuses in some other way to understand the integration in terms of supervenience, that is, embraces one of those other dualist conceptions which, no less than either Descartes’ interactionist substance dualism or ontological naturalism, endorse the general equation of nature with “the realm of law”.

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ture qua “realm of law”.) Note that this clarifies and indeed corrects the way McDowell has characterised the outer. To characterise the outer simply as the outer, that is, as external empirical reality lying beyond the outer boundary of the inner, is misleading since it must be primarily understood as what lies under, hence holds together, both external and internal empirical reality. This is a crucial shift. For it means that empirical reality is in fact to be understood not simply as the totality of items and events which exist apart from empirical thinking, efficiently causing impingements on its outer periphery, which impingements efficiently cause in their turn moves within the inner sphere proper. Rather, the term ‘empirical reality’ must be primarily and most coherently understood to connote material reality, that is, empirical reality in its entirety and in its capacity as the ‘stuff ’ out of which all items within it, whether inside or outside the inner sphere of empirical thinking, are composed. Moreover, recognition of the need to identify, for the sake of ensuring causal closure, the extensions of the substantive and formal senses of what it is to be ‘in nature’ has given the term ‘empirical reality’ a further twist. Not only is empirical reality tacitly understood as the material basis of what is meant by empirical reality in ordinary, pre-scientific contexts. That is, not only is empirical reality understood in its capacity as the totality of those arrangments of the natural-scientifically natural which materially suffice for the prescientific characters and dispositions of empirically real items, whether inner or outer, at a given point of time. How material reality in this sense, that is, nature, itself evolves across time is tacitly understood as fixing the evolution of these pre-scientific characters and dispositions across time. This is, of course, ontological naturalism in its application to empirical thinking itself. So if there is some “deep-seated mental block” preventing Davidson and Evans from embracing a conception of perceptual experience in which receptivity and spontaneity are integrated with one another, this is solely their commitment to ontological naturalism. Precisely because he understands this picture as depicting this commitment in its application to empirical thinking, Davidson can regard talk of “confinement inside our skins” not just “as an analogue to a metaphorical confinement inside our beliefs” – McDowell 1994b, p. 16 – , but as this epistemic confinement itself, expressed in terms of the physiological material reality in which the epistemic confinement is realised: the functional or formal boundaries of our realm of beliefs are seen as coinciding with the material boundaries of our bodies or, more typically, our skulls. The traditional

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picture of empirical thinking has indeed nothing in particular to do with spontaneity and its sui generis character. Here the extent becomes apparent to which McDowell misunderstands what the equation of nature with “the realm of law” is. This equation is fundamentally a claim about the material nature of empirical reality, i. e., the whole underlying both the inner and the outer, and not about empirical reality qua whole lying beyond the inner sphere of empirical thinking. So as far as challenging this equation is concerned, it must be quite beside the point to insist, as does McDowell, that the external reality upon which empirical thinking bears be construed as primitively containing items and events presupposing some particular linguistically mediated second nature and the specifically ethical outlook and general world-view associated with this second nature. Similarly, it must be beside the point to insist that empirical thinking and its subject only ever occur insofar as they have a second nature in the subjective sense which they have acquired through initiation into some second nature in the objective sense. No doubt these claims are true and perhaps only a smooth naturalist can embrace them. But all this is irrelevant to the task one confronts if the modern understanding of nature, that is, the equation of nature with “the realm of law”, does prevent one from conceiving perceptual experience as a co-operation in which the contribution of receptivity is not even notionally separable from that of spontaneity. This task is the re-conception of the modern understanding of nature not simply in the sense of supplementing our first concept of nature by a second, additional one, but in the sense of replacing our old concept with a new, alternative one. ii. Understanding the Modern Understanding of Nature McDowell’s talk of the modern equation of nature with “the realm of law” might give rise to the following objection: such talk embodies a far too narrow conception of the modern understanding of nature because it effectively assumes that all natural science seeks to subsume phenomena under causal law. This assumption is false; palaeontology and large tracts of geology, for example, are two natural sciences which do not attempt to subsume the natural phenomena with which they deal under causal law although naturally they make copious use of causal law in their descriptions, explanations and theories. This kind of objection can be pushed to the point at which one declares there to be no one thing that natural science seeks to do. Perhaps “the concept of science

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may be better understood as a family resemblance concept, on the ground that the various sciences admit of overlapping commonalities but no one unifying element, whether of content or method.” (Macarthur 2004, p. 35) Thus far, we have simply sidestepped this kind of objection by assuming, surely rightly, that McDowell’s talk of equating nature with “the realm of law” is an infelicitous way of articulating the ontologically naturalist thesis that all causal relations between items and events in reality (whether external or internal) are of a kind (some) natural science appeals to in its various descriptions, explanations and the theories implicated therein. This surely accommodates at least the letter of the objection. One might, however, argue that this response does not really meet its spirit. For surely one can reformulate the objection as the claim that there is no one kind or kinds of causal relation which all natural science seeks to ascertain – something one might take to be shown by the diversity displayed by the natural sciences. Fortunately, neither the original objection nor this reformulation of it genuinely threaten to expose as lacking any clear or unitary sense either McDowell’s talk of equating nature with “the realm of law” or the reconstruction of this talk as the generic commitment of ontological naturalism. At most, they confirm that McDowell’s talk is infelicitous and that the reconstruction of it is not yet sufficiently precise. What, then, is it to endorse the generic commitment of ontological naturalism, namely, that the causal relations out of which all reality, external and internal, is woven are of a kind (some) natural science ascertains? In particular, what does one mean here by natural science? The problem of just what is meant by natural science arises in two forms. In its first form, the problem is as follows: commitment to ontological naturalism would be ludicrously strong were one to understand the term ‘natural science’ to mean natural science as it actually and currently is. Must one then mean natural science as it ideally or properly is – an ‘ideal’ or ‘completed’ natural science, perhaps even natural science ‘at the end of inquiry’? Many would find this unsatisfactory since it is not clear what could be meant by an ‘ideal’ or ‘completed’ natural science which therefore stands ‘at the end of inquiry’. No doubt this is clearest in the case of physicalism, which can presumably appeal to some such thing as David Lewis’ notion of explanatory adequacy or completeness.27 27 Natural science, says Lewis, will be explanatorily adequate when “there is some unified body of scientific theories of the sort we now accept, which together pro-

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But not all ontological naturalists want to be physicalists and in any case the general idea of ontological naturalism should not be construed in a manner which tacitly identifies it with physicalism. It might now seem that all one could mean by an ideal or completed natural science is natural science as it must be if naturalism is to be true. This would be a very unsatisfactory outcome indeed. The second form in which the problem of what is meant by natural science arises is the following: by natural science one might tacitly understand what is often taken as the paradigmatic form of natural science, namely, physics. In this case the naturalist thesis would come to the more or less physicalist claim that ‘at bottom’ the causal relations out of which reality as such is woven, which indeed bind together the internal empirical reality of empirical thinking and the external empirical reality it bears upon, are ultimately of the kind physics mentions in its descriptions, explanations and theories. Perhaps this tacit but quite common identification of natural science with physics, which is motivated by the conviction that physics constitutes the model for all natural science, moves McDowell to speak of equating nature with “the realm of law.” For physics is often taken to seek strict and universal law, that is, to ascertain general principles which are “not only ‘law-like’ and true, but [are] as deterministic as nature can be found to be, [are] free from caveats and ceteris paribus clauses; that [can], therefore, be viewed as treating the universe as a closed system”,28 that is, as closed under (physical) causality. Of course, this raises, for the specific case of physics, the question raised previously with regard to natural science in general: is it true that physics seeks strict and universal causal law? Undeniably, it seeks highly general laws, typically but not exclusively of a distinctively mathematical kind, but is this to say that it seeks strict and univeral causal laws? What does ‘strict and universal’ and what does ‘causal’ mean here? Is there perhaps some external, non-natural-scientific motivation behind the insistence, in particular, on strictness and universality, which is exaggerating the actual and potential accomplishment of physvide a true and exhaustive account of all physical phenomena. They are unified in that they are cumulative: the theory governing any physical phenomenon is explained by theories governing phenomena out of which that phenomenon is composed and by the way it is composed out of them. The same is true of the latter phenomena, and so on down to fundamental particles or fields governed by a few simple laws, more or less as conceived in present-day theoretical physics.” (Lewis 1983b, p. 105) 28 Davidson 1993, p. 8.

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ics? We will return briefly to these issues. In the meantime, we need only note once again that many regard the physicalist thesis as far too strong, far too restrictive, to be true. In pursuit, therefore, of a weaker, less restrictive kind of ontological naturalism, one might understand the term ‘natural science’ as little more than an abbreviation for a rather indefinite and fairly long disjunction: ‘physics or chemistry or biology or psychology29 or … .’ In this case, the generic commitment of ontological naturalism would come to the claim that the causal relations out of which all empirical reality is woven are of a kind pertaining to one of these disciplines, that is, a case of the kind of causal relation with which at least one of these disciplines deals. Yet one must not be so unrestrictive that one admits anything with a halfway plausible claim to being a natural science, for example, geology, palaeontology, zoology, ecology, and so on, more or less indefinitely, into the disjunction. For then the term ‘natural science’ will once again denote a set unified by little more than family resemblance, with the result that the arbitrariness inherent in what does and does not count as natural science is passed on to the defining thesis of ontological naturalism. And this arbitrariness will ultimately lead one to ask why the disjunction should not also include, say, social psychology, sociology and economics, or even archaeology, assyriology, history and literary theory – in short any form of inquiry in the sense of a practice organised around raising and debating knowledge claims about a certain more or less well-defined putative aspect of reality. With this, ontological naturalism has been rendered almost trivially true. We must be more ‘essentialist’ about what we mean by natural science if a generic commitment to ontological naturalism is not to slip down a slope at whose bottom lies the almost uninteresting claim that all real causal relations are of a kind ascertained by some form of organised theoretical inquiry – ‘science’ in the not exclusively lab-coated sense of the German word Wissenschaft. In order to give the notion of ‘natural science’ the bite it needs, we must go back to the original intuition underlying the ontologically naturalist thesis, the intuition which indeed explains why physics is typically taken as the paradigmatic science, so much so that advocates of ontological naturalism often display physicalistic tendencies, at least in the examples they appeal to in their debates and discussions. This is the idea of a ‘substratal’ science, that is, a science which, in some part of 29 That is, psychology of the natural-scientifically oriented kind, e. g., cognitive science, which sees itself as continuous with the other sciences just listed.

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it at least – for example, micro as opposed to meso- and macro-physics – might plausibly be held to describe and explain reality at the level of underlying make-up. A substratal science is thus one that might plausibly be held to provide a means of describing how items and events in both external and internal empirical reality are made up and of identifying what processes, arrangements and dispositions of items at this ‘material’ level account for properties, conditions and dispositions which entities can be observed to have quite independently of knowledge of how things are at this material level. Once it is appreciated that by natural science ontological naturalists have in mind substratal natural science, it becomes immediately clear why, in specifying just what counts as natural science in the sense intended by the generic ontologically naturalist thesis, one never feels inclined to mention geology even though geology is a good, even paradigmatic natural science in all other respects. For geology is not a substratal science in the sense defined, even though it frequently seeks to explain why things happen by appeal to ‘hidden mechanisms’, as, for example, when it explains the formation of mountain ranges through appeal to movements in tectonic plates. A substratal science is not simply one which explains why certain observable phenomena (mountain ranges) come about in terms of certain possibly less observable phenomena (tectonic plates). Rather, it identifies some relatively less observable, nonphenomenal make-up of empirical entities in virtue of which these entities have certain properties, conditions and dispositions to behave that make their bearers, at least relative to the make-up appealed to, phenomena in the first place. In other words, a substratal natural science describes and explains interactions between items of such a kind that these latter can plausibly be construed as the material rather than the efficient cause of certain properties, conditions and dispositions which, at least relative to these items, count as ‘phenomenal’ or even as ‘appearances’. At this point, the worry induced by the fact that the things we call natural science do not have any clearly identifiable ‘essence’ dissipates. For both historical and substantive reasons, physics constitutes the paradigm of ‘substratal’ science and so it is not surprising that, as a matter of brute psychological fact, one tends to elide the generic naturalist thesis with specifically physicalistic versions of it. Yet those for whom physicalism is unattractive need not fear any dissipation of the thesis in the face of the obvious diversity and even disunity of the natural sciences. For the notion of natural science operative in the naturalist thesis is the idea of

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substratal science, and this idea is pre-philosophically available, reasonably clear and in particular reasonably projective. Thus, clinical psychiatrists regularly say such things as that an imbalance in brain chemicals causes schizophrenia without thereby assuming this causal relation to be efficient.30 Furthermore, it is easy to identify, in a principled way, sciences with a clear claim to be included in the disjunction which defines a non-physicalistic kind of naturalism and to distinguish them from those which, like geology, are to be excluded from it. Clear and indisputable candidates for such inclusion are chemistry, molecular biology, physiology and genetics; clear and indisputable candidates for exclusion are, apart from geology, paleontology, zoology and botany. Importantly, all the clearly indisputable candidates are all natural sciences, this for the obvious reason that the idea of nature historically implicit in the term ‘natural science’ has always implicated the idea of the material substratum or, to put things in less tendentious terms, the possibly open-ended totality of material substrata. Of course, this less tendentious way of putting things indicates that an ontological naturalism which admits more than one substratal natural science confronts the problem of explaining how these substratal natural sciences relate to one another. Or, to put the point another way, it confronts the task of explaining how the different material substrata relate to one another. The multiple substrata out of which the empirical reality is ‘composed’ must presumably stand in some kind of coherent relation to one another – but what is it? Fortunately, this is a question of concern only to those attracted by such a multi-layered, non-physicalistic kind of ontological naturalism. In particular, it need not concern us, who would merely understand as charitably as possible what McDowell might be getting at when he speaks of equating nature with “the realm of law.” Notice, however, that this resolution of the second form in which the question arises of what is meant by natural science permits resolution of the first. For as soon as we recognise that talk of natural science is really talk of those sciences which are substratal in the sense indicated, we see that all along the concept of natural science has been understood in a manner projective enough to permit it to denote precisely such things as contemporary physics or contemporary chemistry or contemporary 30 That is, a matter of one separate existence bringing another about in the sense that cause and effect could occur independently of one another and the cause could conceivably, if not in fact, occur non-simultaneously with the effect.

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molecular biology … . For it shows that all along we have been understanding the naturalist thesis as the claim that all causal relations are of a kind some substratal natural science such as we know it today ascertains, or would ascertain, given sufficient time, opportunity and indeed luck. In fact, we need never have worried about the possibility of being forced to identify natural science with the particular form it takes at a particular point in time, whether now or that presumably fictitious time at which inquiry ends. So we shall understand that equation of nature with “the realm of law” which according to McDowell constitutes the modern understanding of nature to be nothing other than the claim that the causal relations out of which empirical reality in its entirety is woven are all of a kind some substratal natural science ascertains, however many such sciences one might hold there to be.31 For when the equation is understood in this way, it becomes quite easy to explain why McDowell should be tempted to speak of “the realm of law” at all. Let us say that those kinds of property and relation in virtue of which something empirically real falls within the object domain of some substratal natural science constitute the material level or dimension of empirical reality, or again, the domain of the natural-scientifically natural. Clearly, the claim that all causal relations in empirical reality are of a kind some substratal natural science ascertains accords a certain priority to this material level, to the natural-scientifically natural. For given this claim, the natural-scientifically natural properties and relations borne by something O at time t come to be seen not merely as materially sufficient32 for those properties and relations borne by O at t which are not natural-scientifically natural. They are also held to determine33 (the probabilities of ) the natural-scientifically natural properties and relations which O might come to bear or stand in at later times. This ‘horizontal’ determination across time then combines with ‘vertical’ determination at a time (material sufficiency) to entail that the natural-scientifically natural features, properties and relations of empirical reality fix (the probabilities of ) all future features, 31 This is the default position to which the conviction that physicalism is too narrow forces the naturalist; it is certainly not an ontological pluralism – see Macarthur 2004, p. 32 – in any sense which would contradict naturalism. 32 Naturally, only in conjunction with the material properties and relations of other things. 33 Once again, only in conjunction with the material properties and relations of other things.

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properties and relations of empirical reality, whether they are or are not natural-scientifically natural.34 In this sense, then, a sense which implicates both ‘vertical’ material and ‘horizontal’ efficient determination, all more ‘phenomenal’ levels or dimensions of being may be said to depend on the level or dimension of being with which the substratal kind of natural science is concerned. This dependence is, of course, what many seek to capture when they say that those features of empirical reality which are not natural-scientifically natural (in the sense defined here) supervene on its natural-scientifically natural features, however such thinkers might conceive this supervenience more specifically. And it is clear that such dependence or supervenience is unconditional, that is, free of caveats and ceteris paribus clauses: how things are at the natural-scientifically natural level or dimension of being fixes unconditionally (the probabilities of ) how things are at any level across time. Consequently, substratal, material reality must be a realm of strict, that is to say, exceptionless causal law. Ontological naturalism is thus not just a claim about empirical reality, namely, as fixed in all its other features by its natural-scientifically natural ones. It also implicates a claim about substratal natural science itself, namely, that such science seeks generalisations “not only ‘law-like’ and true, but as deterministic as nature can be found to be, free from caveats and ceteris paribus clauses.” (Davidson 1993, p. 8) This is what one must regard substratal natural science as seeking if one believes that the entire universe is a system closed under the kind of causality which substratal natural science ascertains. With this, we have an explanation of McDowell’s tendency to speak as if natural science itself sought subsumption under strict and ubiquitous law. As we have seen, McDowell is never completely clear about what the equation of nature with “the realm of law” comes to: is it the rise of an ontologically naturalist interpretation of modern natural science, i. e., the modern metaphysics of nature (in its more coherent, ontologically naturalist rather than Cartesian form)? Or is it the rise of modern natural science itself ? This failure to distinguish clearly between two different historical phenomena is understandable, given that commitment to the modern metaphysics of nature has consequences for one’s conception of what substratal natural science 34 Clearly, it is irrelevant for current purposes whether the present is understood to fix the future uniquely or merely to fix a range of futures, each with its own particular probability. Even in the latter case, whatever the future turns out to be, it is still a future caused solely by a purely natural scientific present.

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seeks to accomplish. For once one has embraced this metaphysics, one cannot but regard natural science as seeking a strict and ubiquitous lawfulness in nature. The reference just made to the idea of the universe as a system closed under the kind of causality ascertained by substratal natural science provides the opportunity for an important clarification. In Chapter Six we turn to consider what it would be genuinely to challenge the modern understanding of nature, and in particular, since internal coherence fates the modern understanding of nature to assume ontologically naturalist form, to deny the generic commitment of such naturalism. Given what it has shown itself to be, this commitment clearly understands the universe to be, as Davidson puts it,35 “a closed system” in a very strong sense. The universe is closed not simply in the sense that it is subject to a principle of causal closure along the following lines: if A is either the efficient cause or effect of B and B is an item ‘in nature’ (in empirical reality, the world, universe, etc.), hence is natural, physical and even material in the prephilosophical sense that it is made of ‘stuff ’ subject to natural law, capable of natural scientific investigation, etc., then A is, too (so that A, too, is ‘of the same substance’, that is, equally made of ‘stuff ’ subject to the same natural law, and equally capable of natural scientific investigation, etc.). Rather, because ‘nature’ has been equated with the object domain of natural science, if there is closure at all, then only under causation of the kind investigated by substratal natural science. The totality to which A and B belong is understood from the outset to be such that the sameness of their substance must lie solely in how they are for substratal natural science. So to deny ontological naturalism is not necessarily to deny causal closure. This is a very good thing since preserving causal closure is, as we have seen, a sine qua non of avoiding the kind of absurdity to which Descartes’ interactionist substance dualism is subject.

§ 5: Ontological Naturalism and Perceptual Experience Let us now turn to the decisive issue. According to McDowell, Davidson and Evans picture empirical thinking as taking place within an inner sphere or domain which is causally embedded in an outer sphere of external objects in the sense that these objects impinge upon it via sensory inputs or impressions lacking all conceptual structure or content. But are 35 See Davidson 1993, p. 8.

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they constrained to think of empirical thinking in this way, in particular, by their commitment to ontological naturalism as characterised in section four? Does this commitment prevent them from conceiving perceptual experience along the lines recommended by our account of how McDowell at least ought to have conceived the unity of receptivity and spontaneity? The under-elaborated reference here to sensory impressions and inputs might cause problems: if we understand such impressions to be items or events ‘in consciousness’,36 then we exclude those thinkers who – perhaps because they do not like talks of items or events occurring ‘in consciousness’ at all – would not want to describe perceptual experience as a matter of sensations or sense data causing perceptual belief or judgement. One could, after all, consistently maintain that Davidson should never have described perceptual experience in this way at all, but simply as a matter of sensation qua some purely physiological item or event causing belief. It is easy to see how to recast matters in such a way that the question to be decided encompasses this and indeed whatever other inflections one might imagine to the general position occupied by Davidson and Evans. We have only to put the question as follows: might a commitment to construing empirical thinking naturalistically, whether baldly or smoothly so, constrain one to identify the cognitively conceptual sphere it occupies with the realm of doxa and apophansis? Or, to put the same question in a somewhat different way, might such a commitment force one to identify the sphere of what has cognitively conceptual content with the space of reasons, thereby assimilating perceptual experience in whatever conceptually contentful sense there might be to belief and judgement? i. From Substance to Function When one thinks of the reality within which both empirical thinking and its object occur as identical with “the realm of law” – the natural-scientifically natural, viewed as a closed system governed by strict law – , one is in effect conceiving the causal process in which this reality consists as occurring most fundamentally and non-derivatively at the material level of the natural-scientifically natural. One will thus seek to construe the external entities which constitute the most immediate objects of per36 Or even simply ‘in the psychological realm’ – see Chapter One, p. 20, note 7.

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ception and empirical belief as causally responsible for these intentional phenomena ultimately in their capacity as natural-scientifically natural. Note that this is to contest something implicit in the idea that perceptual experience is a matter of things showing themselves as thus and so in a certain subjectively, contextually and objectively conditioned mode of giveness. For as we have seen, to think of perceptual experience in this way is to construe it as a causal transaction between an object there and a subject here in which the object appears as it does in virtue of its distinctively perceptible properties and relations. What Sellars calls the manifest image37 is so ineluctable precisely because it is manifest, that is to say, inherent to the structure of perceptual experience. A crucial part of the ontologically naturalist challenge thus consists in showing that the manifest image is, to put the matter crudely, merely manifest – precisely an image, mere appearance.38 To this end, the ‘folk identity’ of external entities – their character as displaying the perceptible properties and relations of everyday life – must be understood, first, as fixed by how such entities affect and are affected by other entities, not the least, the cognising subject. And then such dispositional patterns of behaviour must be shown to be understandable in terms of the material constitution of the entities which display such patterns and in particular, how this material constitution changes and evolves over time. This is not necessarily to make any baldly naturalist claim, for example, that the everyday, pre-natural-scientific identity of external things could be reduced to, or eliminated in favour of,39 the face such things turn to natural science; one could, after all, conceive this everyday, pre-natural scientific character as supervening on natural-scientifically natural constitution in a sense weaker than this, say, in some kind of anomalously monist sense. Rather, the claim being made here is simply the least one must say in order to ensure that the everyday pre-scientific identity of external things is no obstacle to the thesis that the causal relations in which these things stand are all ‘at bottom’ of a kind some substratal natural science ascertains. Now in their effort to show how internal items, specifically, the cognitively intentional states and events in which the perceptual process cul37 See Sellars 1963b. 38 But this is only a proper part of the naturalist challenge because Descartes and Mersenne must accept this much of the challenge no less than the ontological naturalist. 39 What other ways McDowell thinks there are of making the baldly naturalist claim is unclear. But this is not important here.

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minates, occur in nature in the second and formal sense distinguished above,40 ontological naturalists appeal to the supervenience of such items on some bit of nature in the first and substantive sense. They will thus seek to mete out to such internal items the kind of treatment to be meted out to external ones. As with external items, so, too, with internal ones, ontological naturalists will seek to understand ‘folk’ identity – in this case, the very intentionality of cognitive states and events –, first as fixed by how, at least ideally,41 they affect, and are affected by, other things so as then to be able to explicate or at least explain this now relationally conceived identity in terms of the material reality in which these states and experiences are realised. The class of items ideally affected by, or affecting, cognitively intentional states and experiences will include the external things which ideally cause them. But it may well include whatever other internal items might mediate causally between these states and experiences and their external causes, e. g., ‘sensations’. And it will certainly include whatever further intentional states and experiences, and whatever intentional behaviour, such cognitively intentional states and experiences themselves cause – once again we must add, at least ideally. Here, too, in attempting to understand the intentional ‘folk’ identity of such intentional states and experiences in accordance with these two steps, one is not necessarily making any specific commitment as to the nature of the supervenience at issue, that is, as to the precise nature of the second step. One is not necessarily appealing to type-type identity, nor embracing an eliminativist account of intentionality. Nor indeed is one necessarily embracing that kind of token-token identity which consists in identifying the intentional character of cognitively intentional states and experiences with their non-holistically conceived causal role, as when one says that to be a belief about a horse is to be (a) a state which causes other such states and ultimately behaviour in a fashion which tracks the inferential relations and behaviour-shaping character of a belief about a horse; and possibly also (b) a state caused in some way which presupposes that, typically or mostly, states of this kind are caused by a horse. One could, after all, reject all three kinds of move, which would appear to constitute the prime examples of what McDowell understands by bald naturalism, in favour of a more holistic view. Thus, 40 See above, p. 229. 41 This qualification is necessary because intentional states and experiences have a ‘normative’ character: they occur, are had, or take effect rationally or irrationally. See further below in this sub-section.

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one might say that mental state- and event-tokens just are physical stateor event-tokens, yet also insist that attributions of the former can only be made holistically, as mere moments or aspects of an account of overall observable behaviour undertaken in the light cast by the constitutive ideal of rationality and for the sake of explaining and predicting the course of such behaviour. But however one ultimately chooses to take the second step of spelling out how the intentional ‘folk’ identity of cognitively intentional states and experiences supervenes upon their natural-scientifically natural constitution, one must take the initial step of construing this ‘folk’ identity as explicable or understandable in terms of how, ideally at least, such states and experiences affect, and are affected by, other items, in particular, other such intentional states and experiences.42 Or, if one feels that talk of how individual states and experiences ideally affect, and are affected by, other things is insufficiently holistic, one may put the point this way: ‘folk’ identity must be understood to be explicable in terms of the overall role talk of such states and experiences plays in the explanation and prediction, in the first instance, of other intentional states and experiences, but ultimately, of course, of intentional behaviour – explanation and prediction that takes place in the light cast by the constitutive ideal of rationality. But whichever way of putting things one prefers, the general point remains: no sense can be made of supervenience unless one begins by understanding the intentional ‘substance’ of intentional states and experiences to be explicable in some kind of ‘relationalising’ or ‘functionalising’ terms. What, however, does this ‘relationalising’ or ‘functionalising’ mean for perceptual experience? Insofar as perceptual experiences are taken to be conceptually contentful, these, too, must be taken to be explicable in such terms. Their ‘folk’ identity as perceptually intentional states or experiences must also be understood to be plausibly explicable in terms of how they are disposed ideally to affect, and to be affected by, other things, or again, how talk of them functions in explaining and predicting the occurrence of other such states and experiences, and ultimately, of course, ongoing intentional behaviour. With this, the fate of distinctively perceptual intentionality is sealed: distinctively perceptual intentional experien42 This is true even of the eliminativist, who argues that we should eliminate intentional notions precisely because they cannot be construed in terms of functional or causal role in any way which would show them to be truly explanatory, hence useful notions.

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ces and states must be assimilated, to a greater or lesser degree (Davidson and Evans respectively), to the kind of cognitively intentional state or experience which most naturally and paradigmatically falls to mind as construable in ‘relational’ terms. It is clear what this kind is: ‘truth-claiming’ cognitive states and experiences such as belief, judgement and the like. Of such distinctively doxastic states and apophantic events it is most plausible to maintain that their internal intentional structure is explicable in terms of how they ideally affect and are affected by other things – as when one says that their intentional character lies in their inferential role or their character as a rule for action (possibly only in conjunction with what tends to bring them about and which constitutes what one would informally describe as the mind-world, denotational aspect of their intentional contentfulness). Or again, of such doxastic states and apophantic events it is most plausible to say that their internal intentional structure simply is their character as inseparable, holistic moments or aspects of overall intentional behaviour which an interpreter postulates according to the constitutive ideal of rationality in order to explain and predict the occurrence of further such states and experiences, and ultimately overall intentional behaviour itself. The initial step of construing the identity of intentional states and experiences ‘relationally’ or ‘functionally’ is a ‘reduction’ of sorts. Yet it is not an essentially naturalist move since it is not a reduction to the natural-scientifically natural, i. e., to material constitution. Rather, it is a ‘reduction’ which precedes all such baldly or smoothly naturalist temptations, for these are only properly at home once this initial ‘relationalisation’ of intentional ‘substance’ has been made – when, namely, one turns to the further question of how to construe this relationally conceived identity in such a way that clear and specific sense can be given to the generic claim of supervenience. One might say that this latter issue concerns how precisely to conceive the way in which the underlying, naturalscientifically natural mechanisms at work in the black box make it the black box it is. And this makes clear that in order even properly to pose the naturalist question, one must have already conceived the black box as a black box, that is, as able to have its ‘substantial identity’ cashed in terms of ‘functional concepts’, namely, as a certain way of relating to, of affecting and being affected by, other things. There is, of course, with regard to those internal items which are intentional states and experiences a problem, or at least a difference, not present in the case of at least many of the external items which cause

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them: intentional states and experiences such as beliefs and judgement (and for that matter desires and intentions) are subject to ‘normative’ considerations of correct and incorrect, rational and irrational. They occur, are had, or take effect correctly or incorrectly, or perhaps better, rationally or irrationally. For this reason, the first of the two steps involved in the naturalisation of the cognitively intentional has been characterised from the outset in ‘normative’ terms: the relational explication of the identity of the cognitively intentional was characterised as a matter of fixing this identity in terms of how what bears it ideally behaves, which consists in part in how this bearer behaves when possessed by a truly or fully rational subject. Perhaps indeed belief and judgement must be construed in terms of how they function in the cognitive economy of a subject ideal not merely in that it is fully rational, but also in that it gets things right. After all, to characterise how a belief ideally behaves must surely involve appeal to the circumstances under which it is true. One must surely factor into the identity of belief sensitivity to empirical refutation, that is, its character as something which a truly or fully rational subject will give up under conditions which reliably intimate its untruth. No doubt the problem or question of the ‘normative’ presents itself in diametrically opposed ways, depending on whether one is a bald or smooth naturalist. Thus, the bald naturalist will find it hard to explain how individual states and events construed in terms of their capacities to affect and be affected by other things could take effect, or themselves be effected, in ways which are valid or invalid. The functionally characterised process of nutrition, from mastication through digestion to excretion, does not take place validly or invalidly, as opposed to (more or less) efficiently or inefficiently. Why is the case of empirical thinking so different and does one really capture this difference when one construes it in ‘relationalised’ or ‘functionalised’ terms? This problem is only compounded by the fact that validity implicates notions of truth and falsity. To be valid is, after all, to be truth-preserving. But how can states characterised in terms of how they affect and are affected by other things be items sensitive to truth and untruth? The smooth naturalist will also confront the problem or question of the ‘normative’, albeit from the other direction. For a smooth naturalist such as Davidson, the question becomes how those moments or aspects into which the interpreter differentiates ongoing behaviour in order to locate it on a scale whose upper bound is the constitutive ideal of rationality can be token-token identical with physico-physiologically characterised states or events. If there is no bit-by-bit, or piece-by-piece mapping,

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how can there be a one-to-one mapping (token-token identity) at all? Has not the notion of identity lost all grip and application? In which case the ‘normative’ character of intentionality or, as McDowell would put it, its spontaneity, shows itself harder to preserve in its sui generis character than the smooth naturalist thinks? Fortunately, these issues need not concern us here since our interest lies solely in the move preceding the step of naturalisation which generates the problem or question of the ‘normative’. This is that prior step of construing the internal intentional ‘substance’ of cognitively intentional states and experiences in the ‘relationalised’ or ‘functionalised’ terms of how they behave, ideally, of course, vis--vis other things. Commitment to ontological naturalism forces one to take this step as one’s first move towards naturalisation (and thus towards whatever problems of reconciling the ‘natural’ and the ‘normative’ this second move brings with it). Consequently, this commitment forces one to assimilate perceptual to doxastic and apophantic intentionality (or, if not directly to this, then to something which contributes a part to such intentionality, e. g., a Sellarsian intuition of a ‘this-such’).43 It is important, however, to bear in mind the point made above, namely, that this first step towards naturalisation is not itself an essentially naturalist move. Commitment to an ontologically naturalist philosophical programme entails commitment to this first step but not conversely. For commitment to this first step already follows from the general equation of nature with the “realm of law”. It is clear why this is so: the primary task is to explain how internal items, in particular, cognitively intentional states and experiences can be in nature in the second and formal sense, given that nature in the first and substantive sense, that in which the second must be grounded, has been understood as Descartes and 43 Peacocke’s position does not contradict this. For him as for others the only form of conceptual contentfulness is propositional contentfulness. Furthermore, Peacocke never clarifies how all the things he claims to constitute distinctively perceptual contentfulness could conceivably hang together; he simply provides a mere inventory of items whose function and phenomenological legitimacy is not obvious – see Peacocke, op. cit., esp. Ch. 2. His failure to provide such clarification constitutes a (naturally only fallible) ground for thinking that he cannot – this for the kinds of reason advanced here. Peacocke’s attempt to take seriously the sensually and qualitatively impressional character of perceptual experience is commendable but his phenomenological sensitivity is dulled by his naturalistic pre-conceptions, and so his account of the intentional structure of perceptual experience ends up as a misdescription.

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Mersenne recommend. So all internal items must be, even for Descartes and Mersenne, similar ‘in substance’ to the external items constitutive of nature in the first and substantive sense at least to this extent: what they are is explicable in terms of the general way in which they relate (at least ideally) to other entities; in no sense may what they are constitute something to which one must appeal in order to understand why in general they relate to other entities either as they do in fact or as they ought to do. Note that this does not entail that they must be of exactly the same substance although it does suggest the difficulty already encountered of denying this identity. There is another, particularly instructive way of seeing why this first step of ‘relationalisation’ or ‘functionalisation’ of the intentional character of cognitive states and experiences becomes necessary as soon as one embraces even the general equation of nature with the realm of law. What would it mean to allow that the intentional character of a perceptual experience could not be non-circularly explicated in such relational or functional terms, that in fact the order of explication had to be the other way around? This would be to concede that how a perceptual experience is ideally affected by other things, in particular, by its intentional object, could only be characterised in terms which refer to this perceptual experience and its intentional content themselves. In other words, the capacity of the object of a perceptual experience to cause the same could only be characterised as the capacity to cause just this kind of perceptual experience, with just this kind of perceptual intentional content. But then the intentional object would be understood as something essentially disposed to cause such and such perceptual experience of it. Its ‘substantial nature’ as an external thing would consist in its possessing such and such perceptible properties and relations; it would be an external thing in an everyday pre-theoretical, hence perceptible sense. If, therefore, perceptual experience were to prove resistant to ‘relationising’ or ‘functionalising’ explication, one would have to accept at face value the ontology implicit in the structure of perceptual experience, which accords to the perceptible properties and relations of external things in the everyday, pre-theoretical sense a causal role in the production of the relevant perceptual experience. Consequently, these properties and relations would not be ‘inert’. One would have denied the general equation of nature with the “realm of law”. So one is indeed led to construe internal items, in particular, all cognitively intentional states and experiences, in the ‘relationalising’, ‘black box’ terms of causal role as soon as one conceives nature and the natural in the two senses in which Descartes understood them; one need not also

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seek to identify, in ontologically naturalist fashion, the extensions of these two senses. It is primarily the general equation of nature with “the realm of law”, and only in consequence the specifically naturalist version thereof, which forces one to assimilate perceptual experience in the epistemically relevant sense to judgement and belief. Unsurprisingly, then, throughout the Meditationes Descartes displays a tendency to equivocate on the notion of perceptual experience: sometimes it is assimilated to perceptual judgement, at other times to sensation. ii. Two Kinds of ‘Relationality’ – The Hermeneutic Character of Perceptual Experience The argument of the previous sub-section was merely a first pass at identifying in ontological naturalism a tendency to assimilate the sphere of cognitively, hence conceptually contentful items to the sphere of doxa and apophansis. For in some ways it is too simple to describe the first step one must take towards a naturalisation of cognitively intentional states and experiences as a matter of construing their internal intentional ‘substance’ in ‘functional’ or ‘relational’ terms. To put things this way is to obscure the fact that this first and preparatory step construes intentional substance ‘relationally’ or ‘functionally’ in a quite specific and, as we shall see, truncated sense – truncated in that it involves a tacit oversimplification of the process of empirical thinking. This oversimplification has constituted a persistent temptation for distinctively modern reflection on the nature of self-conscious subjectivity. Consequently, by locating the ground of this oversimplification in the requirements of ontological naturalism, we effectively demonstrate that a tendency inherent in the distinctively modern pre-occupation with, and reflection on, the nature of self-conscious subjectivity (empirical thinking) has its roots in that general equation of nature with “the realm of law” whose internal dialectic engenders ontological naturalism. It is uncontentiously true that the identity of a cognitively intentional state or experience must be manifest in how it (ideally) relates to other things, in particular, other such intentional states and experiences. The only real issue that can arise in connection with this uncontentious claim concerns how precisely this relatedness is to be understood. To this extent, then, the contrast insinuated in the preceding sub-section between explicating the cognitively intentional in terms of how it (ideally) relates to other things and proceeding the other way around is at best su-

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perficial. Consider perceptual experience as it has been explicated here. To perceive is to perceive how things are, hence appear as, what they are. To perceive a blackboard duster (as) lying there on the desk before me is to perceive how it is doing this, say, as lying diagonally relative to the left corner of the table, with its own left corner lying about, say, five centimetres from the edge, with chalk all over it and indeed around it …, and so on, indeterminately. This further information is in some sense contained within my perceptual experience, although it is clearly not conceptually contained within it, as something entailed by the conceptual content of my experience. Rather, it is implicit in the sensually impressional character of my experience, which consists in the manner, the how, in which my experience reveals its conceptual content (“a blackboard duster lying there on the desk before me”) to apply there and now. Because it is not contained in that part of total perceptual intentional content which is genuinely conceptual, this further contextual information is not an inferential consequence. Yet this does not prevent one from describing the beliefs to which my perceptual experience might lead as a result of its having the perceptual intentional content that it has, or indeed the propositional contents of these beliefs, as in some sense contained within the experience, hence as consequences which it might rationally have. To this extent, it is certainly possible to say something sufficiently similar to what is commonly said of belief and judgement: two perceptual experiences are the same if and only if they have the same consequences. At the same time, there is also significant difference. For one can only recognise something to be a consequence of perceptual experience in this sense if one is able either to recollect or to imagine, to some sufficient degree, what it is like to undergo such a perceptual experience; one must not merely grasp a conceptual content in abstracto, but ‘see’ how it applies there now as perceived to apply from here now (by a subject of such and such a kind). In this sense, the consequences of perceptual experience have a decidedly hermeneutic character. Now this hermeneutic character reflects the fact that perceptual experience has at least some of its consequences in a fashion fundamentally different from an intentional state or experience with exclusively conceptual content. Distinctively inferential consequences follow ‘according to rule’ at least in the sense that – however habitually and unthinkingly a subject might actually make the transition from belief in a conceptual content to belief in some inferential consequence thereof – one can al-

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ways express this transition, at least retrospectively, as a rule-governed one.44 By contrast, not all the consequences of perceptual experience follow in this sense ‘according to rule’. Rather, some follow, as one might say, according to how the ‘rule’, that is, the relevant conceptual content and conceptual norms implicated in it, applies here – once again irrespective of how habitually and unthinkingly the perceiving subject might actually make the transition from perceptual experience to belief in some hermeneutically implicit consequence thereof. We now see why it is at best superficial to imply that the relevant contrast is between explicating internal ‘intentional substance’ in the ‘functional’ or ‘relational’ terms of how an intentional state or experience (ideally) affects, and is affected by, other things; and explicating matters the other way around. For the real contrast is in fact between internal ‘intentional substance’ which is, and internal ‘intentional substance’ which is not, ‘rulish’, that is, such that what possesses it exercises the functional role imparted by this substance (intentional content) solely ‘according to rule’. In the one case, all transitions from the intentional state or experience in question to another are governed by rule; in the other case, not all transitions are thus governed. Of course, the rule of inference at issue here, whether material or formal, governs not in the sense of being invoked in the transition itself but rather in the sense of being invoked in order to exhibit the legitimacy of the transition. Once this point is understood, one sees just what it means to say that in the case of intentional states or experiences which are ‘unrulishly’ contentful, the order of understanding and explanation must be from consequences to content rather than the other way around: because in this case there is no such governing rule, one must understand the intentional state or experience and its content in its particularity and singularity in order to see what transitions from it are legitimate. The first and preparatory step towards a naturalisation of cognitively intentional states and experiences consists in construing them in ‘functional’ or ‘relational’ terms – as non-circularly explicable terms of how they (ideally) affect and are affected by other things, in particular, other intentional states and experiences. As such, this step, which even Descartes must take, amounts to a denial that there are intentional states and experiences which are contentful in the ‘unruly’ sense indicated. All 44 The rule in question might be construed as a principle of material inference in Sellars’ sense or as a principle of formal inference involving some general conditional as one of its premises.

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cognitively intentional states and experiences are to be construed as taking effect ‘according to rule’ – once again, in the sense just indicated, which does not entail actual manipulation of rules by the subject of empirical thinking. At this point, a sense emerges in which commitment to ontological naturalism might potentially truncate one’s understanding of the very process in which empirical thinking consists. For this first step effectively reduces to inferential role at least that part of how the cognitively intentional (ideally) affects, and is affected by, other things which consists in how it (ideally) generates, and is generated by, other intentional phenomena – as if empirical thinking could only unfold in processes of inference. In consequence, it elevates strictly discursive thinking not just to a necessary moment or aspect of self-conscious subjectivity, but to a feature necessarily and sufficiently distinctive of it. The tendency of modern philosophical reflection on the nature of self-conscious empirical thinking to construe the latter purely discursively, as exhaustively characterised as a process of raising and evaluating truth-claims, or indeed as an internalised process of giving-and-taking reasons, has its ground in what tends modern philosophy towards ontological naturalism, viz., the general equation of nature with “the realm of law”. By contrast, implicit in the conception of perceptual experience articulated here is the claim that the transitions made in empirical thinking are not exhaustively inferential, but at times hermeneutic. That is, in the process of self-conscious empirical thinking intentional states and experiences do not arise from others solely in inferential fashion, but often in processes of unpacking, either thinkingly or unthinkingly, the hermeneutic consequences of perceptual experience. From this perspective, it must be one-sided to regard the capacity to give and take reasons as the primary and distinctive feature of self-conscious subjectivity. Just as distinctive, just as primordial, must be the capacity to understand and to demonstrate how conceptual determinations and contents apply in this situation here and now – as when one self-consciously shows what one says, means or thinks. 45 One indication that this claim is right lies in the consequences of denying it. Precisely when the process in which intentional states and experiences rationally displace one another is conceived in ubiquitously inferential, hence apophantic terms, one nourishes the extreme view that em45 Thereby one demonstrates that there is a way of comprehending a rule which is not just another discursive interpretation (Deutung) of it.

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pirical thinking proceeds so much ‘according to rule’ that it can be replicated or at least modelled by a process of manipulating symbols according to syntactical form. For such inferential processes (at least when they are tacitly assumed to be deductive and the apparently non-deductive character of much real reasoning has been put to one side as a problem to be dealt with later) can be tracked or modelled ‘mechanically’ in this sense. What, therefore, sets empirical thinking and self-conscious subjectivity apart from mere symbol-processing ‘machines’ is precisely the ability to perceive how ‘symbols’ apply here and now, to those things there, and to act upon, indeed occasionally to extract self-consciously, the ‘unruly’ consequences thereof. Only something with this ability can be said to be able to give and take reasons, hence to be able self-consciously and responsibly to wield concepts at all. iii. The Rise of the Philosophical Concept of ‘Sensation’ One problem that immediately emerges once one has assimilated perceptual to doxastic and apophantic intentionality is what to do with the sensually or qualitatively impressional element which seems to set perceptual experience apart from belief and judgement. It would be phenomenologically inaccurate to deny that perceptual experience has a sensual and qualitative dimension to it, say, by construing it simply as a matter of certain physical states or events causing lowest level belief or judgement. Thus, Davidson, apparently in recognition of this phenomenologically ascertainable fact, construes perceptual experience as a matter of sensation causing lowest level perceptual judgement or belief – sensation being understood, of course, as a non-conceptually structured item which nonetheless occurs ‘in consciousness’. Similarly, Evans not only regards perceptual experience in that sense of the term which makes it something we share with animals as a matter of being put in a non-conceptually contentful informational state; he also understands this state to possess a sensual, qualitative character which explains the phenomenon of belief-independence. Once again, this is to regard it as an item which occurs ‘in’ the consciousness at least of self-conscious human beings capable of belief and judgement. Notice, however, that while both Davidson and Evans are not blind to the phenomenologically ascertainable fact that perceptual experience involves a sensually and qualitatively impressional dimension, both construe it as an item which occurs separably ‘in consciousnesss’. In this sense, both endorse some more or less sophisticated version of the

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classically modern assumption that this dimension is to be explicated as the presence of ‘sensations’. It is not hard to explain why Davidson and Evans feel themselves thus constrained. For their naturalistically motivated assimilation of perceptual experience in any truly cognitive sense to perceptual belief or judgement leaves them little choice: having construed perceptual experience itself as a matter of things outside us causing perceptual belief or judgement inside us, one might now try to accommodate the sensual, qualitative character of perceptual experience by regarding it as some additional effect had on us by things outside us. But what effect in us? And in what sense is it a part of perceptual experience? Is it merely aggretatively a part, or is it not even notionally separable? It must be the former since perceptual experience in the epistemically relevant sense has from the outset been conceived as terminating in a truth-claiming (perceptual belief or judgement) itself capable of standing alone. Furthermore, it must be something in which no trace of spontaneity is involved at all since the conceptual dimension has already been entirely parcelled out to this truth-claiming intentional state or experience in order that the conceptual dimension might be construed in terms of how it (ideally) relates to, affects and is affected by, other things. Yet phenomenological accuracy requires that the total effect had upon consciousness by things outside us include more than the purely conceptual element. So the total effect must consist in something totally nonconceptual occurring ‘in consciousness’ in at most aggretative unity with the conceptual element of perceptual belief or judgement. The sensually or qualitatively impressional dimension must therefore be sensation in a sense which we now see to be dictated by one’s commitment to equating nature with “the realm of law.” With this, we have explained the decidedly modern tendency displayed by thinkers from Descartes to Davidson to construe the sensually impressional dimension of perceptual experience on analogy to pains, twitches, tickles, qualia and ‘raw feels’ (whatever the latter are).46 46 “The conception of visual impressions as states of consciousness can be clarified to some extent by pointing out that they were assimilated to bodily sensations and feelings.” (Sellars 1967, p. 10) Pace Sellars, this is precisely how they cannot be clarified – see below, Chapter Seven, § 1 i. In fact, the philosophical concept of sensation wielded in numerous philosophical accounts of perceptual experience is a very strange beast indeed. There are, of course, sensations in a pre-philosophical sense: sensations of heat, feelings of pain and indeed what the Germans call Empfindung, i. e., how one is affected by things, possibly even the very things

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Of course, the fact that phenomenological accuracy requires us to include, as occurring ‘in consciousness’, something in some sense sensually impressional and non-conceptual shows that the philosophical concept of sensation is not a completely artificial creation. There must be some sort of conceptual connection between the sensually impressional character of perceptual experience and sensations in the ordinary sense, a connection which makes it at least look as if one could appropriate the latter in order to explicate the former. What is this connection? In other words, what are sensations as ordinarily, that is to say, pre-philosophically understood? In very many, if not all cases, they can be understood as the effects had upon consciousness by perceptual mechanisms when they are physically overloaded, hence not yielding perceptual experience at all (or at least only defective perceptual experience). In this sense, one might say that to sense is precisely not to perceive and vice versa. Clearly, it makes biological sense to have perceptual mechanisms which, when subject to physical overload, let the subject of perception know about it. For then the subject will respond in ways which eliminate or reduce the potentially damaging overload, e. g., by closing its eyes or withdrawing its arm. It is also clear that the sensations generated ‘in consciousness’ by such overload will reflect, in their qualitative, sensual character, the character of the perceptual mechanisms generating them, and thus the sensually impressional character of the kind of experience which these mechanisms normally enable. The qualitative character of sensations in the ordinary, unproblematic sense is thus to be understood in terms of the sensually impressional character of the relevant kind of perceptual experience. The mistake inherent to the philosophical concept of sensation, or perhaps rather the philosophical misuse of the concept, consists in attempting to turn this order of explication on its head. By way of conclusion to this whole section, let us note one important feature of the account given here of the origin of the distinctively modern picture of empirical intentionality and its subject as an inner realm enclosed by an outer realm which has been equated with the natural-scientifically natural: in it no appeal has been made to assumptions about one perceives. It is crucial to note, however, how very unlike perceptual experience such sensations and feelings are. This is true even in the case of touch: hapsis, properly understood, puts one in touch with the things themselves, not with sensations caused in one. This is not to deny a conceptual connection between perceptual experience and sensation: sensation is what one has when perceptual mechanisms get overloaded, thereby ceasing to function as mechanisms of perceptual experience.

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spontaneity, freedom or normativity. Nor has the account appealed either to any ostensible immateriality of the empirical subject and its ‘mind’ or to any alleged capacity of the inner infallibly to introspect its contents. This picture, this distinctively modern, metaphysically loaded ontology of empirical thinking, its subject, and the place of both ‘in nature’, is thus fundamentally independent of these latter claims. Whatever extraneous religious, ethical or epistemological considerations might lead one to see in the modern subject and ‘mind’ something spontaneous, free, immaterial or capable of infallible introspection, these considerations do not shape the picture itself. Rather, these considerations merely push elaboration of the picture in this or that more specific (and more or less paralogistic) direction, and they do so solely for whatever extraneous religious, ethical or epistemological reasons motivate them. If, however, this is so, then it must also be wrong to suggest that the modern picture of empirical thinking and its subject involves a commitment to immaterialism. McDowell once suggested that Cartesian immaterialism arose as a result of the attempt to accommodate “representational bearing on the world and availability to introspection” within a conception of empirical intentionality and its subject “as a suitable subject for science”. (McDowell 1986, p. 155) Not only does this get things the wrong way around, both in a substantive and a historical sense (since for Descartes and others of his time, the existence of immaterial souls was a premise, not a consequence); it also seriously underestimates the sophistication of Descartes and his times. Pace McDowell (in McDowell 1986, p. 15), physical conservation laws, albeit not those we endorse today, were already well entrenched at least in Descartes’ mind, if not his times.47 In particular, Descartes fully appreciated the danger that any kind of ‘integration’ of the psychological and physical would require for its coherence that empirical reality display some kind of causal closure, that is, some sense in which cause and effect are ‘of the same substantial nature’. To this extent, he fully appreciated that it may well be “contrary to reason to hope for an integrated psycho-physics which would incorporate immaterial substances into a fully scientific view of the world.” (McDowell 1986, p. 155)

47 See Descartes 1644 (1983), Part II, § 36, p. 57, where Descartes claims that God is the primary cause of motion and that He always maintains an equal quantity of it in the universe.

Chapter Six: From Nature to World The basic tenet underlying the picture of empirical thinking common to both Davidson and Evans is the generic claim endorsed by bald and smooth naturalists alike that the causal relations which hold empirical reality in its entirety together are all of a kind ascertained by some substratal natural science. It is fundamentally this claim which prevents one from conceiving perceptual experience as a genuine unity of concept and intuition, at least in the sense reconstructively attributed to McDowell as what his idea of integrating receptivity and spontaneity ought to come to. For it is fundamentally this claim which forces one to assimilate perceptual intentionality to ‘doxastic’ and ‘apophantic’ intentionality, thereby banishing the sensually impressional character of perceptual experience to the extra-conceptual fringes of consciousness alongside sensations of heat, pains, red after-images and the like. But must one, in denying this generically naturalist claim, absurdly deny the legitimate accomplishments of natural science? In order to answer these questions, it is crucial to clarify just what kind of thesis one is endorsing when one insists that all causes and effects in empirical reality are of a kind some substratal natural science ascertains.

§ 1: Naturalism – Science, Philosophy or Both? It is not hard to see that the definitive thesis of ontological naturalism is a metaphysical one, at least in the sense enunciated by Aristotle when he characterised first philosophy as the study of the archai, the distinctively first principles and causes of things.1 More precisely, the thesis that all empirically real causes and effects are of a kind some substratal natural science ascertains, proclaims, wrongly in Aristotle’s opinion,2 the in prin1 2

Metaphysics, Bk. I, Ch. 2, esp. 982a21 – 982b10; see also Bk. IV, Ch. 1, 1003a26 – 27. See Metaphysics, Bk. I, Ch.3, 983b7 – 984b7. Here Aristotle criticises those earlier natural philosophers who had acknowledged merely material causes. By this Aristotle can hardly mean that such natural philosophers had no notion of efficient

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ciple possibility of finding the first principles and causes of at least all things in empirical reality at the material level – as if an account of the material constitution of entities ‘in nature’ and their interaction at the material level across time were in principle enough to account for all efficiently causal relations between such entities. Aristotle does not himself use the term ‘metaphysics’. Even so, he seems clearly to have in mind the kind of total account the in principle possibility of which specific forms of naturalism seek to legitimate, namely, an account which shows the material level or dimension of empirical reality to be that at which the most basic, independent causal relations are found, hence that which constitutes the ‘true’ being or ‘substance’3 of all empirically real things. The definitive thesis of ontological naturalism thus proclaims the in principle possibility of a form of what, in the eighteenth century, the school of Wolff had come to call metaphysica specialis, in contrast to metaphysica generalis or ontologia. 4 Of course, this ‘rationalist’ distinction between ‘special’ and ‘general’ metaphysics harks back to Aristotle, specifically to the two connotations which the term ‘first philosophy’ (prote¯ philosophia) had for him: on the one hand, the connotation already mentioned, namely, the identification of the truly first causes and principles of things, and on the other, the study of entities in their capacity as entities.5 Now as Brentano pointed out in his doctoral dissertation,6 Aristotle thought that to undertake the one study was to undertake the other7 – which is not to say that he simply conflated these studies, i. e., thought that his characterisations of them meant the very same thing. But

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cause at all, or confused the question of why one thing follows upon another with the question as to what things are ‘made of ’. Rather, like contemporary naturalists, these earlier natural philosophers thought that what things are made of fixed an answer to the question of why things happen. In personal communication Rick Benitez has confirmed this reading of Aristotle and pointed out that while Plato was aware of other causes – else he could not have written the Timaeus – , he did not think that they deserved the name aitia – see Phaedo 95a-100a. Res quae ita existit, ut nulla alia re indigeat ad existendum (Descartes 1644 (1983), § 51, p. 23; AT viii1), at least in the abstractly nominal sense of substantiality rather than the commonly nominal sense of an individual substance. The word ontologia, i. e., ‘ontology’, is not at all ancient or even pre-modern, but in fact is coined on the cusp of modernity – see Mora 1963. See Metaphysics, Bk. IV, Ch. 1, 1003a20 – 21. See Brentano 1862 (1960). This dissertation was to have a great influence on Heidegger. See Metaphysics, Bk. IV, Ch. 1, 1003a31 – 32.

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when the school of Wolff made a similar distinction, it did so in order to separate the two studies: while general metaphysics or ontology studied such categories as substance-and-accident, cause-and-effect, as well as of our concepts of space and time,8 special metaphysics studied the ultimate causal grounds of things: the concepts of world and matter, God and soul, as well as the distinctive characteristics associated with these entities, e. g., infinite versus finite duration, extent and divisibility, omnipotence of will and cognition, immortality, simplicity, freedom, responsibility, etc.9 Because these entities were held to be realities somehow related to sensible things, yet not themselves given in experience, distinctively modern, rationalist special metaphysics was regarded as the science of the suprasensible. As their names indicate, special and general metaphysics, taken together, were held to comprise the full extent of metaphysics – although it is worth noting that Kant once described metaphysica specialis as metaphysics in the full or proper sense.10 Importantly, the distinction made by the school of Wolff between general and special metaphysics recurs, at least in general form, in fairly recent analytic philosophy. Thus, Donald Cary Williams once distinguished two branches of metaphysics. The first branch, analytic ontology, examines … the traits necessary to whatever is, in this or any other possible world. Its cardinal problem is that of substance and attribute, or at any rate something cognate with this in that family of ideas which contains also subsistence and inherence, subject and predicate, particular and universal, singular and general, individual and class, and matter and form. It is the question how a thing can be an instance of many properties while a property may inhere in many instances, the question of how everything is a case of a kind, a this-such, an essence endowed with existence, an existent differentiated by essence, and so forth. Concerned with what it means to be a thing or a kind at all, it is in some wise prior to and independent of the other great branch of metaphy-

8 Presumably it would also include the investigation of such issues as the status of universals, natural scientific law and abstract objects. 9 Of course, the notion of metaphysica specialis in this sense is already implicit in Descartes – see, e. g., his “Letter from the Author to the Translator”, which served as a preface to the 1647 French translation of the Principia Philosophiae and which contains his famous simile of philosophy as a tree “of which the roots are Metaphysics, the trunk is Physics, and the branches emerging from this trunk are all the other branches of knowledge.” (Descartes, op. cit., p. xxiv) 10 See Kant 1791 (1978), A 11 (Werkausgabe, p. 590).

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sics, speculative cosmology: what kinds of thing are there, what stuff are they made of, how are they strung together?11

This contrast between speculative cosmology (special metaphysics) and analytic ontology (general metaphysics) is expressly appealed to by Frank Jackson in his attempt to make good the claim that physicalism is a thesis within serious, that is to say, special metaphysics.12 The defining thesis of ontological naturalism may thus be described as a move made within special metaphysics. Note that to claim this is to say nothing at all about how precisely the thesis might be demonstrated, that is, about how special metaphysics is to be conducted. The Wolffians thought of it as proceeding by analysis of the relevant concepts. So, too, does Jackson; he attempts to show in what sense a strong form of ontological naturalism, viz., physicalism, is a thesis within serious armchair metaphysics. Yet one need not think of metaphysics, in particular, special metaphysics, in this way. Numerous thinkers from very different traditions have held that metaphysics was somehow an empirical or at least a posteriori discipline – see Zeller 1895 for an example which is not only unfamiliar but also therapeutic, given the inaccurate picture painted of him and other neo-Kantians by Rorty.13

§ 2: Does Science need Naturalism? The fact that it is not obviously absurd to regard the defining thesis of ontological naturalism as in some sense an empirical or a posteriori claim shows that its status as a claim made within special metaphysics, at least in the generic Aristotelian sense, is no obstacle to its being a claim also made by natural science. The crucial question is, however, whether the thesis is necessarily endorsed by natural science. In other words, is it a thesis to which natural science is committed simply in virtue of being natural science, hence independently of whether specific research programmes within, say, cognitive science or molecular biology have successfully developed theories and explanatory models which entail that their chosen ranges of phenomena constitute no exception to the naturalist thesis? It is, after all, a brute empirical fact about natural science that 11 Williams 1966, p. 74. On this same page Williams describes metaphysics as “the thoroughly empirical science.” 12 See Jackson 1994, p. 40, note 1. 13 See Rorty 1979.

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thus far these kinds of discipline have not yielded this kind of concrete, empirical result – and yet one might still want to argue that to deny the ontologically naturalist thesis is to deny natural science. There are two ways in which one might conceive the thesis as genuinely essential to natural science, such that commitment to it can sensibly run ahead of the results of the kind of research to which one might regard the thesis as empirically sensitive. On the one hand, one might regard it as constitutively essential, that is, as a claim to which natural science is essentially committed because its truth is entailed by the truth of certain laws and principles so fundamental that commitment to them is plausibly held to define the very identity of natural science as we know it. On the other, one might regard it as regulatively essential, that is, as a claim presupposed by some method, norm or value conformity to which is plausibly held to define a practice of theoretical inquiry as natural-scientific. Is, then, the defining thesis of naturalism constitutively essential? In particular, are there any laws or principles of natural science which are plausibly held to define natural science as we know it and which entail this thesis? One candidate immediately springs to mind: the law of conservation, formulated for whatever conservandum one cares to choose – motion in the case of Descartes, mass in classical Newtonian physics, or energy and mass in physics post Einstein. Indeed, this candidate appears to have sprung to McDowell’s mind: see McDowell 1986, p. 155, where he claims that “conservation laws” were not firmly entrenched in Descartes’ time, and speculates that this might explain why Descartes could find “immaterialism” plausible. Yet it is easy to see that this undoubtedly fundamental law does not entail the naturalist thesis. There are, after all, infinitely many ways in which one’s chosen conservandum C could be deployed throughout the universe at a future time t+n such that all these ways preserve the quantity of C at t. So conceivably, empirically real causes not of the kind some substratal natural science ascertains could produce all sorts of effects without overturning this particular law of natural scientific nature. Indeed, this point indicates not just that this is conceivable, it also indicates how it is. In other words, it indicates the sense in which such causes would be constrained by the law: the latter delimits a field of possibilities for the former. Of course, the vast majority of different deployments of C which are consistent with this one law at t+n will nonetheless not be possible since their existence will contradict other natural scientifical laws. But this observation, as true as it is, is irrelevant to the issue at hand.

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For one thing, the issue at hand concerns solely whether denial of the defining naturalist thesis contradicts a particular kind of natural scientific law, namely, a law of conservation. Consequently, in order to refute any suggestion that such denial does, one has only to point out that this kind of law, while it rules out some possibilities, leaves infinitely many open. For another and more important thing, this refutation, while formulated for a particular kind of natural scientific law, does not essentially rely on being formulated specifically with reference to this law. So it is generalisable to all and any such law. There is no conceptual reason for thinking that any natural scientific law or set thereof so fixes the field of possibilities consistent with it that the set of arrangements of the universe at t+n consistent with its arrangement at t is a singleton (or, more accurately, contains some restricted number of arrangments whose individual probabilities of occurrence sum to one). Indeed, there is reason to think just the opposite: each natural-scientifically natural law bifurcates reality into those arrangements of reality at t+n which are, and those which are not consistent with its arrangement at time t. But no matter how many logically independent natural scientific laws one progressively adds to the mix, thereby delimiting an ever smaller set of possibilities relative to the previous one, all these sets will still contain infinitely many possibilities – just as by recursively bifurcating an interval of real numbers one only ever ends up with sub-intervals containing infinitely many real numbers. The generically naturalist thesis would therefore seem not to be an entailment of any law or principle actually claimed to be true and wielded by natural science itself. If so, it can be denied without contradicting any such law or principle. Perhaps nowhere does this become more evident than in the refutation of another attempt to show that to deny naturalism is to deny natural science. One might argue, namely, that any cause ‘in nature’ not of a kind mentioned by natural science in its descriptions, explanations and theories must first sunder causal chains occurring within natural scientific nature in order then to insert itself into them. In other words, it must temporarily suspend the laws which govern these causal chains in order to create room for it to exert its causal influence. It must temporarily render inapplicable to certain phenomena ‘in nature’ a law which applies to all phenomena ‘in nature’. With this, the whole idea of a non-natural-scientifically natural cause shows itself to be miraculous in Hume’s sense, that is, a simple contradiction in terms. Clearly, the argument begs the question. One can only think that a cause not of the kind natural science ascertains must break into, or insert

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itself between links in, the chain of natural-scientifically natural causes if one is assuming from the outset that causal relations of the latter kind form a seamlessly single web reaching from the past through the present to the future. But to assume that natural scientific causation is seamless and unbroken is to assume precisely what is denied when one denies that all causal relations are of a kind some substratal natural science ascertains. For what one means by such seamlessness in the causal web of empirical reality is precisely that the causal chains constituting this web all display the same kind of unity, that is, are all expressions of the kind of causal relation in which natural science trades. When one denies the defining thesis of naturalism, one denies that the causal web of empirical reality is seamless and unbroken in this sense, i. e., such that all links in all causal chains display this uniformity or unity in kinds of causal relation. In other words, one asserts the always only partial, incomplete character of the kinds of efficiently causal relation appealed to in (the relevant kinds of substratal) natural science, hence the essentially partial, incomplete character of (the relevant kinds of substratal) natural science qua inquiry into “why things happen”. In the next section, we will examine more closely what it might mean to speak of the always only partial, incomplete character of natural scientific causation. More specifically, since mental states, conditions or experiences are typically taken as the paradigm cases of ‘non-natural’14 causes and effects, at least in the sense that if anything counts as such causes and effects, they must, we shall consider what it might be to conceive some psychological state or condition as an irreducibly non-natural-scientifically natural cause which nonetheless shapes the natural-scientifically natural. In the meantime, however, we need to consider yet another attempt to show that to deny the naturalist thesis is to contradict a fundamental claim of natural science: imagine that a certain physicist is operating a linear accelerator in the real world. In order to carry a certain experiment out, the physicist forms and then realises an intention to turn various knobs on the operating console of the accelerator, as a result of which a certain particle travelling along the accelerator veers out of its line of travel. Surely, unless the physicist’s intention is identical with something 14 Where ‘non-natural’ means simply not being the kind of thing natural science would acknowledge and appeal to in its descriptions, explanations and theories. It most emphatically does not mean ‘supernatural’ in the conventional sense of the term, i. e., something which transcends ‘nature’ so radically that there is no sense in which it can be said to be natural.

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physical, its causing the particle to veer must contravene the principle of inertia. For does not the principle assert that something in motion will move in a straight line at constant velocity unless acted upon by some physical force? The answer to this is clear: the principle of inertia does not necessarily understand the notions of the ‘physical’, ‘force’, etc., in such a way that the psychological can only have its own distinctive efficiently causal role at the cost of being not just distinct, but separable from, the physical. Of course, if one understands the notion of the physical in this way, then the psychological can only ‘exert force’ either in some absurdly miraculous fashion or in the Pickwickian, derivative sense of ‘borrowing’ the causal role of some natural-scientifically natural reality – this either by being identical with the latter or at least ‘constituted’ by it in some thus far unclarified and perhaps unclarifiable sense. But it is questionbegging to think that the notion of an intervening physical force appealed to in the principle of inertia has to be understood in this way, that is, as excluding the idea that psychological states, conditions or experiences could play a physically causal role which is distinctively their own. Indeed, it is not just question-begging, it is also wrong. To regard the notion of an intervening physical force in this way is in fact surreptitiously to smuggle into the law a naturalist, hence specifically metaphysical interpretation of what it is to be physical (and natural): to be physical or natural is to be an entity whose causal efficacy ultimately lies completely in its material reality, i. e., those of its properties and relations which are of the kind some substratal natural science ascertains and mentions in its descriptions, explanations and laws. The principle of inertia, which, after all, was empirically discovered and formulated as part of the effort to describe and explain how things in the world of everyday perception and action move, need not understand the notion of the physical in this metaphysically tendentious way. Thus, from empirical observation, one will perhaps conclude that the behaviour of balls rolled down inclined planes approximates to the following idealisation: in the limit case of a frictionless plane the decelerating force exerted by the upwardly angled plane on the horizontal motion of the ball varies proportionally with, while the distance the ball travels varies inversely to, the angle of inclination of this plane – so that at zero inclination, the decelerating force will be zero and the ball will not lose any velocity at all, hence continue on at the velocity it attained when it reached the bottom of the inclined plane. Even so, there is no reason to think that in order to do this, one must appeal to a notion of

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force or of the physical generally which precludes either that this force might be exercised by something psychological or that something with psychological properties might also be a physical thing, possessed, however, of distinctive capacities to act and be acted upon in virtue of having psychological properties. In fact, perhaps one could not, at least not initially, have been appealing to any such understanding of force and the physical since otherwise one could not have seen the idealisation in the empirical facts, hence in this sense derived the law by extrapolation from empirical observation. Physical forces one can actually observe surely include ones which psychological beings, not the least experimenters themselves, can exert. Of course, as soon as one decides to interpret the principle of inertia not just as something which applies at the meso-level of the physical and natural in a pre-scientific, everyday sense (and at the macro-level of the heavenly bodies), but as something which applies at a micro-level, and moreover understands it in such a way that the arrangement and interaction of the items it applies to at this level – corpuscles, atoms and molecules, sub-atomic particles, or whatever – fixes both ‘vertically’ and ‘horizontally’ all other levels, then one must regard the notion of the physical as excluding the intervention of not just the psychological, but of anything at any higher level. But to insist that this is the right way to understand the principle is once again to smuggle specifically metaphysical content into it. Once again, one is simply begging the question in favour of the claim that one cannot deny the defining thesis of naturalism without contradicting this most fundamental law of natural science. Once again, one is simply assuming or stipulating that the defining thesis of naturalism can be denied only at the cost of denying natural science. In the face of failure to demonstrate that commitment to ontological naturalism is constitutively essential to natural science, one might be tempted to argue that it is regulatively so: while not entailed by any substantive claim made by natural science, ontological naturalism is implicit in the methods, norms or values of natural science. It is, one might argue, an indisputable historical fact that natural science has been able rationally to progress in a dual sense: firstly, it has progressed from less comprehensive to ever more comprehensive theories; secondly and more importantly, it has progressed from one domain of nature to another, from the physical first to the chemical, and then, more recently, to the biological and psychological. What has enabled natural science to progress in this dual sense has been, or so one might further argue, its willingness to comport itself towards empirical phenomena on the understanding that the

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naturalist thesis is true. To deny the naturalist thesis would thus be to cut the ground out from under clearly successful natural scientific practice. It is clear how one must respond to this attempt to legitimate naturalism by appeal to its allegedly regulative status: even if acceptance of the naturalist thesis as true should be necessary for rationally aspiring to progress in the dual sense outlined, this does not entail that the thesis actually is true. Utility does not, after all, equal truth. So one could deny that the thesis is true without denying that it is something in which natural science usefully believes. Furthermore, because utility does not equal truth, the whole idea of demonstrating truth by appealing to presumed regulative status is surely wrong-headed. There would appear to be, for purely conceptual reasons, no way of moving from need for belief to truth of the belief needed. Perhaps, appearances to the contrary, there is a more sophisticated way of appealing to the regulative status of the naturalist thesis – more sophisticated in that it permits one to move validly from need for belief to truth of belief. Nonetheless, the prospects of finding such a way are not good, certainly not if the historical record is anything to go by. The Marburg neo-Kantians, for example, thought a truly ‘scientific’ metaphysics could legitimate a modern, naturalist concept of nature in such a way that one could find reason for believing the naturalist thesis to be true (and not merely useful for natural science to believe) even though it was to be understood as something to which natural science was merely regulatively committed. A ‘scientific’ metaphysics was metaphysics in the service of what the Marburg neo-Kantians understood by the theory of knowledge (Erkenntnistheorie).15 Crucial to the Marburg neo-Kantian conception of the theory of knowledge was rational reconstruction of the history of empirical inquiry in general and of modern natural science in particular. This gave the theory of knowledge as the Marburg school conceived it, and therefore also the metaphysics it involved, a quasi-empirical character. According to the Marburg school, such rational reconstruction teaches, firstly, that with the rise of modern science, a conception of empirical reality emerged according to which empirical reality is a single, unified realm of often mathematically expressible causal law. This conception of empirical reality as “the realm of law” enabled empirical inquiry to assume a uniquely successful form – successful in that as never before it was 15 See Christensen 2007b for an account of the Marburg neo-Kantian conception of truly ‘scientific’ philosophy as metaphysics in the service of Erkenntnistheorie.

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able to generate ever more powerful theories and to conquer ever more domains of the empirically real. Secondly, such rational reconstruction teaches that all forms of theoretical inquiry have aspired to the progressive and expansive character exhibited by modern natural science, enabled as it is by effective methods and criteria of success which permit practitioners to engender consensus about what ought and ought not to be accepted as true. Through the consensus they engender, such methods and criteria permit practitioners collectively to resolve one problem and then move collectively on to the next. Thereby they impart to inquiry the progressive and expansive character definitive of true science. Because it displays this character par excellence, modern natural science thus constitutes a paradigm for all forms of theoretical inquiry. Now because rational reconstruction shows modern natural science to have this iconic significance, it also shows something more. Specifically, it shows that we may take the way natural science wields its conception of empirical reality as a clue to what, in general, metaphysical and ontological claims about reality actually are. The picture of empirical reality as subject to a single, unified system of causal law – in effect, the modern metaphysics of nature – is something implicit in the practice of modern natural science as its understanding of how empirical reality must be if it is to be tractable to natural scientific inquiry. In the seventeenth century, this bold metaphysical sketch (Entwurf ) of empirical reality as nature in the modern sense is posited in order that empirical inquiry may be as it has always aspired to be, namely, a progressive and expansive, hence truly scientific process of knowledge-acquisition in which, from phase to phase, there is always broad consensus amongst practitioners about what it is and what it is not rational to believe. Given the essentially hypothetical character of this picture of empirical reality, the only conceivable justification for it is its success in enabling empirical inquiry to bring itself about and maintain itself as science. As the fact and history of modern natural science show, it has been tremendously successful in this. Philosophy may take from the fact of modern natural science and its success a lesson of its own: the way natural science understands and treats the metaphysical and ontological theses underlying it is what such theses are. In other words, the fact of science teaches that metaphysical and ontological claims are nothing more or less than hypothetically posited conceptual frameworks whose justification as true lies solely in their capacity to enable first-order empirical inquiry to succeed in the manner exemplified by modern natural science. When, through the rational reconstruction of the history of modern science, philosophy learns this lesson, it,

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too, constitutes itself as science.16 Thereby the transition is accomplished from a pre-modern, speculative metaphysics to a modern, scientific one grounded in the logic and history of scientific discovery. Now this transition is simultaneously a transition from nave metaphysical realism to objective idealism. Metaphysical realists understand the picture of empirical reality as a single, unified realm of causal law as something whose truth justifies why modern science proceeds as it does. They must therefore regard the modern metaphysics of nature as itself in need of independent, a priori, hence unscientifically speculative justification. But the rational reconstruction of the history of empirical inquiry, and in particular, of modern natural science shows this to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what metaphysical and ontological theses are. The picture of empirical reality as a single, unified realm of causal law is in effect the positing of how reality needs to be if empirical inquiry is rationally to adopt explanatory adequacy in Lewis’ sense17 as its regulating ideal and, guided by this ideal, progressively expand to encompass ever wider ranges of phenomena. When philosophy grasps this, it comes to see the picture in an objectively idealist rather than realist light – this precisely because it has come to understand that the justification of the picture lies in the success it enables, as natural science progresses towards its regulative ideal. If, however, the metaphysical picture of empirical reality implicit in empirical inquiry is only properly understood as an enabling hypothetical posit reflecting the aspiration to explanatory adequacy, then the fact of modern natural science and its success does not just demonstrate the utility of believing all that is entailed by the asymptotic goal of explanatory adequacy. It also demonstrates the truth of these entailments. And according to the Marburg neo-Kantians, the generically naturalist thesis is precisely an entailment of the explanatory adequacy of natural science. So the fact of modern science provides, as is shown by rational reconstruction of the history of first-order theoretical inquiry into empirical 16 So metaphysics in particular and philosophy in general only themselves become truly scientific, hence truly possible, once empirical inquiry has done so, i. e., become natural science. For only once modern natural science has emerged is there something for ‘epistemologically’ (erkenntnistheoretisch) guided rational reconstruction successfully to work upon. And it is only when philosophy and metaphysics understand themselves as realised in and through such rational reconstruction that they desist from their mock combats and take the sure path of a science. 17 See Chapter Five, p. 241, note 27.

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reality, a reason for believing the generically naturalist thesis to be true. Moreover, it does so in advance of the success of any concrete empirical research programme whose successful accomplishment entailed that the phenomena investigated by the programme conformed to the thesis. The fact of science therefore provides a philosophical reason for endorsing the thesis. Clearly, this strategy for deriving from the fact of modern science a reason for believing the generically naturalist thesis to be true is dubious. Let us grant that natural science has achieved its extraordinary success because it works from a certain metaphysical picture of empirical reality as a single, unified realm of causal law. Even so, one could only regard this as justifying the picture by tacitly equivocating on the notion of success. If by the success of natural science one meant merely that natural science had come up with numerous powerful and presumably true theories across a wide range of phenomena and domains, then one could obviously draw no conclusion as to the truth of the metaphysics ostensibly enabling this success. In order to draw such a conclusion, one would have to go a step further, namely, take the success of natural science in this uncontentious sense as showing that it had advanced some considerable way along the path towards the regulative ideal mapped out for it by its ostensible metaphysics. But this is to introduce a notion of natural scientific success which presupposes the truth of this metaphysics, that is, of the thesis that empirical reality constitutes a single, unified realm of causal law. The question of whether this thesis is true has therefore been begged all along – and with it, the question of the truth, as opposed to the utility, of the generically naturalist thesis. Paul Natorp attempted to resolve this general difficulty without undermining the Marburg programme by arguing that a commitment to reality’s being whatever empirical inquiry needed it to be for progress towards the asymptote of explanatory adequacy was built into the very structure of empirical intentionality.18 Rational reconstruction of the history of empirical inquiry generally and of modern science specifically had to be augmented by a philosophical psychology19 which exhibited the idealist character of intentionality itself. Such a philosophical psychology would accomplish this by showing, in more or less phenomenological fashion, that already the folk understand everyday phainomena to be Erscheinungen – mere appearances supervening on empirical reality qua 18 See Christensen, op. cit. 19 Natorp speaks here of a general psychology – see Natorp 1912.

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“realm of law.” In response to the objection that this does not really solve, but at best shunts the problem off into phenomenology – for why should we think that the idealist commitments even of a pre-scientific empirical intentionality are true? – , Natorp would reply as follows: what is uncovered by the philosophical psychology envisaged is not simply what we must mean by empirical reality in order to be able effectively to know empirical reality. Rather, it is what we must mean by empirical reality in order to be the self-conscious beings we are and indubitably know ourselves to be. So it is all we could ever mean by empirical reality. It is therefore incoherent to ask whether empirical reality could be otherwise than this. The most telling response to this subtle argument would consist in showing that a properly conducted, non-tendentious philosophical psychology would not in fact reveal what Natorp wants it to reveal, namely, that everyday phainomena are mere appearances of a natural-scientifically natural “realm of law.” This cannot be undertaken here since it is an issue for Part II and indeed beyond this, the reconstructive appropriation of Being and Time. Suffice, then, to say that no one has thus far found a convincing path from utility to truth. And this surely entitles us, only fallibly, of course, to take at face value the apparent conceptual impossibility noted above of ever doing so. Why, then, have some found appeal to the ostensibly regulative status of the naturalist thesis so attractive? Presumably, they have feared that unless some such appeal can be made to work, grounding the thesis will require one to fall back upon seriously armchair metaphysics, about which they have become suspicious. To them, concession that the naturalist thesis can only be philosophically justified from the armchair appears to be concession that it cannot be justified in any distinctively philosophical fashion at all. But this point can be put in another, more positive way: insofar as one’s suspicion of armchair metaphysics is justified – and much, of course, speaks for this – , the impossibility of moving from need for belief to reason for belief means that natural science is not (and had certainly better not be) regulatively committed to the naturalist thesis. Of course, that the naturalist thesis might only be justifiable in distinctively philosophical fashion if one engages in serious armchair metaphysics says nothing one way or the other about whether natural science is in fact regulatively committed to the thesis. So is it true that commitment to naturalism is an essential presupposition of natural scientific method or progress? It is hard to see how one could show it to be a presupposition of natural scientific method (if such a thing there be) without

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begging the question. If, for example, natural science necessarily aims at explanatory adequacy in Lewis’ sense,20 then perhaps it is aiming at something which entails the naturalist thesis. But why should one think that natural science necessarily aims at explanatory adequacy? Because it is shown by the history and practice of actual natural science? Surely such empirical observations could only show that thus far natural science has pursued this goal as a matter of fact; they could never show that it must. In any case, do such empirical observations even show this much? Do the historical facts actually bear the claim out that natural science as it actually is and has been is committed either to explanatory adequacy or to the naturalist thesis? All sorts of natural science have displayed spectacular success within their own domains. Yet psychology and biology have not thus far succeeded in showing that their respective object domains present no obstacle to the naturalist thesis. Nor has physics conquered any other domains than the physical. It would, for example, be false to claim that it had conquered the chemical by explaining much of the latter in terms of physical theories, in particular, theories of fundamental particles or fields as governed by a few simple laws, as in contemporary theoretical physics. The historical facts thus suggest that the naturalist thesis remains a speculative one – so speculative, in fact, that nothing can be said for or against it. Moreover, the fact of science is precisely a story of success. That is, natural science overall, as opposed to individual natural scientists and even individual research programmes within natural science, has succeeded in all sorts of ways, even though it has not achieved explanatory adequacy. So short of begging the question by tacitly downplaying the actual success of actual natural science as merely partial, as not all it has ‘really’ been after, one can find no licence in the historical facts for concluding that actual natural science is committed either to pursuing explanatory adequacy or indeed to the naturalist thesis itself. But, one might object, what about those individual research programmes within natural science, for example, in cognitive science and molecular biology, which seek to develop theories and explanatory models entailing that their chosen ranges of phenomena constitute no exception to the naturalist thesis? Surely the fact of such research programmes shows that one cannot question the naturalist thesis without questioning natural science? The claim at issue is whether natural science is essentially committed to the naturalist thesis. And this is to ask whether it is com20 See Chapter Five, p. 241, note 27.

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mitted to the thesis whether or not specific research programmes entailing its truth have succeeded, or even been embarked upon. The fact that specific research programmes within natural science, indeed within biology and a natural-scientifically oriented psychology, have naturalist implications is therefore neither here nor there. If they succeed, then one will know the naturalist thesis to be true, or at least not to be falsified by the relevant range of phenomena – but only then, and until then.21 The following diagnosis thus appears to be perfectly reasonable, if not completely and utterly obligatory: the claim that all causal relations in empirical reality are of a kind ascertained by some substratal natural science, as well as the suggestion that natural science inherently aims at explanatory adequacy or completeness, are nothing more than theses of a late modern descendant of metaphysica specialis and first philosophy as the study of first principles and causes. True, this latter day metaphysica specialis is more modest than its ancestors: unlike Aristotle’s conception of prote¯ philosophia, it does not see itself as containing, but rather as complementing, inquiry into nature. Furthermore, some of its practitioners, unlike the practitioners of early modern metaphysica specialis (but much more like Aristotle himself ), regard their central claims as in some sense a posteriori and even ‘empirical’. Even so, the late modern naturalist enterprise reflects a meta-philosophical conception according to which the task of philosophy is to complement natural science and physics by showing what they themselves do not: that the laws of the distinctively material reality natural science gets at constitute the first principles and causes of all things ‘in nature’.22 Consequently, there is nothing necessarily incoherent or absurd in denying the naturalist thesis since neither it nor Lewis’ ideal of explanatory adequacy23 has anything particularly to do with natural science. The only thing one 21 It would, of course, be quite wrong to maintain that commitment to naturalism were demonstrated by the fact that contemporary cosmology is currently engaged in a search for what cosmologists call a grand unified theory. The goal of this search is ‘merely’ a theory which unifies all the physical forces we currently know there to be, and such a theory only ever seeks to provide a single means for describing and explaining all causal processes insofar as they are physical. So to deny the naturalist thesis or the coherence of explanatory adequacy in Lewis’ sense is in no way challenge this strictly natural scientific, hence perfectly legitimate enterprise. 22 This is, of course, not necessarily to claim that either natural science in general or physics specifically is able actually to get at these first principles and causes completely. 23 See Chapter Five, p. 241, note 27.

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thereby calls into question is a certain metaphysical interpretation of the object domain of natural science: that modern metaphysics of nature which, according to a late modern vestige of early modernity, it is the task of philosophy to legitimate.24

§ 3: How Not to be Unnaturally Naturalistic There is no reason for thinking that by denying the naturalist conviction that all causes and effects ‘in nature’ are of the kind some substratal natural science ascertains one must absurdly contradict any claim legitimately made by natural science (at least in advance of the concrete success of specific research programmes within enterprises such as cognitive science). If, however, one were to deny it, then, as the previous section has shown, one would have to maintain that some natural-scientifically natural causal chains are only ever partial and incomplete. That is, they do not occur as part of a seamless web of such chains, this because they begin or end in causes and effects not of a kind natural science can represent in formulations of its kind of law. But what could it mean more specifically to deny the seamless, unbroken character of the causal chains out of which empirical reality is woven? What could it mean to speak of the always only partial, incomplete character of causation at the material level of the natural-scientifically natural? i. Thinking the Unthinkable Mental states, conditions or experiences are typically taken as the paradigm cases of non-natural-scientifically natural causes and effects, at least in the sense that if anything counts as such causes and effects, they must. As we shall later see, there is a deep justification and explanation for this. So let us consider what it might be to conceive a psychological state, event or experience as an irreducibly non-natural-scientifically natural cause or effect. Three examples will be considered, each illustrating different aspects of what it would be to admit non-natural-scientifically natural causes and effects, and what can be learnt even from envisaging this as a mere possibility. For our first example, let us return to the physicist operating a linear accelerator in the real world. 24 See also below, note 31.

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A certain particle is travelling down the linear accelerator when, in order to carry a certain experiment out, the physicist turns various knobs on the operating console of the accelerator, as a result of which the particle veers out of its line of travel. What caused the particle to veer is a sudden change in the strength of the electromagnetically produced magnetic field through which it is moving. What caused the magnetic field suddenly to strengthen is a surge of electricity down the wires leading to the electromagnet producing the magnetic field. What causes the surge of electricity is a sudden drop in resistance at a certain point in the wiring (the knob on the console), which releases more electricity into the wires leading to the electromagnet. What caused the sudden drop in resistance is the physicist’s deliberately turning the knob on the console. And, of course, what caused there to be so much electricity behind the point in the wiring at which the drop in resistance occurred was the fact that the wire was connected, ultimately, to a certain system for converting heat energy stored millions of years ago as coal into electrical energy …. In this one causal strand in the causal web into which all empirical realities are stitched two natural-scientifically real chains occur, the one stretching out of the past, from the laying down of coal deposits through the burning of the coal in a power station to the presence of electricity at a certain amperage and voltage on the input side of the knob, the other stretching out from the drop in resistance through the surge in electricity on the output side of the knob and the sudden strengthening of the magnetic field to the veering off of the particle. The claim that these two natural scientific causal chains are partial is the claim that the latter chain is irreducibly and ineliminably initiated, while both chains are irreducibly and ineliminably bound together by the physicist’s intentional act of turning the knob – the knob on the console of the linear accelerator at such and such a University located in such and such a town in such and such a country, etc. Of course, the act derives its irreducible and ineliminable causal significance as the act that it is from the irreducible and ineliminable causal role of the psychological state or event in which the act originates – say, the physicist’s decision or intention to turn the knob (however decisions and intentions are to be understood more precisely), or perhaps simply his recognition that the time is right to turn the knob. This psychological state or event is not identical with any part of the causally ordered series of brain, motor and muscular events which materially suffices in the circumstances for the act’s occurring since one can decide or intend to act,

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or recognise that it is appropriate to act, without even beginning to act. Nor is one forced to say that the physicist’s deciding or intending to turn the knob (or simply recognising that it is time to turn the knob) simply is some neurophysiological state or event which efficiently causes the brain activity that no doubt is the first material stirring of the act. For there is no inherent contradiction in maintaining (a) that this psychological state or event is not identical with any brain state or event prior to the act; (b) that some organisation of, or activity in, the brain prior to the act is, in the circumstances, materially sufficient for this psychological state or event;25 and (c) that this psychological state or event efficiently causes the act (in the sense of initiating and shaping the various bodily movements which in the circumstances is the act). It would, of course, be inherently contradictory to maintain not just (a), (b) and (c), but also (d) that efficiently causal relations exist only or, in some unexplicated and, one suspects, inexplicable sense ‘primarily’, between natural-scientifically natural realities. But of course the whole point of the example is to illustrate what it would be not to maintain (d). It would, of course, be wrong to say that the picture just sketched prevents one from making such claims as that a brain’s finding itself in such and such a neurophysiological state will lead to its finding itself subsequently in such and such other neurophysiological state, at least when these states or conditions are understood to be partial states or configurations of the brain rather than its total state at a time. For clearly, when understood in this partial sense, the claim always comes with a qualification to the effect that the one state follows upon the other, background circumstances permitting. And there is no non-question-begging reason to assume that the relevant background circumstances tacitly presupposed in such partial generalities include only various background facts of the same kind, that is, at the same, in this case neurophysiological level. The clearly open-ended set of circumstances permitting can certainly include such higher-level items as continued sound functioning of the heart, sufficiently low levels of alcohol in the blood, one’s not being hit by a bus and no supernova in the immediate vicinity. So it may just as legitimately include such things as a decision or intention to do such and such, a judgement or belief that such and such is the case, or any other psychological event or condition which could similarly block the 25 Psychological beings made up of different ‘stuff ’ would, of course, have a materially different kind of organisation or activity as the material cause of the psychological state or event.

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occurrence of what only ever occurs if circumstances permit. Naturally, if the term ‘state or condition of the brain’ is understood to connote the brain’s total disposition at any one time, then the picture sketched would prevent one from making this kind of claim – just as it would prevent one from saying a similar thing about natural-scientifically natural reality as a whole were one to understand by the term ‘state or condition of the natural-scientifically natural universe’ its total disposition at a time. But if one understands either of these terms in this totalising way, then one is tacitly endorsing that whose denial we are trying to picture, namely, ‘horizontal’ determination of later natural-scientifically natural reality, and thus of all natural reality itself, by its earlier natural-scientifically natural disposition and the laws governing the same. This point intimates something of crucial importance, namely, that the defining thesis of ontological naturalism actually distorts or exaggerates the kind of thing substratal natural science attempts to do. In the previous chapter we gave a somewhat reconstructive account of the conception McDowell is getting at when he speaks of the modern view of nature as “the realm of law.” There we pointed out that underlying this view was the ideal of subsumption under strict, exceptionless causal law as something which substratal natural science must be capable of providing if it is to do what ontological naturalism demands of it. This is as much as to say that this ideal is not necessarily inherent to such natural science itself, but is rather imposed from outside upon it by the specifically metaphysical doctrine of ontological naturalism. To construe substratal natural science as aiming at such subsumption is thus arguably to embrace a metaphysical interpretation of it. And this interpretation may well be a question-begging over-interpretation since there is no reason to assume that the general principles under which substratal natural science doubtless attempts to subsume phenomena need be as strict and exceptionless, that is, as free of the qualification “circumstances permitting” – Davidson’s “ceteris paribus clauses” – , as ontological naturalism requires. But let us home in a little more on what it would be to deny ‘horizontal’ determination at the material level by considering another example, once again involving the mental, but this time as both cause and effect. Assume that I am feeling glum and that you say something to cheer me up. What would it mean to speak, in this case, of a chronically partial chain of natural-scientifically natural cause and effect, one beginning and ending in items of a kind pertaining to so-called ‘folk psychology’ and in which these items play their causal role precisely in virtue of their ‘folkpsychological’ identity? A causal chain begins with your believing that I

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am glum and wanting to cheer me up. This causes you to say something heartening, which in the circumstances is materially realised in a certain excitation of nerves efficiently causing a certain movement of certain muscles. This movement efficiently causes the air to vibrate in a certain way, which vibration in turn efficiently causes my eardrums to resonate in some way isomorphic to the vibration. This resonation then efficiently causes, via signals down my aural nerves, my brain to arrange itself in such a way that in the circumstances its being thus arranged is materially sufficient for my understanding you to be saying something heartening. Finally, my understanding you to be saying something heartening causes my brain to reorder itself in a fashion that, in the circumstances, is materially sufficient for my (and not my brain’s!) being in a state of feeling cheered. This description would appear simply to extend ways of talking which already regularly and unproblematically occur, for example, in clinically psychiatric contexts and in psychophysical and psychophysiological experimentation. Note the perfect coherence of saying that the direction in which the causal chain from you to me continues on depends, even at the level of neurophysiology, physiology and physics, on the fact that the brain state or condition in which it culminates is materially sufficient for my feeling cheered. The very next link at the neurophysiological level will be something equally neurophysiological – as when my feeling cheered26 causes my brain to re-arrange itself in fashion which, in the circumstances, is materially sufficient for my forming the desire to get up and embrace you – so that it would be quite wrong to describe my feeling cheered as inserting itself into the causal chain as an extra, mediating link. Even so, the psychological state or condition still plays a causal role in that it shapes what happens, i. e., imparts a certain form to the causal chain: this latter is not straight but rather bent in one direction rather than another. And the explanation for this bentness of form is not available at, that is, is not explicable in terms of, the neurophysiological level. For what explains the bentness, what sends the neurophysiological workings of my brain off in one direction rather than another, is the fact that the psychological state or condition for which the neurophysio-

26 In much strictly empirical and clinical psycho-physical research things like this are said all the time: “Those test subjects who testified to feeling good about themselves and their lives generally displayed higher levels of alpha brain wave activity”, etc.

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logical state or condition at the point at which the chain bends is materially sufficient is my feeling cheered. In this sense, then, causes and effects not of a kind natural science ascertains function perfectly coherently as the seams which bind merely partial chains of natural scientific causation together: they are the points at which such chains head off in directions only folk-psychologically explicable, hence natural-scientifically inexplicable. This metaphor nicely brings out the point underlying Leibniz’s claim that even if one enlarged the brain to the size of a mill so that one could walk around inside it, still one would not see any thoughts within it. For of course an inventory of the individual links of the causal chain extending from you to me, and then, when I respond to your kind remark by embracing you, from me to you, would, if conducted only at the level of physics and neurophysiology, reveal only physical and neurophysiological causes and effects. Yet this inventory would not show that non-natural-scientifically natural causes and effects are not involved. For they are present and indeed visible in how the chain bends, i. e., in the chain’s shape or form. Anyone conducting the envisaged inventory must therefore be familiar with how the chain bends if he is to correctly list the various natural-scientifically real causes and effects which constitute the links of the chain. The inventory can therefore only be taken if, as in fact always happens in real-life psychophysical and psychophysiological investigations, those conducting it do not start with, or remain solely at, the ‘material’ level of physics and neurophysiology but at some point grasp the ‘form’ realised in the chain and epistemically available at a higher, non-natural-scientific, but obviously perfectly natural level, e. g., understanding me as feeling glum, you as saying something heartening to me, which latter cheers me up (and in turn causes me spontaneously to form the desire to embrace you). Note that it would be quite wrong to claim at this point that by thinking of things in this way one implicitly denied the causal unity of ‘nature’ (the universe, world, empirical reality, etc.). It is one thing to regard the history of the universe as involving, at the level of (substratal) natural scientific description, solely natural-scientifically natural causal relations, quite another to regard the totality of these relations as bound temporally together solely in virtue of these relations. Or, to put the point another way, it is one thing to insist that all items in empirical reality are, at some level of description, material things, subject to natural scientific law, and capable of natural scientific investigation, quite another to claim that the causal relations in which they stand are all of a kind ascertained by (some substratal) natural science. That ‘nature’ is a

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causal unity does not entail the unitary character or homogeneity of its unity – as if empirical reality were not merely a single causal web, but one which was seamless in its singleness. The principle of causal closure, according to which if A is either (efficient) cause or effect of B and B is an item ‘in nature’, hence natural, physical and material, then A is just as much ‘in nature’, and just as much natural, physical and material, does not require that the causal relation in which A stands to B be always ‘at bottom’ of a kind ascertained by some (substratal) natural science. The distinction implicit here between ‘nature’ as causally unified and as seamless in its causal unity intimates a more precise account of just what one is doing when one admits non-natural-scientifically natural causes and effects such as mental states and experiences. Above we saw how the naturalist thesis involves construing the properties and relations in virtue of which something belongs to the object domain of natural science as an ontological level or dimension upon which all else depends in a very strong sense: such properties and relations (a) determine ‘vertically’ what properties and relations not of this level or kind their possessor bears or stands in at a given time; and (b) determine ‘horizontally’ what properties and relations of their own level or kind their possessor might come to bear or stand in across time. ‘Vertical’ determination at a time and ‘horizontal’ determination across time thus combine to fix27 all future properties and relations, of whatever kind or level, their possessor bears or stands in. At least in this sense, then, a sense involving both ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ determination, non-natural-scientifically natural levels or kinds of being are held to supervene on the natural-scientifically natural level or kind of being. So to deny the naturalist thesis as just characterised, at least in the manner contemplated here, is to deny ‘horizontal’ determination (by what is exclusively natural-scientifically-natural) across time. Let us elaborate this through a third and final example: we now know that a certain neurochemical state or condition of the brain is materially sufficient for being in a state or condition of manic depression.28 This is a clear and 27 To whatever degree of probability, of course. There is no need to assume that the determination in question here must be non-probabilistic, i. e., that the future is determined to occur with a probability of one. 28 Perhaps if one spells this out long and hard enough, say, by insisting on a certain brain condition in a certain kind of brain in a certain environment under certain laws of natural-scientifically ascertainable nature, one reaches certain natural-scientifically natural states of affairs or conditions which are necessarily sufficient for being in a state or condition of manic depression.

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uncontentious example of ‘vertical’ determination at a time of a higher level state or condition by its natural-scientifically cognisable material nature. But why should we assume that ‘horizontal’ determination across time is equally uncontentious – as if the efficiently causal relations into which entities ‘in nature’ enter could only ever be solely functions of their material nature or constitution? To be manic depressive is to possess a general tendency to have inflated opinions of one’s possibilities and to be excessively energetic at one time, then to have very deflated opinions and to be excessively slothful at another time. Given that one’s suffering from manic-depression is determined ‘vertically’ by one’s material nature, it follows trivially that one is ‘vertically’ determined by this material nature to possess this tendency. Yet one clearly asserts something further when one goes on to insist that how this tendency is subsequently realised at a future time is determined solely in accordance with the relevant natural scientific laws by the material constitution both of oneself and of various other facts of the environment at an earlier time. As soon as one appreciates that the notion of ‘horizontal’ determination is thus independent of the notion of ‘vertical’ determination, certain issues that once seemed inestimably deep no longer appear so significant. As we have seen, it is perfectly natural to say that a certain state or condition of the brain – a neurophysiological disposition to produce brain chemicals in the wrong proportions – causes a state or condition of manic depression. Things like this are said all the time in both clinical and theoretical psychiatry and precisely naturalists insist that one must not contradict good empirical science. Yet at this point philosophers think that a truly deep, metaphysically philosophical issue arises: surely, they say, this is only conceivable or explicable as a matter of the neurophysiological state or condition standing in some very close relation to the psychological state or condition. Surely, there simply must be identity here? Or, if identity should prove untenable, surely there simply must be at least ‘constitution’ in some thus far unidentified sense, a sense which does not simply rename, but genuinely explains, material sufficiency by showing the psychological to borrow its causal efficacy from the natural-scientifically natural without being identical with it? It is, however, false to maintain that these rhetorical questions and the positions they insinuate as correct arise naturally and untendentiously out of the observation that, at least for persons of a distinctively human kind, having a brain in such and such a neurophysiological state or condition is materially sufficient for the person whose brain it is to be in a state or condition of manic depression. When one reflects on the conceptual is-

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sues implicated in this empirical observation, one can only conclude three things: firstly, one does violence to the conceptual facts to suggest that they in any way license one to think that the two states or conditions are or must be identical with one another; secondly, in itself there is nothing particularly deep or problematic in the thought that these two states or conditions should not be identical with one another; and thirdly, no inference may be drawn as to the nature of this non-identity, i. e., whether it is a matter of mere distinguishability or something as problematic as notional separability – problematic because then a being could possess the psychological state or condition without having any material character sufficient for the state or condition. Scientifically informed but pre-philosophical, or rather, pre-metaphysical observation suggests the truth of the first of these three points. For one thing, material sufficiency is surely an irreflexive relation. For another and more important thing, to be in a state or condition of manic depression is to be a person whose brain is in a certain state or condition, and since a person has its brain rather than being identical with it, the state or condition of the brain which materially suffices for manic depression of the person – the arrangement of the brain’s parts – could not be identical with the psychological condition of the person. Of course, one might dispute the claim that a person is not its (living) brain by appeal to the standard kinds of thought experiment: “What if a person had its brain removed and inserted into another body, or perhaps even into a web of systems providing it with all the sustenance and informational inputs, as well as all the opportunities for output to motor systems, which its body provided? Would not the person survive? And does this not show that the person is its brain?” Certainly this thought-experiment shows that the person survives. But it does not show that a person just is its (living) brain since here the brain is understood to have been inserted into a functional equivalent of the kind of body it originally had. One might therefore modify the thought-experiment by imagining that the brain is inserted merely into a web of support systems for keeping it alive. Surely, one will say, the brain would not merely be clinically alive; the person from whose body it had been taken would have survived, wondering, for example, why it was no longer receiving any sensory input, and unable to move about. But here, too, there is the same kind of illicit overinterpretation. Certainly, the brain is clinically alive and the person whose brain it is has in a certain, deficient sense survived – in that, for example, if the brain gets put back into a functionally appropriate body, then, ceteris paribus, a full-fledged person, indeed the original person, would be so to

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speak restored (with a corresponding gap in its life-history). We know, however, from experiment that the greater sensory deprivation is and the longer it persists, the more the very personality and selfhood of a person or self dissolves. So the limit case of complete deprivation, which is, for all intents and purposes, reached in the thought-experiment under consideration, means total dissolution of personality and selfhood. Nor is this simply an empirical point. It is reasonable to think, and in Part II we will attempt to show it, that consciousness of self as (such and such) a self requires an ongoing, temporally structured flowing of experience. But in the scenario imagined, just this flowing of experience is absent. And so, while in a certain objective sense, both the brain and the person survive, the coherently self-conscious person is (at least temporarily) absent; there is no thinking or even (coherent) hallucinating going on, but at best an incoherent muddle the like of which it is hard to imagine. Consequently, one may not conclude from this kind of thought-experiment that a person in the full sense of the word is identical with their merely living brain. At this point, one might claim that the first thought-experiment, when taken together with the refutation of the second, at least shows that a person is simply identical with their living, fully functioning brain, that is, a brain-plus-body in the sense of a brain embedded in a web of systems providing informational input to it. But in fact neither this thought-experiment nor the refutation of the second really shows this. Indeed, to think that they did would be tacitly to read into them what one sought to draw out of them. For the only conclusion to which both the first thought-experiment and the refutation of the second entitle one is that in order for there to be a person a more comprehensive kind of material sufficiency is needed than that provided by the merely living brain. The brain needs in addition to be fully functioning in a fully functioning body. If, however, this is so, then we are presupposing brain and body to stand in ‘living’ unity with one another, that is, to display a unity which consists in, must be defined as, causal interaction materially sufficient for there being a living person. The claim that a person is identical simply with its brain now shows itself to be just as false as the claim that a person is identical simply with its body. And the claim that the person is a ‘unity’ of brain and body shows itself to be true only if circular, that is, if by unity one means that ongoing causal interaction be-

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tween brain and body which materially suffices in the circumstances for its being that specific kind of living whole which is a person. 29 All this is quite unproblematic; neither conceptual necessities nor pre-philosophical intuitions have thus far yielded any conundrum for such things as the philosophy of mind to resolve. As we saw in section three of the previous chapter, however, the situation changes when, impressed by the possibilities of the new science, one throws into the mix the decidedly philosophical, indeed specifically metaphysical conviction that to occur ‘in nature’, to be natural, physical or material, in the primary and non-derivative sense is to stand in interaction with other things solely in the manner ascertained by one’s preferred brand of the new science – say, a corpuscularly mechanistic physics. This conviction constitutes the distinctively modern metaphysical conception of nature which Descartes shares with contemporary naturalists like Davidson and Evans. And it immediately renders the following propositions inconsistent with one another: (a) psychological properties and relations, in particular, those which constitute self-conscious ‘mindedness’, make their own causal contribution to how and why things happen, hence are not identical with any properties and relations which are natural in the primary sense (causal efficacy, hence non-materiality of the psychological); and (b) nothing can realise or instantiate such properties or relations without also realising or instantiating natural properties and relations in the primary sense (non-immateriality of the psychological). Once these two propositions have been brought into opposition to one another, modern philosophy of mind can begin its futile dialectic. ii. Making the Unthinkable even more so Thus far, we have focussed solely on the mental (psychological states, conditions or experiences),30 that is, on precisely the range of phenomena traditionally taken as the paradigm cases of non-natural-scientifically natural cause and effect. It is time now to identify the deep justification and 29 So the concept of a person is not to be explicated in terms of the concepts of mind, body and their causal interrelation, but rather the other way around. It is wrong to think of a person as a mind annexed to a body – see, e. g., Husserl 1952, § 54, H 211 – 212. 30 Of course, much modern philosophy construes the mental rather more restrictively, namely, as those psychological states, conditions or experiences which are constitutive of self-conscious subjectivity.

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explanation claimed above for this. Not by accident did in early modernity a whole series of issues which, although discussed in pre-modernity, had not been live ones, suddenly become the focus of intense philosophical interest, indeed were seen to be related to one another in a hitherto unrecognised way. For the stunning success of what we today call modern science encouraged many to think that with its rise one had found the key to demonstrating a metaphysics of nature according to which all efficiently causal relations across time between entities, states of affairs or events ‘in nature’ are functions solely of how things are made up, i. e., their material reality: all one had to do was to understand by material reality reality in its capacity as bearing properties, and standing in relations, of the kind ascertained by natural science. More accurately, this success initially encouraged one to think that what we today call modern science was the accomplishment of such a metaphysics of nature.31 If, however, one thus decides to appropriate natural science for specifically metaphysical purposes, one finds oneself confronted by the general task of explaining, in some distinctively philosophical fashion which runs ahead of actual natural scientific research, how reality in its capacity as bearing properties, and standing in relations, which natural science does not ascertain or mention in its theories, stands to those which natural science does ascertain and mention. This general problematic differentiates itself into a series of more specific questions whose unity and origin in the modern metaphysics of nature is lost from view as soon as the latter becomes such unquestioned commonsense that one no longer notices its shaping influence. And so these questions themselves come to be seen as ‘problems of philosophy’ each arising individually out of ostensibly pre-philosophical ‘intuitions’ and with no more unity than their occurring together in the one elementary introduction to philosophy. Thus, there is, in the first instance, the question with which we have been de facto concerned so far, namely, the ‘mind’s’ relation to, and a place 31 The transition from the term ‘natural philosophy’ to the term ‘natural science’, which is so fundamentally complete by the end of eighteenth century that German idealists could invent the philosophy of nature in contrast to natural science, marks the decline of this initial, nave way of interpreting natural science metaphysically. The thesis that empirical reality is ‘at bottom’ ‘nature’ is now seen, no doubt in part due to the influence of Kant, as a separately philosophical claim which consequently requires, at least in the eyes of many if not all thinkers, separate philosophical demonstration. In this sense, modern “naturalism about nature” is in fact a late modern phenomenon in which the early modern, pre-Kantian conception of empirical reality lives on.

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in, ‘nature’. Then there is, as we have also de facto seen, the issue of how to conceive perceptual experience itself. Crucially, however, as we move away from the ‘subjective’ realm of the mental, there is the question of how to understand the perceptible properties and relations of everyday life – the problem not just of secondary, but also primary qualities and indeed the problem of the spatiality and temporality we pre-scientifically experience entities to have. Lastly, alongside these forms of the question concerning what to say about properties and relations not appealed to in natural scientific theories and explanations, which therefore do not locate their bearer in the object domain of natural science, we can also place the question of how to understand cultural, social, traditional and historical properties and relations. The metaphysical conception of nature always implicitly at issue in this kind of question invariably depicts the relation between the natural-scientifically and non-natural-scientifically natural as follows: there is a natural-scientifically homogenous causal chain of events extending from past through the present into the future. Strung out at certain points along this chain, and correlated with certain natural-scientifically natural events which bind them causally into the totality of nature, are the various non-natural-scientific events, properties, relations or states of affairs:32 the red traffic light in its capacity as a red traffic light, my seeing it as a red traffic light, my deciding to stop and my stopping itself, therein obeying the law, and of course the various laws and social practices constitutive33 of the traffic light as a traffic light at which I am legally obliged to stop, of my behaviour as obeying the law, etc. All these non-naturalscientific realities (or descriptions of reality) are seen as sitting on top of the natural-scientifically homogenous causal chain of events which extends from past through the present into the future, such that natural scientific reality (or the natural scientific description of empirical reality) is seen as literally carrying, as composing-and-temporally-unifying, nonnatural-scientific reality (or the non-natural-scientific description of reality). But what has been shown thus far is that this picture can be coherently inverted, at least with regard to psychological reality. At this point, it becomes clear that it must be equally possible to invert the picture across 32 Or, if one prefers, non-natural scientific descriptions of reality. This preference has no impact on the validity of the argument here since the argument can easily be reformulated in the terms preferred. 33 Constitutive in Anscombe’s and Searle’s sense.

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the board, thereby turning what was carried into what carries, or rather supports, as do the piers of a bridge. Then, ordinary, everyday events, properties, relations and state of affairs become the piers which link the now merely partial spans of natural scientific causation while the nonnatural-scientifically natural world becomes the ground in which the piers are moored. To deny the naturalist thesis is implicitly to concede that what goes for folk-psychological (description of ) reality goes for folk (description of ) reality as such. It must be emphasised that this does not commit one to the existence of immaterial realities such as souls (although it does, quite trivially, commit one to the existence of empirical realities with a certain causal autonomy vis--vis the materiality which constrains them). To think that it committed one to maintaining that there are more ‘substances’, in the sense of ‘stuff ’ out of which things are made, than those ascertained by the appropriate substratal natural sciences would be a paralogism of the first order. Furthermore, it must be emphasised that to deny the naturalist thesis is implicitly to concede that what goes for psychological (description of ) reality only goes for all non-natural scientific (description of ) reality insofar as it goes for the former. Properties, and relations such as being red, being a traffic light, being legally obliged to stop at …, etc. are all obviously subject-relative in some way or other (which is not at all to deny that they are objective): the notion of being red cannot be understood, for example, without reference to what it is to perceive, and indeed rationally respond to, something as red, and so on, for all the other kinds of non-scientific reality (and description thereof ). In this sense, then, the issue of whether folk-psychological reality is a dimension of cause and effect not of some kind ascertained by natural science is indeed the central issue, for in interactions between material things in which nothing psychological is involved, material reality fixes how things happen across time. The mental or psychological is indeed the paradigm case of non-natural-scientifically natural cause and effect in the sense previously indicated, namely, that if anything else counts as such a cause or effect, it must. For indeed nothing counts as a cause or effect of this kind except insofar as it stands, at least potentially, in causal relation to the psychological. In conclusion, let us note the crucial meta-philosophical upshot of a genuinely natural naturalism, that is, a naturalism which gives non-natural-scientifically ascertainable causes and effects a place in empirical reality, or rather, the world of everyday, pre-theoretical perception and rationally self-regulating behavioural response. As the problem of distal causes

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shows, Davidson thinks of the outer to thought’s inner in his causally externalist terms because of his commitment to what is, for all its anti-reductionist sophistication, still a form of naturalist orthodoxy. But nothing obliges us to think of the outer – the “actual environment,” the world, external reality, etc. – as ‘at bottom’ reality-as-it-is-for-natural-science; this whole idea can be coherently denied without detriment to anything else, hence is in this sense optional. Furthermore, we already have some positive philosophical reasons why we should deny it: firstly, attempts to make concrete sense of the naturalist thesis have involved, as their initial step, a construal of perceptual experience in terms of how it ideally relates to other things which falsely assimilates it to ‘non-sensual’ judgement and belief and it is hard to see how such attempts, whether strictly armchair and conceptual or empirical, could avoid this step (although the possibility of finding some other way of explicating perceptual intentional substance ‘relationally’ perhaps cannot be ruled out a priori). Secondly, the idea not only co-opts substratal natural science into a quite non-scientific, specifically metaphysical agenda, in order to do this, it must impute or prescribe to such science a concern for subsumption under strict, i. e., exceptionless causal law which arguably this latter neither has in fact nor need have. Last but not least, nothing stands out as a good reason for endorsing this specifically metaphysical agenda. As a piece of philosophically unmotivatable and thus far empirically unmotivated latter-day metaphysica specialis, ontological naturalism is both bad science and bad philosophy. In the first of two last-ditch efforts to fend off what is in effect the claim that the modern metaphysics of nature are at the very least optional, one might object that – since causal relations are necessarily expressions of general law – it simply does not make sense to construe the causal web of reality as not governed solely and ubiquitously by a natural scientific lawfulness. In the light of all that has been said thus far it is easy to see what the proper response to this must be: the first part of the objection, at least when properly understood, is true and unobjectionable. The second part, however, is a question begging assimilation of the sense in which causal relations are expressions of general principle to a quite specific and very strong sense of generality, one ostensibly sought, at least ideally, in natural science. There are, after all, all sorts of low-level psychophysical generalities, for example, that imbalance in certain kinds of brain chemical causes schizophrenia, or that artificial inducement of alpha brain waves makes a test subject feel inexplicably cheery, or, going in the opposite direction,

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that those engaged in more challenging and intellectually stimulating kinds of work will sustain higher levels of brain function into old age. No one is disputing that any causal relation, of whatever kind, must be the expression of the kind of lawfulness exhibited by this kind of comparatively low-level empirical generality. It would, however, be question begging to assume that all such low-level empirical generalities are really just the superficial manifestations of underlying mechanisms whose causal unity and regularity is of a much more systematic and comprehensive kind – precisely the kind of strict lawfulness which many, Davidson, for instance, suppose natural science to seek.34 If, however, by general law one means simply some generality expressing what happens when such and such is the case, then regarding mental causes and effects as non-natural-scientifically ascertainable seams binding ‘underlying mechanisms’ together has no implications for the truth of the claim that all causal relations are expressions of general principle. In the second of these last-ditch efforts, one might now object that to regard mental states, conditions and experiences as capable of inflecting natural-scientifically natural, specifically neurophysiological reality in certain non-natural-scientifically ascertainable ways is speculatively to declare the unachievability of the very idea of a systematic and complete theory of cognition, for example, of the functionalist variety still popular in much contemporary cognitive science. And it must be admitted that to regard the mental as a domain of non-natural-scientifically natural cause and effect would be to deny the very idea of a complete theory of mind, indeed of the psychological as a whole, just as to deny that in general all causes ‘in nature’ are of a kind natural science ascertains must be to renounce the completeness of natural science as such. Once again, it is easy to see what the response to this must be. The goal pursued here has primarily been to point out what it would take coherently to view mental states, conditions and experiences (or indeed anything else) as standing in causal relations not of a kind ascertained by natural science. Whether one should actually view anything in this way is not the main issue – not the least because it is in part a matter to be decided by the concrete success and failure of such enterprises as cognitive science. Of course, it is only in part an empirical matter; under no circumstances 34 And they suppose the relevant kinds of substratal natural science to seek this because of their commitment to the ontologically naturalist thesis that causal relations in empirical reality are only ever of a kind some substratal natural science seeks to ascertain.

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does recognition of the role of empirical inquiry entitle one to issue, metaphorically speaking, a blank cheque to such disciplines as computationalist cognitive science, artificial intelligence, neural networks, research into autonomous agency and the like. It is certainly an at least equally rational enterprise to attempt to argue, naturally only fallibly, that the reason why none of the more ambitious and radical claims made historically for these disciplines has been made good is that these claims entail a metaphysics of nature which is not only coherently deniable, but also false. Certainly, it is a useful enterprise to argue this since it counteracts the tendency to issue, in a far more literal sense, blank cheques to the industries aforementioned. At some point, it becomes prudentially rational to say that energies would be better invested elsewhere, and a truly scientific culture must preserve the possibility of making this kind of assessment.

§ 4: ‘The Outer’ as the Metaphysically Unencumbered World The metaphor of non-natural-scientifically natural causes and effects as the seams which bind the chains of natural scientific causation together, as the points at which these chains head off in natural-scientifically inexplicable directions, reveals that in admitting causal relations not of a kind ascertained by natural science, one is not denying that all such relations only ever occur as part of a single web of cause and effect, but merely the seamlessness of this web. In other words, one is denying merely the singleness of the unity of the web of cause and effect across time, of one thing’s following efficiently upon another, not the singleness of this web itself: this unity is not solely of the kind natural science ascertains, that is, completely accountable for, or describable in terms of, the kinds of general principle which natural science formulates for use in its kind of explanation and prediction. In effect, one is denying that the one single web of cause and effect as such coincides with (this same) reality described solely in terms of its material constitution, that is, in the language of natural science. Now one can, if one likes, call the one single web of cause and effect in which empirical reality as such consists ‘nature’. So of ‘nature’ in this more than natural scientific sense – the single web of cause and effect – one can coherently say that non-natural scientific causes and effects occur as elements of the causal chains constituting it. So nothing said thus far prevents one from saying

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that, in this sense of the term ‘natural’, the efficient cause or effect of anything natural is itself natural; causal closure is preserved. Of course, what makes this preservation possible is that the notion of being an item ‘in nature’, hence of being natural or even ‘material’, is no longer being understood in the spirit of Descartes and Mersenne. To be an item ‘in nature’, hence a natural or even a material thing is no longer a matter of being something capable of interacting with other entities only in manner investigated by some preferred brand of substratal natural science – in Descartes’ and Mersenne’s case, mechanistic physics. Rather, to be an item ‘in nature’, a natural or material thing is to be something which can interact with other entities not only in the manner investigated by whatever brand of substratal natural science, but also in the pre-natural scientific manner characteristic of its everyday higher level properties, including, of course, those psychological properties which constitute ‘mindedness’ (if the item in question should have such properties, as it may not). This is the sense which is now grounding that second and derivative sense according to which to be an item ‘in nature’, hence natural and even material, is to be capable of interacting, at particular points in space and time, with various items ‘in nature’ (in our replacement sense), hence with various items which are natural (once again, in our replacement sense). Since the ‘mind’ is natural and even material in this replacement sense, we no longer have to deny that if A is either the efficient cause or effect of B and B is an item ‘in nature’, hence natural, physical, material, etc., then A is, too. We can therefore happily identify the extension of the second sense of nature and the natural with that of our replacement for the first. When this is done, a certain kind of naturalism turns out to be true. One can therefore agree wholeheartedly with McDowell’s general point that two different senses of ‘nature’ and ‘the natural’ need to be distinguished: on the one hand, to be natural is to bear properties, and stand in relations, of the kind natural science discovers and formulates natural scientific laws for – in which case the term ‘nature’ connotes the domain or universe of discourse of natural science. On the other hand, the term ‘natural’ has a wider connotation which permits it to encompass ranges of entities which are able to act and be acted upon in ways not accessible natural-scientifically. The term ‘nature’ thus connotes something wider, more comprehensive, even though under this wider connotation the term denotes the same entities as it does under the previous one. Of course, in this wider sense of the term, nature is not second nature. Furthermore, when taken in this wider sense, the term connotes

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something conceptually prior not just to the concept of the domain, the universe of discourse, of natural science, but to the concept of a domain of positive theoretical inquiry as such. For in this wider sense it connotes the totality wherein the items we can perceive, hence rationally respond to, are located and, of course, causally interact with one another. A naturalism of the kind envisaged here, for which the ‘natural’ does not tacitly connote the object domain of natural science, nor indeed of any other form of positive theory, is thus not a form of metaphysica specialis. In this sense, it is metaphysically unencumbered, precisely a natural kind of naturalism.35 Yet the term ‘nature’ has been rendered equivocal by the tendency of naturalist special metaphysics to elide the wider, pre-theoretical ‘folk’ sense one might give the term with its narrower connotation as the object domain of (substratal) natural science. For this reason, it is better to speak instead of reality, indeed empirical reality as such, for by this is meant the totality of that upon which empirical thinking and its subject can bear, in which this latter itself occurs and is interpreted as occurring – external reality construed as properly containing the internal reality which bears upon it. But the term ‘empirical reality’ is itself misleading, not the least because, as we have seen in discussing how a wider sense of empirical thinking and its ‘bearing on reality’ is already implicit in Davidson, talk of empirical reality, like McDowell’s talk of empirical thinking, suggests something too narrowly epistemic. One should therefore speak simply of the world – the world of ordinary pre-theoretical perception and action. The world in this sense is, or so we have argued, what McDowell is really getting at when he speaks of the outer within which empirical thinking is ‘confined’ as what such thinking is inherently open to through its perceptual experience, and which, in virtue of its character as the world of ordinary pre-theoretical perception and action, is itself open to such thinking. That what we are dealing with here is ‘the world’ in this sense is shown by the fact that this wider sense of ‘nature’ and ‘reality’ is not simply wider, it is in fact the widest sense we could conceivably give these terms while still being able to claim that it picks out only entities with properties and relations of a kind we could in any way perceive and respond ration35 What, then, is the status of this natural naturalism? It belongs to a revised, critical form of metaphysica generalis or ontologia, which legitimates ontological categories, concepts and theses by appeal to how they must be if thought’s bearing on reality (in the widest sense of this term) is to be possible.

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ally to, that is, of a kind upon which empirical thinking could bear. In this widest sense, then, the terms ‘nature’, ‘external reality’, ‘empirical reality’, ‘reality as such’, or again, “the actual environment”, – any term which connotes the outer to thought’s inner – denote the world with which we are simultaneously acquainted through perception and habitually familiar in behavioural response. McDowell’s account of ‘nature’ can now be seen as exhibiting, on the objective side, the fault exhibited, on the subjective side, by his account of empirical thinking, ‘thought’s bearing on reality’, etc. In both cases, the objective as well as the subjective, one needs to move beyond the tendency to take theoretical cognition and how it relates to its object domain as the representative case of ‘subject’, ‘object’ and their ‘interrelation’. For otherwise one will run the risk of failing to see that the outer upon which thought primarily bears, which therefore is presupposed by any understanding of the outer as the domain of such and such positive form of theoretical inquiry, is not itself the domain of any such kind of inquiry. In particular, it is not the domain of any special metaphysics (metaphysica specialis), which immediately entails, as Kant saw, that there is no such (purely theoretical) discipline. Of course, the world in this maximally comprehensive, pre-theoretical sense, although not the same as McDowell’s second nature, nonetheless incorporates it. Nothing is lost, therefore, in declaring McDowell’s attempt to revitalise themes from German Romanticism and Idealism to be a red herring. The situation in which McDowell finds himself is, we suggest, something like the situation in which, according to Heidegger, Dilthey found himself. Speaking of the world of ordinary everyday life, Heidegger says that Rilke, in his Notes of the Maltese Laurid Brigge, “… is not only able to see this primordial, but unreflected and certainly not theoretically constructed world …,” he “… also understands the philosophical element in the concept of life, which [philosophical element] Dilthey had already sensed and which we have formulated, in the concept of existence, as being-in-the-world.”36 So according to Heidegger, Dilthey’s notion of ‘life’ (Leben), as the non-idealistically conceived process within which all ‘objective spirit’ – precisely a second nature of culture, 36 See Heidegger 1989, § 15, c) b. H 246 – 247 (173). The relative pronoun actually used by Heidegger here, viz., “den”, entails that the relative clause qualifies “the concept of life” (Lebensbegriff ) rather than “the philosophical element” (das Philosophische). But this does not seem right; ‘das’ or ‘welches’ would seem to make more sense here.

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society, tradition and individual histories – happens (geschieht), contains an anticipation of his own notion of being-in-the-world. Perhaps, then, what McDowell is really getting at when he proceeds from thought’s bearing upon reality and arrives at second nature, clearly understanding the latter as the correlative notion to the former, are the notions of being-in-the-world and world respectively, notions which Dilthey and Rilke inchoately glimpsed in their complementarity and correlativity. If this is right, then the step which McDowell would now need to take would be to distinguish clearly between a structural, even ontological feature and correlate of perceptual intentionality and its subject – worldliness and world – from what no doubt is, for reasons familiar to us from thinkers like Wittgenstein, a condition of the possibility of self-conscious empirical intentionality as such, viz., a particular second nature in the objective sense, whether some specific objektiver Geist, some specific Lebensform (as distinct from what Dilthey meant by das Leben), some linguistic community, or again, some specific totality of social practices. For to make this distinction would be to move beyond Wittgenstein and Taylor, and indeed also to move beyond Dilthey, Rilke, Lebensphilosophie and their German Idealist and Romantic predecessors, to a better appreciation of what is only implicit in, yet truly interesting about, the concept of second nature. This is what Husserl and Heidegger were getting at when they spoke of the world – in Husserl’s case already as early as 1916, when Husserl first introduces the concept of the life-world (Lebenswelt), and in Heidegger’s case in his talk of world (Welt) and ‘worldhood’ (Weltlichkeit) simpliciter. If this is so, then thought’s bearing on reality, when understood generally, and not in the narrowly epistemic, even theoretical way McDowell primarily understands it, would be itself an anticipation of more phenomenological notions, in this case, of the self and its character as comporting itself self-evaluatingly, hence understandingly, towards entities within or in the world.37 Of course, in order to justify this claim and the legitimacy of the phenomenological concept of world presupposed by it, one must say a lot more. Here, however, is not the place to undertake this task since it 37 “But the problem guiding us, that in discussing which we were led to the phenomenon of the world, is precisely to determine what and how the subject is– what pertains to the subjectivity of the subject … In the end it is precisely the phenomenon of the world which forces us to a more radical account of the concept of the subject.” (Heidegger op. cit., § 15 c) a., H 238 (167); my translation)

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would amount to accomplishing what Heidegger sets out to do in Being and Time. A full account of these matters would, in other words, require that reconstructive interpretation of Being and Time for which the reconstruction of McDowell is intended merely as a propadeutic. Nonetheless, it will perhaps clarify matters somewhat if we present, in summary form, certain distinguishing structural features of the concept of world which are implicit in the preceding. This will be useful not the least for the purposes of the next section, which is to provide some concrete textual evidence for the claim that in the concept of second nature McDowell is on the brink of articulating a genuinely phenomenological concept of world from which, however, he is continually held back by the more conventional thesis that empirical intentionality and its subject only ever occur as part of some objektiven Geist, Lebensform, society, linguistic community, social practices, etc. The world is (a) a ‘something’ (Etwas), that is, an individual entity in the sense of any referrable or possible value of a variable whatsover. In particular, it is an individual entity which is, in a certain distinctive sense, ‘intuitable’. The concept of world, or rather the philosophical explication thereof, thus has its origins in Kantian notions of space and time, which, because they are forms of intuition, are also pure intuitions, i. e., entities intuitable in their own distinctive way, as implicit in, and delimited into regions and intervals by, individual empirically real entities in the standard sense. When Kant speaks of the one space and the one time, when he insists on a qualitative, irreducible difference between the sense in which a region of space belongs to the one space, an interval of time to the one time, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the sense in which an individual empirical entity belongs to the extension of a concept, he is getting at the character of our notions of spatiality and temporality as being not so many concepts or categories more alongside others, but as having a distinctive status. So, too, with the concept of world: as is the one space and time for Kant, it is the continuous background whole only as standing out against which individual empirically real entities are ever perceived. If, however, this is so, then the world itself is experienced, admittedly only in its own distinctive, chronically partial way, since it can never be given in its entirety. Of course, this similarity raises a question of difference: how does the concept of world differ, as clearly it does, from Kant’s conception of space and time as forms of intuition, hence pure intuitions? But an account of this difference is bound up with an account of the critical relation which phenomenology in the tradition of Heidegger and Husserl has to Kant. As such, this question can-

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not be dealt with here, but must be left first to Part II and then, in particular, to the reconstructive interpretation of Being and Time. The concept of world is thus (b) the concept of something which is not posterior to individual empirically real entities, the objects of perceptual experience in the usual sense. That is, it is not simply the sum of entities which make it up. That it is not such a sum is manifest in the fact that what we ordinarily and pre-theoretically understand by world – and in its conception of world phenomenology claims, of course, merely to be making this pre-philosophical understanding explicit – has alternative possible futures. Consequently, the concept of world which phenomenology claims merely to explicate is to be distinguished from the notion of a possible world as wielded by recent analytic metaphysics and formal semantics. The former grounds and gives sense to the latter rather than conversely: the idea of a possible world in the neo-Leibnizian sense is arguably simply an abstraction from, and limit case of, the idea of the history of the world up to the point of time at which one self-consciously reflects, say for prudential or ethical reasons, on how things might, possibly only as opposed to how they will in fact, continue on from here. Of course, what grounds this ontological character of the world as not posterior to individual empirically real entities, hence its capacity to motivate whatever notion of a possible world might prove useful in formal contexts, is its status as a condition of the possibility of perceptual experience, hence of self-conscious empirical thinking and its bearing on reality. The concept of world is thus the concept of an entity which (c) is implicit in the very structure and identity of perceptual experience itself (which structure is, of course, itself grounded by appeal to its transcendental status as how perceptual experience must be if thought’s bearing on reality in the widest sense is to be possible). It is thus crucial not to confuse the thesis of the worldliness of empirical, in particular perceptual intentionality and its subject with the kinds of thesis suggested by McDowell’s talk of second nature: the dependence of at least self-conscious thinking on language, the essential character of language as public and social, the dependence of the public and social on history or at least some kind of tradition, etc. No doubt it is quite right to insist on this chain of dependency, no doubt indeed the chain can be revealed through a phenomenological explication and legitimation of the everyday, prephilosophical notion of world. Even so, the former thesis is clearly distinct from, and indeed more radical than, the latter ones. It is thus also crucial not to confuse the insistence of the phenomenological tradition on the concept of world with Wittgensteinian and recent pragmatist in-

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sistence on the essentially linguistic and social character of intentionality. A more critical stance is needed towards the common view that phenomenology in the tradition at least of Heidegger, or indeed its hermeneutic descendants (Gadamer), is ‘really’ doing no more or less than Dewey, Wittgenstein, Davidson, etc. The concept of world is the concept of an entity which is (d) held together by causal relations not all of which are of a kind (some substratal) natural science ascertains. As such, it ‘exceeds’ purely natural scientific description and explanation. Consequently, the world is (e) a totality containing individual empirically real entities which one can regard as conforming to notions of the physical or natural, the spatial, temporal, material and causal only if one does not naively assume from the outset that these ‘categories’ are or must always be the very same notions as those needed by, hence wielded in, theoretical inquiry, in particular, natural scientific explanation. Rather, whatever notions of the physical or natural, the spatial, temporal, material and causal are wielded in everyday perception, action and reflection must be understood as pre-theoretical notions in which the corresponding natural scientific notions are founded – founded in the sense that in order to wield the latter, one must have always already wielded the former in pre-theoretical perceptual interaction with, and judgement about, the everyday world. Of course, when taken simply in itself, the claim that the theoretical notions are dependent upon the pre-theoretical ones is something almost anyone could agree with. The claim gains real philosophical bite, however, when not taken in itself, but rather in conjunction with rejection38 of the assumption that there is some other kind of dependency in the light of which the pre-theoretical is prior to the theoretical only in a transcendental, enabling sense (since, as serious metaphysics ostensibly shows, there is a pre-theoretically unavailable, ‘hidden’ ontological dependence of empirical reality as it is for everyday pre-theoretical perception and action upon empirical reality as it is for theoretical, in particular, natural scientific inquiry). Once this assumption is rejected, one need no longer feel obliged to explain the transcendental, enabling dependence away (as merely transcendental and enabling). Rather, one may take it at face value since one may now show it to follow directly from an ontology of the world which proceeds from and, at its successful completion, returns to the thesis that empirical thinking in the widest sense would not be possible if the causal ‘substance’ of ‘empirical reality’ (world) were completely and unifiedly 38 At least until such time as empirical inquiry yields results to the contrary.

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capturable in the language of theoretical, in particular, natural scientific description and explanation. We have already seen there to be an innocuous sense in which causal relations are necessarily expressions of general principle or law, a sense which must be distinguished from the idea that causal relations are expressions of a deep, homogenous unity of strict causal law which natural science ostensibly seeks to uncover. This latter idea may already misrepresent even what natural science attempts to do. But it certainly misrepresents the notion of causality as pre-natural-scientific cultures or phenomenological reflection on everyday pre-theoretical existence would explicate it. And it would simply be tendentious to claim that such pre-natural-scientific notions could only ever be wrong, or alternatively that they are, in a fashion not yet available to their wielders, ‘really’ the notions needed by, hence wielded in, modern natural science. Some argument has been provided for the claim that that wherein empirical intentionality and its subject must exist and be interpretable as existing is the world in the sense partially defined by these five features: an account of how perceptual experience must be structured if there is to be such a thing as empirical thinking genuinely bearing upon a reality distinct from it entails that perceptual intentionality in particular, hence empirical intentionality in general, refers into, and itself exists in, the world in this sense. It has also been argued that nothing of any moment hangs on denying that perceptual experience is in and of the world in this sense. In particular, it is a mistake to think that commitment to natural science either requires or is identical with commitment to the ‘scientific worldview’, understood as the naturalist thesis that the manifest world of everyday perception and action supervenes, in some thus far unexplicated and perhaps inexplicable manner, on reality-as-it-is-for-natural science. But to say that nothing of any moment hangs on endorsing this generically naturalist thesis is not to say that it is false. Nor has anything said thus far shown it conclusively to be false. Via a mix of phenomenological interpretation and transcendental argument some truly a priori philosophical conclusions have been drawn. Specifically, it has been argued that perceptual experience is a unity of the conceptual and qualitatively non-conceptual in the sense described in Chapter Three; and that this intentional structure is a condition of the possibility of intelligent behaviour and self-consciously rational self-evaluation. These two conclusions entail that the generically naturalist thesis could only be demonstrated by a programme of empirical or indeed philosophical research which did not dirempt perceptual experience into perceptual judgement

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and sensation.39 Yet this does not entitle one definitively to assert either that no kind of naturalism whatsoever is true or that no kind of demonstration of it is possible. The possibility has therefore been left open that, at some time in the future, some kind of empirical research, perhaps even some kind of philosophical programme, might demonstrate there to be no such thing as the world in the sense of something which possessed features (d) and (e). But this raises a very interesting question: what would such a demonstration mean for our account of perceptual experience and its inherent worldliness? Importantly, it would not just mean that there was no such thing as the world (in the sense envisaged here); it would also mean that the illusion of there being the world in this sense were inherent to pre-philosophical everyday life (since this follows from a phenomenologically accurate, transcendental-philosophically guided interpretation of perceptual experience). One might put the point this way: such a demonstration would show that the world as here envisaged was a form of transcendental semblance (transzendentaler Schein).40 This is actually a highly desirable result. For it is precisely part of the intellectual problem and challenge in which naturalism consists that what Sellars calls the manifest image refuses to lie down and die as soon as the naturalist thought occurs. That colours, for example, are the causes of our visual perceptions, and precisely for this reason are objective features of the items seen, is built into our pre-philosophical understanding of perceptual experience. Moreover, this understanding is so entrenched that the whole philosophical programme and challenge of naturalism has been devised in order to dislodge or at least to disarm41 it. At the very least, then, the account given here of the intentional structure of perceptual experience and its transcendental necessity explains an important fact not just about perceptual experience and the notion of world, but about naturalism itself. No attempt has been made to refute the generically naturalist thesis entirely, but only in the forms thus far conceived, which assimilate perceptual experience to belief, thereby banishing the sensually impressional character of perceptual experience at best to the realms of ‘sensation’. Consequently, even as the arguments 39 Or, alternatively, reduce it to perceptual judgement while eliminating the sensually qualitative character of perceptual experience. 40 That this might well be a misappropriation of Kant is not important here. 41 As in dispositionalist (or even ‘functionalist’) accounts of colour of the kind Descartes, for example, advocated – see Gaukroger 1995, p. 345 f.

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given here underscore the difficulty of envisaging an alternative form, they leave the possibility open of there being such. And if such an alternative form of naturalism were to be demonstrated, then the fall-back position would be that the manifest image, even though merely manifest, even though mere appearance, is nonetheless necessary as such, that is, as semblance.

§ 5: Intimations of a Phenomenological Concept of World In mapping out a concept of the world as something possessed of the five features (a) to (e) listed above, we have not sought to provide conclusive argument for there being something which instantiates the concept. Rather, the goal has simply been to pin down, through a number of distinctive features, what is meant by world to such a degree that it becomes possible to fulfil an obligation which by now has surely become pressing. For if it is right to say that the real thrust of McDowell’s discussion of second nature and modern “naturalism about nature” is recognition of a phenomenological conception of world, then Mind and World must contain identifiable traces of such recognition. Is there any concrete textual evidence that McDowell is struggling towards a notion of world (or external reality, “actual environment”, the outer to thought’s inner, etc.) which possseses these five features, in particular, the features (d) and (e), which amount to a genuine break with the naturalist identification of empirical reality with nature qua “realm of law”? At one point McDowell insists that if we are to understand how animals such as ourselves, who are possessed of conceptual capacities, can be ‘in nature’, we must conceive them as being in a certain cultural, social, traditional and possibly even historical world. We must, he says, distinguish being-in-a-world in this sense from the way in which animals without conceptual capacities simply occur in objective reality. Conceptwielding animals like us exist in a world whereas animals incapable of this occur merely in an environment or indeed a milieu – see McDowell 1994b, p. 115 f. Now this kind of language, indeed the very terms ‘world’, ‘environment’ and ‘milieu’, are of good phenomenological origin since all can be found at least in Heidegger and Scheler, but also to some extent in Husserl. Indeed, McDowell seems to be aware of this origin, for

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precisely at this point he explicitly appeals to Gadamer, attributing to him the distinction between world and environment (in the sense of milieu). McDowell’s allusion to Gadamer and the distinction between world and environment thus constitutes some evidence for the claim that McDowell is on his way to a phenomenological concept of world. Further evidence for this claim is provided, of course, by the fact that it is precisely the phenomenological concept of world at which one arrives when one rescues Davidson’s insight into the worldliness of empirical intentionality from his prioritisation of the causal over the intentional and perceptual senses of world. But the matter is not clear, for in gesturing towards the phenomenological concept of world, McDowell also misconstrues it. In particular, he misses the Heideggerian subtletly in Gadamer’s distinction, a subtlety which sets it apart from mere recognition of second nature as a second concept of nature. The distinction Gadamer derives from Heidegger is inaccurately put as one between merely being in an environment (in the sense of milieu rather than Umwelt 42) and being in a world – as if the term ‘world’ were a common noun which must receive some kind of adjectival specification, e. g., public world, cultural world, social world, traditional world, etc. Heidegger always insisted on the notion of the world, which takes no indefinite article and is understood as requiring no further adjectival specification. Of course McDowell does appreciate this, at least to some extent and at a verbal level. Thus, precisely when appealing to Gadamer, he writes of how “a properly human life” is “lived in the world,” (McDowell 1994b, p. 118; italics added) thereby insinuating the Heideggerian idea of beingin-the-world. Yet precisely here McDowell associates this idea with the young Marx’s idea of “a properly human life”, i. e. a life lived as the active, free and unalienated “productive making over of “nature, the sensuous exterior world”.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 117) This association of ideas is incorrect; the reason why “Gadamer does not note the parallel” (McDowell 1994b, p. 117) between Heidegger and himself on the one hand, and Marx on the other, is that there is no parallel here to note.43 So at a deep-

42 Since according to Heidegger an Umwelt, properly so-called, is, for something that is in the world, what a milieu is for something which, not being capable of the first person, cannot be in the world. 43 This is not to deny that the transcendentally ontological notion of world might not have some implicit reference to the notion of the conditions under which a self-conscious self exists most truly or fully (eigentlich) as such a self. And this latter notion, while not itself a strictly ethical notion but rather an ontological one,

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er, more than verbal level McDowell does not truly appreciate what Gadamer and Heidegger were getting at when they spoke of the world. This is neither simply the Hegelian cum Romantic notion of second nature by another name, nor something one has de facto acknowledged simply because one has introduced the latter notion. The point here might be put this way: McDowell’s conviction that by introducing the notion of second nature as a second concept of nature alongside the first he captures what Gadamer and Heidegger mean by world shows that he de facto assimilates the world to a world – to a particular linguistically mediated socio-cultural and traditional world. Thereby he falls, from a position on the brink of phenomenology, back into a more anthropologistic one characteristic of much late nineteenth century neo-Kantianism and philosophy of life. The nascent insight that empirical thinking and its subject are essentially in the world is pushed aside by the more conventional claim that the individual ‘empirical thinker’ occurs only within, and as a product of, a particular, linguistically mediated social, cultural and traditional world, within which it finds, at least if social conditions are right, freedom and unalienated existence as a self-conscious, rational subject. The notion of the world, of that wherein all second natures, all objektive Geister, all forms of life, all sets of linguistically mediated social practices, together with the ethical outlooks and worldviews constitutive of them, are located, is displaced by the less interesting notion of second nature itself, that is, of a linguistically mediated, sociocultural and traditional world. So McDowell’s more or less incidental references to Gadamer do not constitute anything more than suggestive hints that he is on his way to that understanding of the notion of world which distinguishes the phenomenological tradition, in particular, of Husserl and Heidegger. Are there then any other, stronger intimations of this concept of world? As we have seen, there are intimations of such a conception of (the) world already in Davidson, which is no doubt part of the reason why McDowell, for all his criticisms of Davidson, always insists on his debt to Davidson.44 If, however, there are such intimations, admittedly only in naturalistically distorted form, already in Davidson; and if McDowell is himself attempting to clear away these naturalistic distortions and is will arguably implicate orientation towards the ethical as an essential component of all self-conscious selfhood. 44 See the remark on p. 129 of McDowell 1994b, where he admits that in his lectures, he obscured his debt to Davidson. In fact, he says, he counts Davidson “… as an ally rather than an opponent.”

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grasping, in anti-metaphysical intent, towards a phenomenological concept of the world: then we should expect to find McDowell trying in some shape or form to correct how Davidson construes the relation between the psychological and the physical along the lines of the natural naturalism outlined in the section preceding. And in fact we find McDowell doing what at least seems to be just this. In the course of characterising what distinguishes Davidson’s position from “the way of thinking” he recommends, McDowell points out that Davidson opposes bald naturalism, urging that “… concepts of “propositional attitudes” [that is, of intentional states and experiences] make sense only as governed by a “constitutive ideal of rationality”.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 74)45 McDowell interprets this claim as follows: the fundamental point of our concepts of intentional states and experiences is … to subserve the kind of intelligibility we find in something when we place it in the space of reasons. On that basis Davidson argues that we cannot reduce those concepts to concepts governed by a different “constitutive ideal”, or, to put it in Sellarsian terms, concepts whose home is a different logical space. Specifically, and again putting it in the terms I have been using: the intellectual role of those spontaneity-related concepts cannot be duplicated in terms of concepts whose fundamental point is to place things in the realm of law. (McDowell 1994b, p. 74)

So far, says McDowell, this constitutes common ground between him and Davidson. But, says, McDowell, what is distinctive about Davidson’s approach – and by this he presumably means what distinguishes Davidson’s position from his own – is “an ontological claim” made by Davidson: the very things which satisfy concepts of the so-called ‘propositional attitudes’ … are already in principle available to an investigation whose concern is the realm of law. The constitutive focus of the two kinds of intelligibility separates two batches of conceptual equipment, but it does not separate their subject matter. Davidson makes this ontological claim specifically about events: every event, even those that fall under the concepts that subserve “space of reasons” intelligibility, can in principle be made intelligible in terms of the operations of natural law. (McDowell 1994b, pp. 74 – 75)

According to McDowell Davidson’s purpose in saying this is to permit those items which satisfy concepts of the propositional attitudes to “… stand in causal relations to one another and to other things, without 45 For the notion of the constitutive ideal of rationality see Davidson 1984c, pp. 207 – 224, especially pp. 221 – 223.

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threatening the thesis that causal relations only hold between occupants of the realm of law”, (McDowell 1994b, p. 75) – which thesis clearly expresses, in Davidsonian terms, a generic commitment to naturalism. Clearly, if this is so, then the items which satisfy our concepts of the propositional attitudes “… can be causally linked only if they are also occupants of the realm of [natural-scientifically ascertainable] law; and Davidson says they are [such occupants], even though they are not revealed as such by their satisfaction of [these] concepts.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 75) And as McDowell points out, Davidson understands this to mean that “a reason can be a cause, though it is not by virtue of its rational relationships that it stands in causal relations.” (McDowell 1994b, note 6, p. 75) This latter claim is ambiguous. At first sight, it seems to come to the following: reasons (or propositional attitudes) are causes, but not in virtue of their character as reasons (or propositional attitudes), and the various “rational relations” in which they stand as a result of being reasons. Rather they are causes solely in virtue of their character as occupants of the object domain of natural science – what McDowell calls “the realm of law”. One must, however, be careful here. For Davidson rejects the view that anything stands in causal relations to anything else in virtue of having such and such properties and relations, whatever these might be. While one can distinguish between properties and relations which are, and properties and relations which are not, causally efficacious, this distinction is strictly derivative and secondary, merely reflecting the fact that appeal to certain properties and relations yields better explanations than appeal to others. One does more justice to Davidson when one interprets the claim as follows: reasons (or propositional attitudes) are causes, but not in virtue of their character as reasons (or propositional attitudes), and the various “rational relations” in which they stand as a result of being reasons, since nothing is (non-derivatively) a cause in virtue of any property it bears, or relation it stands in. This ‘extensionalist’ view of causation has already been challenged, but for the moment we may grant Davidson the view. For clearly, however one understands precisely the claim that a reason or propositional attitude can be a cause, though not in virtue of its rational relationships, to negate it is obviously to maintain that reasons and propositional attitudes are causes (and effects) precisely in virtue of their character as reasons or propositional attitudes. So by distinguishing Davidson’s position

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from his own by appeal to what McDowell calls “an ontological claim,”46 McDowell is surely expressing willingness precisely to negate it. Admittedly, the matter is not clear. For having apparently distinguished between Davidson’s position and his own by appeal to Davidson’s endorsement of this claim, McDowell now muddies the waters by saying that he does not want, “here at least”, to question its truth – see McDowell 1994b, p. 75. Rather, he wants simply to note how this claim excludes the conception of experience he recommends. But of course, if the claim does prevent Davidson from adopting that conception of perceptual experience which McDowell recommends, then modus tollens commits McDowell to denying the claim. It seems quite right, then, reconstructively to attribute to McDowell the intention to challenge the modern understanding of nature if by this one means the unnatural, metaphysical naturalism of Davidson and indeed Evans. Correspondingly, it seems quite right reconstructively to understand McDowell’s introduction of the notion of second nature as a stumbling attempt to endorse a naturalism of that more natural kind which takes one beyond all variations on the distinctively neo-Kantian, ‘smoothly’ naturalist theme of the natural versus the normative – nomothesis versus ideography, explanation versus justification, different kinds of ‘intelligibility’, different language games, or different constitutive ideals. If this is so, then McDowell is moving, nolens volens, towards a more phenomenological notion of empirical reality as the world.

46 In fact, it is a specifically metaphysical rather than ontological claim.

Chapter Seven: On the Brink of Phenomenology In Mind and World McDowell moves from what he calls thought’s bearing upon reality through an investigation of perceptual experience to his appropriation of Hegelian and Romantic notions of second nature. This is, as McDowell recognises,1 a transcendentally philosophical movement of thought. Here it has been argued that this movement makes more coherent sense when reconstructed as passing from self-conscious empirical subjectivity as rationally self-regulating through an account of perception as showing how things are what they are to a conception of the everyday, pre-theoretical world as a necessary presupposition of the empirical subject and its intentionality. If so, then the movement of McDowell’s thought is also implicitly phenomenological. Is there, then, any evidence in McDowell’s writings to suggest a transcendentally philosophical conception of philosophy which is also nascently phenomenological?

§ 1: Ideas Concerning a Phenomenological Philosophy In Mind and World McDowell does not reflect in any systematic way on the status of what he is trying to accomplish and how.2 In his later Woodbridge lectures, however, he shows a more sustained interest in meta-philosophical issues. Precisely here one can find points of important overlap with the meta-philosophical position of Edmund Husserl. Admittedly, these overlaps will be evident only to those so familiar with the works of Husserl himself, and crucially also with the general philosophical tenor of Husserl’s times, that they will not naively assume certain 1 2

See, e. g., McDowell 1998a, p. 445 f. McDowell’s meta-philosophical reflections in Mind and World are disparate and often consist in comments on, and responses to, meta-philosophical remarks made by other contemporary Anglo-American philosophers. In this work, McDowell’s most sustained and independent but also highly general meta-philosophical reflection occurs in the Postscript to Lecture V (McDowell 1994b, pp. 175 – 180), where he interprets and defends Wittgenstein’s “quietism” against Crispin Wright. This interpretation and defence is briefly examined in section two of this chapter.

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terms used by Husserl, such as ‘the problem of cognition’ (Erkenntnisproblem), ‘theory of knowledge’ (Erkenntnistheorie), ‘presuppositionlessness’ (Voraussetzungslosigkeit), ‘certainty’ (Gewißheit) and the like, to mean for him and his contemporaries what they mean for Anglo-American epistemologists. The task of this section thus falls into two parts: we must first interpret McDowell in such a way that a recognisably phenomenological character becomes visible. We must then interpret Husserl’s idea of transcendental phenomenology in such a way that historically uninformed caricatures of it are avoided. To the extent that the idea of transcendental philosophy which emerges on completion of the first part of the task clearly intimates a potential for development along the lines elaborated in the second, we may conclude that McDowell is on his way to a more transcendentally phenomenological conception of philosophy itself. i. Epistemology and Transcendental Philosophy McDowell’s Woodbridge lectures begin with a discussion of Sellars in the course of which McDowell claims that “we cannot take Sellars to be doing epistemology in some sense that contrasts with reflecting about intentionality.” (McDowell 1998a, p. 435) According to McDowell, Sellars believes that epistemology can only be done properly or fully if it involves reflection on what it is to be something empirically intentional – in the first instance, an empirical intentional state or experience, but presumably also, the subject of such states and experiences (since plausibly determining what it is to be the former must ultimately compel one to determine what it is to be the latter). It is clear from the text that McDowell regards Sellars’ belief as correct but he gives no account of why it is correct. It is not unreasonable to speculate, however, that the reason why Sellars is right is because the problems of traditional epistemology have arisen, not through unmediated reflection on ordinary, everyday concepts of perception, belief and justification, but because certain not at all pretheoretical pre-conceptions have misshaped the philosophical explication of these everyday concepts. Thereby the traditional epistemological problems have been engendered. If so, then the solution, or rather dissolution, of these problems must consist in identifying how intentionality has been misunderstood and how this misunderstanding has arisen. Only so can one come to those correct understandings which expose the traditional epistemological problems as spurious.

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That McDowell himself would endorse this account of why Sellars is right seems clear from all the things he has said about Davidson and Evans. Recall that according to McDowell, Davidson and Evans fail to see the possibility of conceiving perceptual experience as integrating the conceptual and non-conceptual because of their picture of empirical thinking as confined within an inner sphere itself enclosed by an outer realm which they tacitly identify with the realm of law, that is, with natural scientific nature. This picture expresses their specifically metaphysical commitment to ontological naturalism and it implicates a metaphysically loaded conception of what it is to be a ‘natural’ subject of intentional states and experiences such as we are. It is easy to see how this metaphysically loaded conception might combine with various commonplaces about knowledge, justification and perceptual experience to generate an epistemological problem. For this ‘ontology of the subject’ involves implicit commitment to the idea that intentional states and experiences are either worldless or at most worldly in Davidson’s causally externalist sense. So insofar as one does not wish to endorse, or simply has not thought of, Davidson’s causally externalist conception of content and interpretation, one has set oneself up for engendering the problem of the external world: non-externalism becomes internalism in Putnam’s sense and the logical possibility of being a brain-in-a-vat acquires epistemological consequences it would not otherwise have.3 If, however, this is right, then the proper way to do epistemology cannot consist in trying to construct out of everyday ‘intuitions’, for every thesis T that the sceptic adduces, a proof that not T – not the least because it is hard to see how mere everyday notions of perception, knowledge and justification could ever themselves generate sceptical conundra. Nor can the proper way to do epistemology consist in showing how a certain picture makes propositions concerning the nature of intentionality, or for that matter, anything else, seem binding and inevitable – as if one could expose these propositions as optional and usefully replaceable by an alternative vocabulary simply by identifying the picture upon which they allegedly depend. No picture or metaphor could ever determine anything without being interpreted by propositions.4 So to do epis3 4

See Chapter Four, p. 185, note 6. A picture of a short, dumpy, slightly balding man in early nineteenth century clothes who is holding one of his hands in his waistcoat is not in and of itself a picture of Napoleon; what makes it this is the context of intentions and interpretations in which it occurs, as is shown by the need for the little brass plate

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temology properly must consist precisely in the converse, that is, in identifying the propositions which make sense of the picture. The picture in question here is, of course, that of empirical thinking as confined to an inner sphere enclosed within the outer sphere of empirical reality (the world). The propositions are those naturalist commitments which make the picture one of how the empirical subject and its intentionality are in the world when this is conceived as nature qua “realm of law.” Doing epistemology properly consists in identifying how these propositions shape the picture to yield a problem-engendering account of what it is to be such everyday phenomena as intentional states and experiences, their process (empirical thinking) and their subject in its capacity both as bearing these states and experiences and as caught up in this process.5 But now a problem arises. If such a classic problem of epistemology as that of the external world arises only under the tacit assumption of some insufficiently examined, metaphysically loaded understanding of intentional phenomena, and in particular, their subject, then to do epistemology properly cannot consist simply in identifying the metaphysically tendentious understanding which causes the problem. This critically unreflected understanding can only be made to go away if it is not just identified, but also shown to be wrong. Nor can one mean by ‘wrong’ here simply ‘unhelpful’ – as if one could get rid of this understanding simply by declaring it to be the source of ‘weird’ problems and ‘endless’, ‘unproductive’ attempts to solve these problems. No such move can suffice since the weirdness of a problem and the unproductive endlessness of attempts to solve it in no way undermines its character as a problem. No problem

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under the picture. Interestingly, this point underlies Evans’ observations on pp. 124 – 125 of Evans 1982. What Evans fails to see is that precisely insofar as the content of photograph is accurately representable as, say, “Red(x) & Ball(x) & Yellow(y) & Square(y) & On Top Of(x,y)”, hence requires something external to it (in the shape of the artist’s intentions or the tradition of interpretation in which the picture is embedded) in order to achieve that instantiation-toa-particular-case which makes it a picture of, say, Tony Blair’s red ball lying on top of George Bush’s yellow square, pictures cannot serve as a model for thinking about the contentfulness of perceptions. Indeed, it shows that the order of explication must be, if anything, the other way around. For perceptions are not about some kind of thing; rather, they are, from the outset, about some particular thing or individual. For this reason they are conceptually contentful in a way pictures are not. This is not necessarily to distinguish, in the manner of Kant, Natorp and the mature Husserl, between the process which is empirical thinking and the empirical subject (although it is consistent with such a distinction).

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will go away until we see some reason for its going away. An account is therefore needed of why it is wrong, and not merely ‘unhelpful’, to think of intentionality and in particular its subject in a way which engenders the problem of the external world. So to do epistemology properly is not just to identify certain uncritically accepted, metaphysically tendentious conceptions of intentionality as causing one’s problems, but to identify them as doing so illicitly. In the logically, if not temporally first instance, we must get our account of intentionality and its subject right since the effort even so much as to identify what causes certain classical problems must proceed by identifying where our understanding of the very being of empirical intentionality and its subject has gone wrong. We must consciously and explicitly address the question already implicitly, albeit inadequately, addressed in the metaphysically loaded view which creates the problem – the question of what it is to be that kind of intentional state or experience which is a knowing, hence what it is to be the kind of subject that knows. In other words, we need to determine what it is for thought to bear on reality in both the narrow and wider, admittedly epistemically constrained senses appealed to by McDowell. And we do this in precisely the manner already operative, if only implicitly and unclearly, in Mind and World: we must recognise that thought’s bearing on reality in the narrow sense – that objective purport of individual intentional states and experiences which not even the sceptic can deny – entails the character of empirical thinking as bearing upon reality in the wider sense, i. e., as rationally regulating itself in the light of how things at least appear (in perception) to it to be. Finally, we must ask how perceptual experience must be in order to enable such rational self-regulation. At this point, we can see how another meta-philosophical claim is right to which McDowell indirectly commits himself in the course of his lectures. Having said that for Sellars, to do epistemology is to incorporate into it reflection on the very being of empirical intentionality and its subject, he goes on to point out that for Sellars epistemology is a ‘transcendental’ form of inquiry. That is, to do it is to ask how cognitively intentional phenomena and their subject must be in order for them to display certain features – objective purport and rational responsiveness (at least of the narrowly epistemic, knowing kind) – which precisely the sceptic assumes in order to get any kind of sceptical argument going. Importantly, McDowell justifies the claim that Sellars conceives epistemology as transcendental by appeal to this latter’s attempt to find precisely a transcendentally necessary role for sensations in the structure of experience.

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Sellars, says McDowell, “thinks our complete account of visual experience must include visual sensations – non-conceptual visual episodes” (McDowell 1998a, p. 444) because he believes that only so can we make intelligible the idea that perceptual experience should involve the actualisation of conceptual capacities, i. e., that it should, as Sellars likes to say, contain a claim that such and such is the case. So Sellars postulates sensations “on general epistemological or, as Kant would say, transcendental grounds.” (Sellars 1967, p. 9; italics added) Sellars himself thus associates epistemology with the ‘transcendental’ “in a recognizably Kantian sense.” (McDowell 1998a, p. 445) The explanation Sellars seeks of why we must give sensations a role in perceptual experience is transcendental because it is needed, he thinks, in order to vindicate the legitimacy of the apparatus – talk of experiences as actualizations of conceptual capacities, which as such “contain” claims, but in a distinctively sensory way – in terms of which we enable ourselves to conceive experiences as ostensibly of objects at all. Sellars thinks his picture, with sensations playing such a transcendental role, just is the picture Kant would have given if he had been fully clear about the drift of his own thinking. (McDowell 1998a, p. 445)

But, thinks McDowell, Sellars puts a distinctive spin on the transcendental character he gives to epistemology, hence to reflection on the nature of empirical intentionality and its subject: There is a temptation to suppose transcendental philosophy would have to be done at a standpoint external to that of the conceptual goings-on whose objective purport is to be vindicated – a standpoint at which one could contemplate the relation between those conceptual goings-on and their subject matter from sideways on. Sellars’ move fits this conception; he undertakes to vindicate the objective purport of conceptual occurrences from outside the conceptual order. (McDowell 1998a, p. 445)

The move of which McDowell is speaking here is what he calls Sellars’ “sense-impression inference.” (McDowell 1998a, p. 445) This is a transcendental argument which seeks to show that sensations, even though they lie beyond the conceptual order, hence lack conceptual content, nonetheless have an essential epistemic role to play in perceptual experience. Specifically, they ‘guide’ perceptual experience into the truth claim such experience contains, thereby enabling individual acts of empirical thinking to have the objective purport they need if empirical thinking as a whole is to be rationally responsive to reality. The distinctive feature of this move is its construal of sensations as items not necessarily accessible from the standpoint of “the conceptual goings-on whose objective

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purport is to be vindicated”, that is, of individual acts of empirical thinking themselves. Now as McDowell points out, this lack of accessibility ‘from within’ immediately throws up a problem. In Science and Metaphysics Sellars suggests that the sensations which ‘guide’ perceptual experience with respect to the particular truth claim it ‘contains’ “… are states of consciousness, but not objects of consciousness.” (McDowell 1998a, p. 446) That is, they “… are states of consciousness that are not apperceived, where “apperception” can be explained as “non-inferential self-knowledge.”” (McDowell 1998a, p. 447) It seems, then, that in this later work Sellars is construing sensations as occurring ‘in consciousness’ – for surely sensations must do this – without, however, thereby being directly accessible to their subject as such. But this leads to an obvious objection: “it is hard to see how, on Sellarsian or indeed any principles, there could be a class of items in consciousness whose members are … incapable of being directly available for self-attribution.” (McDowell 1998a, p. 447) One can certainly agree with this claim, at least when it is understood simply as the claim that for any item I in the consciousness of a subject of intentionality S, if S is capable of first-person ascription at all (and if S is in full possession of its cognitive powers), then S can seriously and literally think or assert the sentence “I have item I” (or some semantic equivalent, e. g., “Item I is in me”) as true. So McDowell sets out to save Sellars from himself. The “sideways on” character of the transcendental philosophy Sellars is doing when he posits sensations not simply as existing ‘in’ perceptual experience, but actually enabling it, consists in the claim that sensations “… are states of consciousness that are not apperceived, where “apperception” can be explained as “non-inferential self-knowledge.”” (McDowell 1998a, p. 447) But, says McDowell, Sellars does not intend this “sideways on” character, this externality of the transcendental standpoint, to be understood in any way which entails that sensations are utterly inaccessible to first person introspection (‘apperception’) – as if they were theoretical entities posited from the third person perspective of someone trying to describe the process by which perceptual experience comes about. Rather, this externality is to be understood simply as the claim that the subject is not and cannot be aware of them in actu¯. As McDowell puts it, the visual impressions or sensations involved in a visual experience are not ‘apperceived’

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… when playing their transcendental role. That is not to say that they are not apperceivable. It is just to say that if they do get to be apperceived – if they do become objects for consciousness – they can no longer be playing their transcendental role, that of enabling episodes of “outer sense,” episodes that “contain” claims about the environment. One can focus one’s attention on the manifold of “sheer receptivity” that was, a moment before, enabling one’s attention to be directed toward the ostensibly seen environment. But in so doing – in bringing it within the scope of one’s apperception – one ensures that it ceases to perform that function. (McDowell 1998a, p. 447)

But, one might well ask, how could anything be prevented from playing its functional role merely through its being referred to? That something is playing a certain functional role at a certain point of time, or during a certain interval of time, does not in general, or as a rule, constitute an obstacle to its being picked out and referred to while it is playing its functional role. Are we to understand that sensation is a special case? If so, then we will need some justification for this special status, and this justification cannot consist simply in the capacity of this conception of when sensation can and cannot be self-attributed to save Sellars from the absurdity of admitting “a class of items in consciousness whose members are … incapable of being directly available for self-attribution”. (McDowell 1998a, p. 447) In fact, there is good reason to think that there is no such justification. Arguably, that a sensation should be playing whatever transcendental role sensations might generally have at a given point of time t could not in principle be an obstacle to its being picked out and referred to at t by the subject whose sensation it is. Note what McDowell says in the passage just cited: “One can focus one’s attention on the manifold of “sheer receptivity” that was, a moment before, enabling one’s attention to be directed toward the ostensibly seen environment.” (McDowell 1998a, p. 447) Clearly, McDowell is assuming it to be possible to recognise at t a manifold of sheer receptivity ‘in’ one at time t as now not enabling one’s attention to be directed towards the ostensibly perceived environment, but as identical with some manifold of sheer receptivity objectively ‘in’ one at time t-n which was then enabling one’s attention to be directed towards the ostensibly perceived environment. But surely one can only recognise what is objectively ‘in’ one now as having then enabled one’s attention to be directed towards the ostensibly perceived environment if one had then, at time t-n, at least been able to recognise it as ‘in’ one now. So in order to “focus one’s attention on the manifold of “sheer receptivity” that was, a moment before, enabling one’s attention to be di-

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rected toward the ostensibly seen “environment,” one must be able to identify, pick out or refer to a manifold of sheer receptivity while it is playing its transcendental role. It seems, then, that McDowell’s attempt to save Sellars from absurdity is itself absurd. Nor should one be surprised at this since the problem it attempts to address is a grave one. McDowell seeks to save Sellars from construing the notion of sensation in such a way that it ends up denoting “a class of items in consciousness whose members [are] permanently and constitutionally incapable of being apperceived, incapable of being directly available for self-attribution.” (McDowell 1998a, p. 447) Now to be ‘in consciousness’ is, as we have seen, to be capable of being apperceived, of being directly available for self-attribution. So McDowell is in effect attempting to save Sellars from being forced to say that the sensations are a class of items in consciousness whose members are not in consciousness, or alternatively, a class of items capable of being apperceived, that is, of being directly available for self-attribution, which are incapable of being apperceived, of being directly available for self-attribution. It is hard indeed to see how on anyone’s principles there could be such a class. The prima facie presence of a straightforward logical incoherence in Sellars’ account of sensation suggests that the proper response to this account should not be to tinker around the edges in the hope of rendering the account consistent, but instead to ask how Sellars could ever have come by it. The answer here is simple enough: Sellars is seeking to assimilate the sensually impressional character of perceptual experience to sensation in the normal sense of the term. Sellars himself intimates this when he says, “The conception of visual impressions as states of consciousness can be clarified to some extent by pointing out that they were assimilated to bodily sensations and feelings” (Sellars 1967, p. 10). But in order thus to assimilate the sensually or qualitatively impressional character of perceptual experience to sensation, Sellars must subtly shift ground or equivocate on how this sensually impressional character is understood. Thus, Sellars begins by understanding it simply as the sensually impressional character – that feature which we all can introspectively ascertain our own perceptual experience to have and without which nothing could count as a distinctively perceptual experience. (This is, as was shown in Chapter Three, the ‘how’ in which external objects are perceptually given as thus and so.) But by choosing to describe this character as the presence of something called ‘sensation,’ he moves from an initial understanding and recognition of perceptual experience as having a distinctive sensually impressional character (which one can indeed describe but

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more effectively show rather than say, as when one draws what one saw as, i. e., how one saw it) to an explication, indeed explanation of it in terms of certain entities called sensations. These are understood to possess certain kinds of property or feature enabling them to assume “the transcendental role” which the original structural feature of perceptual experience is now re-interpreted as being. Clearly, there is an equivocation here, a move from direct, introspective recognition of an inseparable, albeit distinguishable feature of perceptual experience to postulation of items which putatively explain this feature, which must therefore be able to occur apart from perceptual experience. In consequence, it is a move of reduction in which what at first seemed to be an inseparable albeit distinguishable feature of perceptual experience is interpreted as a mere ‘role’, however ‘transcendental’, which items postulated as its bearers may play at one time and not at another. And the reason, or rather explanation, why thinkers like Sellars find this move so compelling is clear enough: the modern metaphysics of nature leads one to assimilate perceptual intentionality to the kind of cognitive intentionality which lacks any sensually impressional character. This then leaves one with the task of finding a place for the sensually impressional character, which task then very naturally becomes an effort to explain the sensually impressional character of perceptual experience in terms of ‘sensations’, construed precisely on analogy to sensations in the unproblematic, unphilosophical sense of “bodily sensations and feelings” (Sellars 1967, p. 10) The hold exercised by the modern metaphysics of nature is such that those in its grip find intuitive what is in fact a highly constructive and non-intuitive, if not exactly counterintuitive move. Now McDowell rejects Sellars’ “sense-impression inference” and the notion of sensation presupposed by it. He thus does not follow Sellars in this latter’s slide from recognition of perceptual experience as having a distinctive sensually impressional character to explanation of this character in terms of some notionally separable item in perceptual experience with properties enabling this item to assume on appropriate occasions “the transcendental role” to which this character has now been reduced. Consequently, McDowell, unlike Sellars, is able to resist the temptation to suppose that “transcendental philosophy would have to be done at a standpoint external to that of the conceptual goings-on whose objective purport is to be vindicated.” (McDowell 1998a, p. 445) So while McDowell rejects Sellars’ particular variety of transcendental philosophy, his refusal to follow Sellars’ slide enables him to avoid rejecting transcendental philosophy as such. As he says in a remark explicitly

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aimed at Rorty, he does not seek “to take issue with the very idea of transcendental philosophy.” (McDowell 1998a, pp. 445 – 446) Everything depends on doing transcendental philosophy in the right way. Epistemology qua transcendental reflection on the very being of empirical intentionality and its subject must not be done as Sellars does it, namely, from an external standpoint or, as McDowell puts it, from “sideways on”. But what exactly is the external, “sideways on” standpoint from which Sellars thinks one can and McDowell thinks one cannot do transcendental philosophy? Here McDowell is vague. Fortunately, his attempt to save Sellars from absurdity can be used to answer this question. At first, what it is to do one’s transcendental philosophy from an external, “sideways on” standpoint might seem quite straightforward: it is to do it from a so-called “third person” point of view, that is, to allow oneself to posit entities and mechanisms not available for direct, non-inferential self-attribution. This yields a comparably simple account of what it is to do one’s transcendental philosophy from the alternative internal standpoint which is not from sideways on: this must consist in nothing more than doing it from the first person, introspective standpoint of the subject of empirical intentionality itself. Thus, one resolves only to speak of items which are available for direct, non-inferential self-attribution. It is not hard to see, however, that McDowell’s distinction of standpoints cannot be identified with any such nave distinction between first and third (or at least non-first) person points of view. Just this is shown by McDowell’s attempt to save Sellars from absurdity: he describes Sellars as doing transcendental philosophy from an external, “sideways on” standpoint even as he argues that Sellars either does in fact or at least could understand certain items to which he appeals in doing transcendental philosophy, viz., sensations, to be accessible only from the first person point of view. But if doing transcendental philosophy from either standpoint cannot be understood in these simple ways, how is it to be understood? Let us grant for the sake of the argument that there are sensations in Sellars’ sense, i. e., sensations which can assume, in virtue of certain properties they possess, the transcendental role of guiding perceptual experience into the truth claim it contains. Let us also assume that McDowell’s efforts to save Sellars were successful, that sensations were available for self-attribution by their subject when, but only when, they are not playing their transcendental role. Evidently, this is to assume that one and the same sensation could at one time occur ‘in consciousness’ as part of some perceptual experience, therein playing its ‘transcendental role’, and at another time occur ‘in consciousness’ (and in this case be intro-

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spectible as thus occurring) as not playing any ‘transcendental role’, hence as not part of any perceptual experience. So on this account, sensations are isolatable, that is to say, notionally separable parts of perceptual experience. Perceptual experience itself is thus an aggretative whole, at least with regard to its sensually impressional character. Perhaps, then, what distinguishes the external standpoint is precisely this preparedness to treat perceptual experience as having parts in this aggregative sense. If so, then perhaps the internal, ‘non-sideways on’ standpoint from which transcendental philosophy is properly done consists in not being thus prepared. From the internal, “non-sideways-on” standpoint, the parts of perceptual experience are only ever ‘in consciousness’ as parts, i. e., as ‘playing a transcendental role’. They are thus taken to only ever introspectible as such parts, or again, as ‘playing a transcendental role’. Both standpoints are first person simply and solely in the sense that they are or involve some kind of non-inferential, direct self-attribution (first person introspection).6 They differ, however, in that the internal standpoint works with a different notion of what it is to be, hence be introspectible as, a part of perceptual experience, playing its ‘transcendental role’ in making such experience possible. But why might doing transcendental philosophy properly require the methodological resolve to construe whatever distinctions one notes in the course of one’s necessarily first person transcendentally philosophical reflection solely as functionally defined moments of that to which they belong? As we have seen, Sellars moves from noting the sensually impressional character of perceptual experience to identifying this character with ‘sensation’, that is, with something which, as he thinks, explains this character, hence can occur independently of it. Just this is the real incoherence in the way Sellars talks of perceptual experience and its sensually impressional character; the worry that sensations might end up being items both in and out of consciousness is merely a superficial manifestation of this incoherence. What McDowell describes as doing transcendental philosophy from an external standpoint is in fact an amalgam or elision of two tasks: (a) explaining how the sensually impressional character of perceptual experience contributes to the distinctive functional, even transcendental roles which perceptual experience itself plays (which obviously requires one to determine just what the roles of percep6

To this extent it is arguably misleading of McDowell to describe the contrast between different styles of transcendental philosophy as one between external and internal standpoints.

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tual experience are); and (b) explaining what is itself responsible for this sensually impressional character.7 Sellars is in effect attempting to create a hybrid out of two distinct tasks which, taken individually, are perfectly legitimate: on the one hand, description of that internal intentional structure and character of perceptual experience which enables the latter to be what it is and to do what it does; on the other, identification of items and processes causally implicated in perceptual experience. Clearly, only the first could be a task for the transcendental philosopher. For as soon as one understands the second as such a task, it immediately becomes a ‘mongrel’ seeking home in a non-existent space8 between transcendental philosophy proper and empirical inquiry into perceptual experience and empirical thinking as they occur in us, whether strictly psychological, as when one investigates the smallest perceivable temporal interval between distinct stimuli; or neurophysiological, as when one investigates how certain injuries affect the perceptual field or low levels of seratonin affect psychological well being. For purposes of transcendental philosophy, the term ‘sensation’ can have no other meaning than something which occurs ‘in consciousness’ as playing such and such a ‘transcendental role’ – which is, of course, to say that the transcendental philosopher should not speak of ‘sensation’ and its ‘transcendental role’ at all. Rather, the transcendental philosopher should speak simply of the sensually impressional character of perceptual experience as a whole, meaning thereby something certainly distinguishable and describable, but not separable, something which, precisely because it is inseparable, enables the whole to play its ‘transcendental role’ in making empirical thinking possible. Transcendental philosophy done from an internal, ‘non-sideways-on’ standpoint is thus first person introspection which refuses to conflate characterisation of the intentional structure of perceptual experience and of how it enables such experience to play its ‘transcendental role’ with description of what explains the intentional structure thus identified. Transcendental philosophy guided by this methodological refusal knows that this is the only way to avoid Sellars’ illicit slide from explicating the functional whole of perceptual experience in terms of its parts to explaining one of these parts. Yet this does not exhaust the notion of tran7 8

One might therefore say that the problem with Sellars’ approach is not that he does transcendental philosophy from the ‘wrong’ standpoint, but that he is attempting to do it from two different standpoints at once. The so-called sub-personal level? See McDowell 1994a.

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scendental philosophy done from an internal, ‘non-sideways-on’ standpoint. One can see this by considering why McDowell is not truly able to explain either what it is to do one’s transcendental philosophy from an internal rather than external standpoint, or indeed why doing it from an internal rather than external standpoint is the right way to do it. The Woodbridge lectures end in the claim that we should think of intentionality as ‘relational’ and this claim simply reformulates (or at least entails) the disjunctivist, ‘anti-common factor’ conception of perceptual experience underpinning Mind and World. Now this conception of perceptual experience appears also to have decisely shaped McDowell’s evaluation of Sellars on sensation and his account of the two ways of doing transcendental philosophy. Its influence explains not only why he is not sufficiently able to elaborate what he means by these two ways, it also explains why, in putting a finger on where Sellars goes wrong, McDowell goes wrong himself. Commitment to viewing intentionality as ‘relational’ leads McDowell rightly to reject Sellars’ goal of finding something epistemically useful for sensations to do and to see that there is something too external in the way Sellars, precisely in order to realise this goal, sets about doing transcendental philosophy. At the same time, this commitment blinds him to the phenomenon which leads thinkers like Sellars to speak of ‘sensations’ in the first place, namely, the sensually impressional, qualitative character of perceptual experience. More accurately, McDowell’s commitment blinds him to the possible significance of the sensually impressional, qualitative character of perceptual experience: the possibility that this character might have some ‘transcendental’ relevance which Sellars and others can only misunderstand once they have been led by their conviction that perceptual experience is apophantic to do their transcendental philosophy from “sidewayson”, hence to explain this character as due to the presence of ‘sensations’. And so this character becomes something of an embarassment for McDowell; he does not know what to say, hence mostly remains silent about it. This means that while McDowell does not conflate genres in the way Sellars does, his own transcendentally-driven reflection on empirical intentionality and its subject remains in the grip of its own pre-conceptions, and at no point does he permit this reflection to shine a critical light upon them. Transcendental philosophy done from the internal, ‘non-sideways-on’ standpoint therefore shows itself also to be first person ‘introspection’ which takes seriously what it ‘introspects’ in that it permits the same to

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serve as a critical instance against which to test whether the pre-conceptions and dispositions to describe one might bring to bear when setting about characterising how perceptual experience enables empirical thinking really perform adequately. In order neither to over-interpret with Sellars, nor to under-interpret with McDowell, it takes ‘items in consciousness’ just as they show themselves to be. Thus, in reflecting on what it is like to see a cricket ball flying there to one’s right towards the boundary, one might recognise that while there is certainly something sensually impressional about this experience – one notes, for example, how the ball appears a darker red than it really is, and attributes this to, say, the fading afternoon light – , this character is not at all a separable part or component in one’s perceiving. One will thus not be tempted to describe this character as Sellars does, namely, as either itself a ‘sensation’, or perhaps due to ‘sensation’, since no sensations are to be found. Equally, however, one will not be tempted simply to discount or ignore this sensually impressional character as McDowell does, since one will recognise that the inseparability of this distinguishable, often describable and typically mimicable moment shows it to be making some contribution to how perceptual experience functions in empirical thinking.9 This may well lead one in turn to recognise that certain conceptions of content one might otherwise be tempted to bring to bear are misdescriptions which hinder the transcendental task of explicating thought’s bearing on reality. A concern both not to conflate genres, as Sellars does, and to permit introspection genuinely to feed back into interpretation of the phenomena at issue, as McDowell does not, explains why transcendental philosophy properly done treats the sensually impressional character of perceptual experience as an inseparable moment rather than an independent part. For in order to satisfy this dual concern, one must take perceptual experience just as it shows itself to be in first person reflection on it. And when one engages in such reflection, one finds no sensations or any other separable parts. Certainly, one does find not separable parts with the remarkable property that they can be recognised to be such parts even though one cannot refer to them when they are such parts.

9

Crucially, one will also not ignore, unlike both Sellars and McDowell, distinctively temporal perceptual experience of change and time, which clearly cannot be assimilated to truth-claiming kinds of intentionality.

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ii. The Idea of Phenomenology Talk of transcendental philosophy as first person reflection governed by a resolve to describe and explicate what it introspects just as this latter shows itself to be intimates Edmund Husserl’s famous catch-cry “To the things themselves!” (zu den Sachen selbst!). This catch-cry gives sloganistic expression to Husserl’s conviction that epistemology (Erkenntnistheorie) can only be done properly precisely as transcendentally driven first person reflection – what he calls transcendental phenomenology. This suggests a certain affinity between McDowell’s meta-philosophical reflections on the kind of thing he was trying to do in Mind and World and Husserl’s conception of philosophy as transcendental phenomenology. It is all too easy to misunderstand what Husserl means by transcendental phenomenology, in particular, by its essentially first person character. This all too readily gets misinterpreted as some quasi-positivistic staring at one’s mental life as it flashes past one’s inner eye.10 But there is no reason to think that Husserl means anything as silly as this,11 any more than there is reason to think that the answerability of empirical knowledge claims to experience forces one simply to stare at empirical facts unaided by prior theory. The key to understanding what Husserl means by phenomenology, phenomena and a transcendentally philosophical recourse to phenomena lies in appreciating that he, too, thinks of epistemology as essentially involving reflection on the very being or nature of empirical intentionality and its subject. Indeed, he thinks this for precisely the reason indicated above: epistemology, properly understood and conducted, consists in exposing as incorrect those prior improperly con-

10 Perhaps McDowell has some such quasi-positivistic staring in mind when he mentions, in order rightly to reject, “a theoretically innocent introspection.” (McDowell 1998a, p. 449) 11 Thus, Husserl insists that the new object domain revealed by phenomenological epoch “does not lie before our gaze with such a profusion of items given to us in clear relief that we could simply help ourselves to them and be sure of the possibility of making them into the objects of a science, much less of the method according to which we should have to set about this.” (Husserl 1992a, § 63, H 135) See also § 87, H 200 – 201, where we are told that phenomenological descriptions do not lie simply to hand and that it is a long and thorny path to adequate apprehension of phenomenological givennesses.

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ducted efforts to understand what it is to be empirically intentional which have created the problems, or rather the problem, of epistemology itself.12 Husserl’s mature conception of philosophy as transcendental phenomenology is first announced in his inaugural lecture of 1907, Die Idee der Phnomenologie. From the outset Husserl makes the essentially therapeutic, indeed ideology-critical character of the conception of philosophy he is about to sketch plain. In his very first lecture he announces it as the antidote to sceptical puzzles which arise, not simply and solely through reflection on ordinary, everyday concepts of knowledge, justification, perception and the like, but as the consequences of certain nave attempts to theorise about empirical cognition. In ordinary, everyday life and in all forms of pre-philosophical theoretical inquiry we are not concerned with such issues as whether or how knowledge, empirical or otherwise, is possible for us. Indeed, what Husserl calls natural thinking or the natural attitude13 is defined by this stance of unconcern. “Ceaselessly active in infinitely fruitful ways, advancing from discovery to discovery in ever newer branches of science, natural thinking finds no occasion to question the possibility of knowing as such.”14 (Husserl 1973, H 19) This is not to say that such natural thinking does not entangle itself in errors and contradictions of great concern to it. But always we find, while remaining within the natural attitude, ways out of our difficulties: when we err in reasoning, “we restore formal consistency” (Husserl 1973, H 18) by appeal to the laws of logic, identifying with their help where we have fallaciously inferred, miscalculated or equivocated in the meaning of our terms. And when we err empirically, such that “empirical evidence conflicts with empirical evidence” (Husserl 1973, H 18), we similarly resolve the clash between knowledge claims by appeal to a wider body of existing belief, using it to weigh up which of the competing claims is stronger. In this manner, empirical thinking and all other forms of thinking similarly ‘natural’ in their unconcern for epistemological issues appropriate in ever wider degree a reality whose existence and availability to us is from the outset presumed as a matter of course (selbstverstndlich) and whose extent and content alone, its elements, its relations and laws, is to be investigated more closely. Thus various sciences of the natural sort (natrli12 Note the dual sense in this: the problem which epistemology seeks to resolve, and the problem which epistemology is. 13 See Husserl 1973, H 17. 14 See Husserl 1954, § 55, H 190 – 191, cited below, note 30.

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chen Wissenschaften) arise and grow, the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) as the sciences of physics and psychology, the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) and, on the other side, the mathematical sciences, the sciences of numbers, classes, relations, etc. (Husserl 1973, H 18)

According to Husserl, this comfortable situation changes as soon as one comes to reflect on “the relation of knowing to its object.” (Husserl 1973, H 18) By this relation of knowing to its object, Husserl does not primarily mean the truth of such knowing. Rather, he primarily means the “correlation between the experience of knowing (Erkenntniserlebnis), meaning (Bedeutung) and object (Gegenstand)” (Husserl 1973, H 19), i. e., its character as the truth-claiming cognitive intentionality of socalled ‘natural thinking’. He thus has in mind something very much akin to what McDowell means by “objective purport”: “(K)nowing is essentially knowing of what objectively is; and it is knowing through the content (Sinn) immanent to it, the content through which it refers (sich … bezieht) to what objectively is.” (Husserl 1973, H 19) Now as ‘natural thinking’ progresses, its attention will inevitably turn to knowing itself; “as with anything occurring within the world, knowing, too, will become, in a certain manner, a problem, a topic for natural inquiry.” (Husserl 1973, H 19) It is, after all, itself an item in nature, the lived experience (Erlebnis) of some knowing, organic being, a psychological fact. As with any psychological fact, it can be described according to its kinds and forms of interconnection, and investigated in its genetic relations. (Husserl 1973, H 19)

Just this, and not simply philosophical reflection on everyday concepts of knowledge, justification and perception, is the real origin of epistemological problems: “(W)hen thinking naturally about knowing and fitting it, together with its accomplishment, into the natural system of thinking associated with the sciences one embraces theories at first sight appealing but which invariably end in contradiction or absurdity – Inclination to open scepticism.” (Husserl 1973, H 3) So according to Husserl epistemological puzzles, and thereby scepticism, arise as a result of the initial attempt to give some theoretical account of ‘natural thinking’, i. e., of the process rather than the product of empirical, mathematical and logical truth-claiming. As long as we remain immersed in the various forms of ‘natural thinking’, whether empirical, mathematical or logical, “we find everything clear and comprehensible, to the extent to which they have developed into exact sciences.” (Husserl 1973, H 21) Understandably, then, when we initially reflect

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on these forms of ‘natural thinking’, we conceive this reflection as itself an exercise in ‘natural thinking’ alongside the forms of ‘natural thinking’ it seeks to comprehend.15 In so doing, we succumb to error, confusion and self-contradiction, with the result that “(w)e are in constant danger of lapsing into scepticism … .” (Husserl 1973, H 21) “The playground of these unclear and inconsistent theories, as well as the endless disputes associated with them is the theory of knowledge (Erkenntnistheorie), and the metaphysics historically and substantively woven into it.” (Husserl 1973, H 21 – 22) Yet although he regards what he has just called the theory of knowledge as heretofore an unmitigated failure, Husserl by no means gives up on it. If the theory of knowledge or epistemology has thus far been done badly, the task now is to do it correctly or properly. And to do what Husserl understands by the theory of knowledge properly is, in the first instance, to conduct it as the critique of knowing (Erkenntniskritik): The task of the theory of knowledge or the critique of theoretical reason is, in the first instance, a critical one. It must identify the perversions of sense (Verkehrtheiten) in which natural reflection on the relation between knowing, its content and its object almost unavoidably entangles itself, that is, refute all sceptical theories, explicit or implicit, concerning the essence of cognition through the demonstration of their absurdity. (Husserl 1973, H 22)

Clearly, this intimates some further interesting and, from an AngloAmerican perspective, novel features of what Husserl means by the theory of knowledge or epistemology: precisely because it arises initially as natural theorising about natural theorising, hence gets done badly, part and parcel of doing it properly must be critique, indeed self-critique. The initial move of epistemology done properly is the critique of epistemology done badly, which immediately entails that epistemology done properly presupposes the existence of epistemology done badly, just as therapy presupposes the existence of the malady to which it is applied.16 15 That this is how Husserl sees things is, of course, also confirmed by his intellectual development: the idea of transcendental phenomenology arises out of his long reflection on the absurdity of psychologistic accounts of logic and mathematics. 16 Note Heidegger’s recognition, in Heidegger 1979a, § 4, H 32, of the fact that Husserl rejects the theory of knowledge (Erkenntnistheorie) “in the usual sense”. By Erkenntnistheorie “in the usual sense” Heidegger seems to mean both psychologistic and other baldly naturalistic kinds of Erkenntnistheorie, as well normatively orientated, smoothly naturalistic neo-Kantian Erkenntnistheorie.

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This is, of course, neither to say nor to imply that epistemology done properly is purely negative, that it has no positive tasks. Quite the contrary, the positive task of the theory of knowledge is to solve the problems associated with the correlation between knowing, the content of knowing (Erkenntnissinn) and the object of knowing (Erkenntnisobjekt) by investigating the essence of knowing. Amongst these, there is the problem of explicating the essential meaning (Wesensinn) of what it is to be a knowable objectivity (Gegenstndlichkeit) or, what comes to the same thing, of being something objective (Gegenstndlichkeit) at all: the meaning which is prescribed by the correlation a priori between knowing and being a knowable object. And this naturally applies also to all the basic forms predelineated by the nature of cognition in which something can be an object. (Husserl 1973, H 22)

These positive tasks may be summed up in one defining problem: the problem of transcendence, which is, says, Husserl, “the point of departure for, and guiding problem of, the critique of knowing.” (Husserl 1973, H 36) Husserl in fact distinguishes several senses of transcendence, hence several senses of its opposite number, immanence. Moreover, since he regards these different distinctions between the transcendent and the immanent as interrelated, the theory of knowledge must seek to clarify all of them – see Husserl 1973, H 35 – 36. But here we need note only the first and primary sense in which Husserl understands the term ‘transcendent’: an entity, whether an ordinary object or a state of affairs, is transcendent just in case believing it either to exist, or to be thus and so, or to obtain never entails, no matter how rationally warranted the belief, is that this entity actually does exist, or actually is thus and so, or actually does obtain. This primary sense or kind of transcendence intimates what the problem of transcendence in general is: it is the problem of how the independence of the object of ‘natural thinking’ in all its forms, whether empirical, mathematical and logical, must be understood insofar as by an intentional object we must mean precisely an object (Gegen-stand), that is, something able to serve as a constraint in the sense of a yardstick relative to which the process of ‘natural thinking’ can self-consciously and rationally regulate itself. In order for it thus to function as a yardstick, it must possess a certain independence of us, for otherwise there could be no distinction between getting things right in our ‘natural thinking’ and merely seeming to do so. Yet this independence cannot be too great because otherwise the distinction between how things are and how they seem to us to be would not itself be available to us, that is, it would not be something

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which we could genuinely ascertain in order to regulate our ‘natural thinking’ by it. Epistemology, properly understood and conducted, thus takes the various theories and pre-conceptions of initial, still natural reflection on ‘natural thinking’ as input in order to establish the coherence, hence legitimacy of the notion of transcendence with which they work. The task of epistemology, properly understood and conducted, is the critique of initial, still nave and natural conceptions of how ‘natural thinking’, of which McDowell’s empirical thinking is a particular species, is constrained by the reality it seeks to know. In other words, it seeks primarily to understand what it is to be ‘natural thinking’. In particular and more specifically, it seeks to understand what it is to be an empirical intentional state and experience, caught up in a process of distinctively empirical thinking bounded by an external reality lying beyond, that is to say, transcending, it. It is not hard to see why Husserl accords the problem of transcendence this central status: the most immediate reflection on what it is to know is precisely reflection on ‘natural thinking’. ‘Natural thinking’ is, however, primarily, if not exclusively empirical knowing, which is, of course, a matter of knowing transcendent entities. So the most immediate reflection on what it is to know is reflection on what it is to know transcendent entities. And the hallmark of this most immediate, still ‘natural’ reflection on the (putative) knowing of transcendent entities is, according to Husserl, that it interprets this (putative) knowing naturalistically, that is, precisely in terms of the picture of thinking as enclosed within its own inner sphere, receiving causal inputs from a natural-scientifically natural reality lying beyond its outer boundary. So, epistemology, properly understood, takes as its central problem the notion of transcendence because epistemology, improperly understood and conducted, has, by interpreting the knowing of transcendent entities naturalistically, rendered a whole series of more specific questions chronically intractable.17 Examples of epistemological issues turned into riddles by such naturalistic accounts are, of course, questions such as the following: 17 Note how this reconstruction of Husserl’s idea of philosophy as phenomenology neatly explains that and why Husserl always saw this meta-philosophical idea as implicit in, and a development of, his critique of psychologism and, mutatis mutandis, other naturalistic accounts of logic, mathematics and indeed theoretical inquiry generally, e. g., biologistic accounts which appeal to Darwinian theories of evolution, or sociologistic accounts, which appeal to machinations of class or gender.

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(H)ow can knowing be certain of its correspondence with the objects known? … Whence do I, whence can I, the knowing subject, ever reliably know that not only my own lived experiences (Erlebnisse), these acts of knowing, exist, but also that which they know, indeed, that there is anything at all which could be set over and against knowing as its object? (Husserl 1973, H 20)

The problem of transcendence is thus the central problem of epistemology, and it must address this problem in the form of a critique of knowing, because the initial, still nave and natural attempt to understand (putative) knowing of the transcendent has turned the more specific questions of epistemology into insoluble riddles and absurdities.18 So epistemology properly understood and conducted – what Husserl eventually calls ‘philosophical thinking’ – exists in essential relation to ‘bad’ epistemology,19 and thus to ‘natural thinking’ as a whole. ‘Philosophical thinking’ does not just sit indifferently alongside ‘natural thinking’, as one form of positive theoretical inquiry more. Rather, it is defined by its status as critical in the radical, Kantian sense of being the therapy ‘natural thinking’ needs in order to correct its own misunderstanding of itself. Clearly, if one grants Husserl all this, then it immediately follows that, for Husserl as for Sellars and McDowell, to do epistemology (properly) is to engage in a study of very being of ‘empirical’, or rather and more generically, ‘natural’ intentionality. Indeed, the reason why this is so, a reason already reconstructively attributed to both Sellars and McDowell, is seen by Husserl with far greater clarity: ‘good’ epistemology consists in saving ‘bad’ epistemology from itself, thereby genuinely resolving the more specific issues embedded in the general problem of ‘transcendence’ rather than collapsing into the absurdities of scepticism. But no sooner has one found in Husserl a clearer appreciation of one central point reconstructively attributed to Sellars by McDowell than one finds in him a clearer appreciation of another: the character of epistemology qua reflection on the very being of ‘natural thinking’ and its subject as ‘transcendentally driven’.

18 Note that this is not to say, in the fashion of Rorty, that such questions simply do not exist in any shape or form at all; it is merely to say that they have become distorted and thereby intractable absurdities. 19 What Husserl calls the critique of knowing “which is undertaken first, prior to the scientific critique of knowing and in the natural mode of thinking.” (Husserl 1973, H 24)

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With this, we touch upon a conviction Husserl shares with other thinkers of his time, e. g., Natorp.20 For both Husserl and Natorp, the idea of transcendental philosophy does not arise unprecedented with Kant, but is already anticipated by Descartes. Indeed, so much is this so that in order to save the idea of transcendental philosophy from Kant’s own tendency to conduct transcendental philosophy from a psychologistically “sideways on” standpoint, one must appeal as much to Descartes as to Kant. Here Husserl displays greater meta-philosophical sophistication than McDowell, and is able in consequence to develop the idea of epistemology qua transcendentally driven reflection on empirical intentionality and its subject in ways which McDowell would not endorse as a matter of fact (although they are not logically excluded by McDowell’s meta-philosophical remarks). How so? As we have seen, ‘good’ epistemology consists in showing that what makes (putative) knowing of the transcendent impossible is the picture ‘bad’ epistemology draws, or rather, its underlying interpretation thereof, of what it is to know transcendent entities. So ‘good’ epistemology must also consist in providing its own interpretation of the intentionality of ‘natural thinking’, an interpretation which makes evident how such knowing is in fact possible.21 It must seek to identify how the various internal features and structures of individual intentional states and experiences contribute to the distinctive intentional character in virtue of which these states and experiences themselves function to enable self-conscious ‘natural thinking’. In this spirit, Husserl says, The viewpoint of function is the central one for phenomenology. The investigations radiating out from this viewpoint thus comprehend the whole phenomenological sphere almost entirely, and in the end all phenomenological analyses put themselves, in some way or other, at the service of such inves20 See, e. g., Natorp 1882 (1978). 21 By 1913, when the Ideen I is published, Husserl has moved to claiming that not just the subject’s intentional states and experiences, and their temporal ‘flowing’ are transcendental, but also this subject itself. Note a crucial implication of the fact that Husserl takes his transcendental turn before he rehabilitates the ego: it intimates that Husserl’s ‘transcendental turn’ (which is publically announced in 1907) is independent of his later learning how to find the ego as something not simply identical with, but presupposed by, the domain of one’s intentional states and experiences. In fact, Husserl’s ‘transcendental’ or ‘pure’ ego arises because, subsequent to his transcendental turn, he has come to recognise the need to admit (a non-Humean conception of) the subject; once, however, such a subject has been admitted, the transcendental status accruing to its intentional states and experiences also accrues to it.

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tigations as components or preliminary stages (Unterstufen). The analysis and comparison, the description and classification, of individual experiences gives way to examination of the details of such experiences from the “teleological” viewpoint of their function in making “synthetic unity” possible. (Ideen I, § 86, H 19722)

This passage indicates how fundamentally one misunderstands Husserl when one maintains that he wants us simply to peer positivistically into our breasts in order to catalogue what we find there.23 Husserl fully appreciates that description of any kind will come to nothing more than a trivial inventory unless it is guided by a genuinely theoretical objective of which one has some genuine understanding in advance, that is, some initial idea of what reaching it requires. In the case of the kind of first person phenomenological reflection which seeks to correct the distortions of ‘bad’ epistemology, this theoretical objective is indicated by Husserl’s talk of the viewpoint of function. The function he has in mind is the transcendentally philosophical function of enabling that unity of consciousness without which self-conscious, rationally self-regulating knowledge-claiming would be impossible. Only when conducted from the transcendental standpoint of function can first person description of empirical or, as Husserl would rather call it, natural intentionality and its subject hope to pinpoint precisely where and how the interpretation from which ‘bad’ epistemology works goes wrong. In particular, only then can it hope to see how the picture of what it is to know the tran22 Note how Husserl a few pages earlier (Husserl 1992a, § 85, H 193) speaks of the functional concept of hyl, i. e., the sensually impressional character of perceptual experience, which must be understood functionally, and not as a ‘component’ even in a merely notionally separable sense. 23 This view would also seem entail that phenomenology neither were allowed nor needed to engage in any kind of reasoning or deliberation about what gives itself to first person reflection. To this Husserl would reply that although deductive theorisings, i. e., inferring from hypotheses about the transcendent, are excluded from it, phenomenology “… is not simply denied all mediating inferences; but because all its knowledge-claims are required to be descriptive ones formed solely with regard to the immanent sphere, inferences and all un-seeing ways of proceeding, whatever their kind, have only the methodological significance of bringing us closer to the things themselves, thereby enabling a subsequent direct eidetic intuition. Before we have genuine intuitions, analogies may occur to us which lead us to various suppositions concerning essential relations, and out of these suppositions conclusions may be drawn which lead us further. But in the end, these promissory suppositions must be cashed in genuine intuition of essential relations. As long as this is not the case, we have no phenomenological experience.” (Husserl, op. cit., § 75, H 157; my rather free translation)

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scendent upon which ‘bad’ epistemology rests fails adequately to capture the features and structures of intentionality which enable knowledge of the transcendent. But if ‘good’ epistemology has this critical, hence transcendental character, then the question immediately arises of how it is to avoid the very mistakes it presumes to underlie ‘bad’ epistemology. Clearly, one must somehow bring into view that which ‘bad’ epistemology misinterprets in such a way that re-interpretation of it can reliably avoid repetition of the original interpretation’s mistakes. This requirement needs to be understood properly: it is not the demand that epistemology, properly understood and conducted, must have some water-tight guarantee that it cannot possibly misdescribe. This would clearly be absurd because any serious attempt to gain substantive knowledge must run the risk of going wrong. Rather, epistemology, properly conducted, must have some guarantee that whatever mistakes it might make as a matter of fact are genuinely identifiable and correctable. In other words, what ‘bad’ epistemology has always already brought into view and interpreted in an inadequate, conundrum-engendering way must now be brought into view and interpreted in such a way that each claim made by ‘good’ epistemology can be tested for, and confirmed in, its accuracy. Only if this can be accomplished can one hope to identify the internal intentional structure of intentional states and experiences, and in particular, the role they play in enabling the intentional life of a self-conscious, rationally self-regulating knowing subject, in a manner which can fairly claim to identify and cure the ills of ‘bad’ epistemology. At this point, we see at least part24 of what Husserl means when he speaks of philosophy as rigorous science (strenge Wissenschaft). For if that critique of ‘bad’ epistemology in which ‘good’ epistemology consists can be provided with the kind of guarantee indicated, then it will have some genuinely operationalisable strictures for testing and, where necessary, revising the claims it makes. It will thus satisfy one necessary condition for being a science. Such strictures, such method, would not, of course, be some algorithmic decision procedure which would relieve the transcendentally driven, critical epistemologist of responsibility for applying them properly. Such strictures would only ensure something strictly analogous to what their counterparts in science ensure: that what24 But only part of what he means. One other crucial part is the intersubjective communicability of the results one achieves – see, e. g., Husserl, op. cit., § 87, H 201.

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ever error there might be is always such that the epistemologist can rationally claim to be able to identify and correct it, in other words, that there is only ever such error as the epistemologist can be genuinely called to account for. In this sense, and only in this sense, would such strictures or method ensure that epistemology was certain in the sense intended by the real Descartes, as opposed to the Descartes of all too many first year philosophy courses. What, then, might these strictures, this method, be? Here, Husserl appeals to Descartes’ method of doubt, or rather, that appropriation of it which Husserl calls phenomenological epoch or transcendental reduction. According to Husserl, the real point and lesson in Descartes’ method of doubt is the way in which it (a) brings into view, as a target for description and explication, one’s intentional life in a manner guaranteed to be free of misinterpretation in the sense indicated; and (b) intimates the methodological principle against which a genuinely critical epistemology must test all its descriptive and interpretative moves. Husserl believes, not implausibly, that Descartes’ method of doubt presupposes and exploits insight into what Husserl calls the ‘objectifying’ (objektivierende) or ‘positing’ (setzende) character of all cognitively intentional states and experiences.25 Because all cognitively intentional states and experiences have such a character, they can only shape belief and behaviour insofar as their sub25 See, e. g., Husserl 1992b, V, § 34, H 483, and VI, § 1, H 546, as well as Husserl 1985, § 13, p. 63. Husserl distinguishes two kinds of objectifying or positing cognitive ‘acts’ (Akte) or ‘experiences’ (Erlebnisse), the predicative kind exemplified by belief, judgement and assertion, and the pre-predicative kind exemplified by perceptual experience (in the strictest sense of the term). The objectifying or positing character of the former is what these days would be called their truthclaiming character. As will be seen in Part II, Husserl never satisfactorily articulates the internal intentional structure of pre-predicative perceptual experience. In the Logischen Untersuchungen he works from the linguistic model of demonstrative linguistic reference – for which reason he speaks of such forms of intentionality as ‘nominal representations’ (nomimale Vorstellungen); see, e. g., V, § 34, H 480 and H 483. Thus, in this work Husserl’s conception of the internal intentional structure of perceptual experience (in that sense which distinguishes it from perceptual judgement) is mildly Sellarsian. By the time, however, of the second edition, Husserl has come to be dissatisfied with this model, and thus with the term ‘nominal representation’: “I was all too conservative [in the re-editing of the Investigations] perhaps only to this extent, that I have retained the quite unsuitable term ‘nominal representation’, just as in general I have been disinclined to tamper with the old terminology of the work.” (Foreword to the Second Edition, H 15; my translation) Why Husserl becomes dissatisfied will be a crucial issue for Part II.

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ject accepts their objectifying or positing character as legitimate, i. e., accepts that things are demonstrably (bewhrbar) such as the state or experience posits them to be. Crucially, there are two aspects to such acceptance: on the one hand, acknowledgement of this positing character as justified or warranted, on the other, preparedness to let this positing character take effect, precisely via acknowledgement of it, on further belief and behaviour.26 Cognitively intentional states and experiences therefore only shape further belief and behaviour insofar as their subject ‘lets’ them: it lies within the capacity of the (truly rational) subject to put out of action (außer Aktion setzen) the belief- and behaviour-shaping capacities of intentional states and experiences by ‘suspending’ its acknowledgement of their positing character as justified or warranted. Husserl points out that Descartes is wrong to describe what he is doing as a matter of doubting the positing character of his individual empirical beliefs, and in particular, his general conviction that the empirical world is – see, e. g., Ideen I, § 32, H 65. For doubters paradigmatically doubt because they have reason to suspect error. To doubt is thus not so much to ‘suspend’ as positively to withdraw or refuse acknowledgement of a claim. Yet there is no reason to think that one cannot simply ‘suspend’ acknowledgement, i. e., simply decline to permit acknowledgement to take effect without withdrawing or refusing it. Naturally, such a move can only be made for a reason, but Husserl thinks there is a perfectly intelligible reason why one might want to make it: a concern to bring one’s intentional states and experiences into view without making any assumptions about them which cannot be confirmed from the standpoint of first person reflection upon them. For clearly, if one can refer to, describe and interpret the internal intentional structures of individual intentional states and experiences, as well as the way they are woven together in the one intentional life, without making any such assumptions about what these states and experiences are and what their unity is, then one will have accessed them in a way which permits one to test the accuracy of those descriptions and interpretations which constitute scepticism-inducing ‘bad’ epistemology. But how precisely are we to understand the systematic ‘suspension of belief ’ which Descartes misdescribed as a method of doubt? Recognising 26 This is, of course, simply a version of the standard point that it is one thing to know what one is committed to believing and doing, something different actually to realise this commitment.

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that he cannot apply this method to all his beliefs individually, Descartes identifies some most general belief whose truth whole classes of individual belief presuppose. He then applies the method to this one belief alone, in the surely correct conviction that if he is able to ‘suspend’ it, then he will have ‘suspended’ in one fell swoop all the individual beliefs it underlies. Notoriously, one such maximally general underlying belief is the conviction that his perceptual experience is for the most part veridical. And so, since Descartes believes that this conviction is dubitable – admittedly only because he has assumed the inherent worldlessness of such experience – , he regards himself as entitled quite genuinely to doubt all individual empirical beliefs and judgements. In a manner similar to, yet also crucially different from, Descartes, Husserl points out that ‘natural thinking’ or the natural attitude is constituted by the general thesis27 of the world – see Ideen I, § 27 and §§ 30 – 32. For ‘natural thinking’ is for Husserl primarily, if not exclusively, empirical thinking, that is, the striving to know empirically. And such putative empirical knowing always assumes that the entities it seeks to know are, while independent of it in the sense that there is, objectively speaking, a distinction between getting things right and merely seeming to do so, not so independent that this distinction were not available to it through perceptual experience. This is, of course, what ‘natural thinking’ or the natural attitude itself understands by distinctively empirical transcendence. Implicit in this understanding of empirical transcendence is the conviction that the world is – that world, namely, in which I, my intentional states and experiences and their objects (referents) are all located and which I access in perceptual experience. Thus, by 1913, Husserl has come to regard ‘natural thinking’, or rather, as he now exclusively calls it, the natural attitude, as defined by a conviction which involves commitment to the thesis that empirical intentionality and its subject are inherently worldly. Inherent in the way the natural attitude itself understands empirical intentionality and its subject is commitment to the thesis that the order in which the objects (referents) of an empirically intentional state or experience occur (insofar as this latter has anything as its object at all) can only ever be the very same order in which the intentional state or experience itself occurs. Specifically, this commitment is implicit in the way ‘natural thinking’ or the natural attitude de facto understands the sense in which the objects (referents) of an empiri27 In the sense of process rather than product, i. e., the positing rather the posit, the claiming rather than the claim.

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cally intentional state or experience ‘transcend’ this state or experience. And the reason why ‘natural thinking’ or the natural attitude understands empirical transcendence in a way which entails commitment to the worldliness of empirical intentionality and its subject is clear: this reflects the kind of balance between independence of, and essential relation to, this subject without which ‘natural’, in particular, empirical thinking would not be something one could rationally engage in. Now according to Husserl, if we ‘suspend’ the conviction that the world is which we, as subjects of ‘natural thinking’, necessarily have, we bring into view various empirically intentional states and experiences we happen to have or be undergoing now without making any claims as to what they are beyond those which can be confirmed through first person reflection upon them. More precisely, by ‘suspending’ this general thesis of the world, we demonstrate that various empirically intentional states and experiences, as well as the temporal ‘flowing’ to which they belong, do not disappear from view, but, as Husserl puts it, are left behind, as a phenomenological residuum – see Ideen I, § 33 and § 49. In claiming this, Husserl is most definitely not saying that to suspend the thesis of the world is to demonstrate that the various empirically intentional states and experiences one happens to have or be undergoing when one suspends this thesis could in principle exist independently of the empirical world and the empirically transcendent entities it contains. Were this the claim, then Husserl would be simply endorsing Descartes’ conviction that empirical intentionality and its subject are worldless – in which case he would have no choice but to restore the world to us by a quite unphenomenological appeal either to the existence of a benevolent deity or to some other fact knowable only by dubiously metaphysical means (metaphysica specialis).28 28 At times, Husserl does say things which seem to suggest that the claim must be understood in this ontological spirit – see, for example, Husserl 1992a, § 46, H 98 – 99, and § 49, H 103 – 104. How these passages are properly understood is a matter for Part II. Suffice for the moment to say that these passages concern the sense in which Husserl is an ‘idealist’, a term which, it is important to note, he himself came to regard as so apt to generate misunderstanding, as implying a Berkleyian subjectivism, that he dropped it. In this spirit, Husserl writes to Abbe Baidin on May 26th, 1934, that “no ordinary ‘realist’ has ever been as realistic and concrete as I, the phenomenological ‘idealist’ (a word which by the way I no longer use)” – quoted in Kern 1964, note 1, p. 276. Of course, this is not to say that Husserl ceased to regard himself as an idealist in what he would regard as the only proper and coherent sense of the term, that sense, namely, according

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What, then, does Husserl mean by the claim that to perform transcendental reduction is to demonstrate the status of one’s own realm of cogitationes as a phenomenological residuum,29 as the domain of a distinctively phenomenological, indeed transcendentally driven philosophical reflection? Here, it is important to recognise that what Husserl understands by ‘suspension’ of the thesis of the world is not its denial, however hypothetical and hyperbolic, but its ‘bracketing’ (Einklammerung). When one suspends the thesis of the world, thereby bringing the various empirically intentional states and experiences one is currently in or undergoing, as well as the temporal ‘flowing’ to which they belong, into view, one recognises that such suspension puts one in a position from which to refer to, describe and interpret the structures of these empirically intentional states and experiences without being shaped or influenced in one’s description and interpretation by the truth claims which these and all other ‘transcendently’ directed intentional states and experiences constitute. In other words, one recognises that one has, to use Husserl’s own turn of phrase, put them out of action (außer Aktion setzen). Thereby one constitutes them as a domain for presuppositionless philosophical inquiry. It now becomes clearer why Husserl insists so strenuously that to suspend a thesis is not necessarily to doubt it, that Descartes went wrong when he described his anticipation of phenomenological epoch as a method of doubt. Doubt is a quite specific form of suspension; as we have already seen, to doubt a thesis is to suspend it, that is, to prevent it effecting any belief or behaviour in one, because one has reason to suspect that it may be untrue. There are thus two components to, or conditions of, doubt: suspension and having a reason to suspect untruth. Only when these two conditions are both fulfilled can one doubt, at least legitimately or rationally. But there is no reason to think that the first condition cannot be fulfilled independently of the second. So if one merely suspends – naturally only ever for a reason, but for a reason other than suspicion of untruth – the thesis of the world, one is not doubting, hence not denying whatever kind of certainty attaches to this thesis. In particular, one is not denying that the certainty with which one knows one’s own mind goes hand in hand with the certainty with which one knows that the world is. All one is doing is preventing this thesis, and to which to be is necessarily to be a possible referent for some subject or ego. This is a version of objective idealism, i. e., of the identity of thought and being. 29 See Husserl, op. cit., § 49.

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thus anything which entails this thesis, from shaping one’s belief or behaviour. And so one is neutralising it as something which could shape that believing and behaving which consists in describing and explicating, from a first person perspective, the structures of one’s intentional states and experiences as they occur in the temporally organised ‘flowing’ of one’s conscious intentional life. But why should anything important turn on this distinction between suspension as such and that specific form of it which constitutes doubt? If the certainty with which one knows one’s own mind goes hand in hand with, hence cannot be uncoupled from, the certainty with which one knows that the world is, then it is literally impossible to doubt the thesis of the world even as one has experience of the world.30 One has no reason for thinking the thesis were false, hence has no reason concerning the truth or falsity of this thesis for thinking that one should no longer permit it to shape one’s belief and behaviour. Yet as the considerations of the preceding paragraph show, this does not mean that one cannot choose not to permit the thesis to shape one’s belief and behaviour. Such choice would not commit one to denying that the two kinds of certainty are linked. (Crucially, of course, it would also not commit one to denying that they are not linked; perfect even-handedness prevails here.) Naturally, the practical effect of such choice would be the same as that of doubt and denial. In this sense, then, one can be said to be acting ‘as if ’ one were doubting the thesis of the world and denying that the two kinds of certainty are linked. Transcendental reduction, properly understood, is thus perfectly compatible with the idea that the very being of empirical thinking specifically, and ‘natural’ thinking’ generally, is bound up with the being of the world. Initial appearances to the contrary, transcendental reduction does not entail the worldlessness of empirical intentionality and its subject, hence does not uncouple the certainty with which one knows one’s own 30 “From the outset the world always and ever is, given to us in the certainty of its existence and its self-confirmation. Even if I have not [consciously] ‘presupposed’ it as my ground, even so the [thesis of the] world holds good for me, the ‘I’ in the ‘I think’ (das Ich im cogito), on the basis of its continual self-confirmation, with everything that the world is for me, in its details sometimes objectively right, sometimes not, also with all the sciences and arts, with all social and personal forms and institutions, insofar as these are in and of the world which is for me the real world. There can, therefore, be no stronger realism if by this word one means no more than: “I am certain of being a human being which lives in this world, etc., and I doubt this not at all.” The great problem is, however, to understand this truism.” (Husserl 1954, § 55, H 190 – 191; my translation)

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mind from the certainty with which one knows that the world is. Moreover, only when transcendental reduction is understood in this way can one understand why Husserl requires it at all. For as long as ‘natural thinking’ remains ‘natural thinking’, that is, remains in the natural attitude, it does not understand why the very being of ‘natural thinking’ is bound up with that of the world. This necessity is not, after all, an ‘analytic’ truth or at least not a necessary truth whose necessity is evident from the outset. Precisely because it is not immediately evident, ‘natural thinking’ is vulnerable to those nave, naturalistic conceptions of itself which generate sceptical worries. “The labyrinthine blind alleys into which initial reflection leads easily engender a scepticism which negates the whole disconcerting sphere of problems.” (Ideen I, § 87, H 201) If, however, this is so, then there is only one way in which one could conceivably respond to the situation into which ‘natural thinking’ has been brought by ‘bad’, that is to say, naturalistically contaminated epistemology. One must start from what is common both to naively dogmatic ‘natural thinking’, for which no question as to why its very being is bound up with that of the world has arisen, and to the naively reflective ‘bad’ epistemologist, who, having called the necessity of this bond irrevocably into question, has succumbed to scepticism: the ‘realm’ of ‘natural thinking’ itself, freed, however, of its character as shaped by its own general thesis of the world. Clearly, this is precisely one’s empirical intentionality specifically, and one’s ‘natural’ intentionality generally, taken simply as it shows itself to be in first person reflection, without any admixture of whatever transcendent descriptions may be true of it. In other words, one must assume, in deliberate, methodical fashion, that naive lack of insight into this necessity which is characteristic both of philosophically unlicked ‘natural thinking’ and the sceptic alike. Only by going back to the de facto starting point of both can the critical epistemologist, that is, the transcendental phenomenologist, so re-interpret what they misinterpret that it becomes evident why ‘natural thinking’ and its subject cannot be worldless. So the difference between Descartes’ thesis that he is as thinking and the thesis of the world is not that the former is ‘indubitable’, the latter merely ‘dubitable’, since each thesis is no more or less ‘indubitable’ and ‘certain’ than other. Rather, the difference is that one can only understand, hence genuinely know, this parity of ‘indubitability’ and certainty by starting from the former, as what one must at least be always already committed to, and working from it to the latter as what one is also always already committed to, precisely in virtue of being ineluctably committed

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to the former. And this difference brings with it another Husserlian subtlety: according to Husserl, while one cannot doubt, but can nonetheless suspend, the thesis of the world, one can neither doubt nor suspend the thesis of one’s own existence as thinking (such and such). Husserl’s difference from Descartes combines with this latter subtlety to show that Descartes was following a sound intuition when he began ‘with the subject’, even if he subsequently went on to misunderstand this sound beginning. For in the sense just indicated, one must indeed “first lose the world through epoch in order to regain it in universal self-reflection.” (Husserl 1987, § 64, p. 161) At this point, one might object that Husserl’s call for phenomenological epoch is a pious but futile hope. The sincerity and vigour with which one seeks to avoid all transcendent assumptions in one’s first person reflection on the intentional structure of one’s own intentional life cannot guarantee that one will actually to achieve such ‘presuppositionlessness’. Husserl simply ignores, as if it were no fact at all, the fact that one can be subject to ideological conditioning and constraint in all sorts of hidden ways. It is clear how Husserl would respond to this kind of objection: it is a bit like objecting to the demand made in genetic testing for scrupulous cleanliness on the grounds that one can never rule the possibility out that one’s actual testing practice should be subject to physical contamination in all sorts of hidden ways. It is always possible that one’s test tubes should be dirty in unsuspected ways. But to think that the point of demanding cleanliness was to rule this possibility out is to misunderstand the nature of the demand. Rather, its point lies in this: that by implementing the demand as best one can, one fulfils a necessary condition for being able to identify retrospectively whatever contamination might be present. So, too, in phenomenology: part and parcel of Husserl’s conviction that phenomenological philosophy should and can become ‘science’ precisely through adherence to the method of phenomenological epoch is his appreciation of the fact that something is ‘scientific’, not because it secures in advance the avoidance of error, but because it has a method for ensuring that whatever error there is can be subsequently uncovered. Phenomenological epoch is precisely a method in this sense, and it secures for phenomenological philosophy a correspondingly ‘methodical’ sense of ‘presuppositionlessness’ (Voraussetzungslosigkeit) and ‘certainty’ (Gewißheit): “The objective presuppositionlessness of a theory of reason thus means nothing other than the commonplace (das Selbstverstndliche) that one [should] continually keep before one’s mind the nature of the

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problem posed by a theory of reason, as in principle universal, and that accordingly and in particular one must not presuppose [as answered] anything whose questionability is implicated by the universality of this problem.”31 (Husserl 1956a, Lecture 14, H 96) A word of caution is in order, however: in attributing to Husserl this conception of what phenomenological epoch accomplishes, we do not wish to imply that there is nothing wrong with it. Quite the contrary, we will eventually claim that precisely under this interpretation, which saves Husserl from the most egregrious caricatures, there is something wrong with it. In Part II we shall argue that what underlies the early Heidegger’s critique of Husserl is recognition that Husserl, because he never develops an adequate or well-worked out conception of first person thought, is led to regard the transcendental ego and its subjectivity as ‘pure’ in a way these latter are not. Against this nave conception of the ego and its subjectivity, Heidegger then counterposes the claims of the ‘historical’ ego – what he will later call Dasein. Specifically, we shall attempt to show that phenomenological epoch or transcendental reduction, at least as Husserl understands it, is not strictly possible because it rests on a failure to see all that is involved in being an ‘I’-thinking, hence no doubt also ‘I’-saying subject. In particular, we shall attempt to show that in order accurately to identify the conditions under which self-conscious, rational subjectivity is possible one must not suspend the general thesis of the world. A brief sketch of Husserl’s failure and the consequences it has for transcendental phenomenology is provided in the Conclusion. A full account must, however, be deferred until Part II since we must now return to McDowell. It seems fair to say that McDowell’s meta-philosophical position, as outlined in the Woodbridge lectures, is properly contained within Husserl’s, hence is compatible with it. Of course, McDowell’s position is less well-developed than Husserl’s. In particular, the closest McDowell ever comes to Husserl’s distinctive commitment to the idea of phenomenological epoch is his insistence that epistemology qua transcendentally driven explication of empirical intentionality must be conducted from a resolutely first person rather than third person standpoint. Furthermore, McDowell would presumably resist any assimilation to Husserl’s position and would certainly be instinctively averse to the Cartesian pathos of certainty and scientificity associated with Husserl’s posi31 It is perhaps worth noting that this is what ‘presuppositionlessness’ and ‘certainty’ really come to even for Descartes.

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tion – although presumably this aversion would derive from misunderstanding of the kind we have attempted here to unseat. Finally, Husserl clearly regards philosophy as capable of substantive theoretical accomplishment in a manner which McDowell, at least in Mind and World, appears to reject. For in Mind and World he declares the meta-philosophical position underlying this work to be “Wittgensteinian in spirit” (McDowell 1994b, p. 177) because it enjoins a philosophical “quietism” which eschews philosophical theorising, at least in any non-ironic, more than therapeutic sense. Yet it is not obvious how a Wittgensteinian “quietism” can sit alongside the substantive first-order philosophical claims of Mind and World. Nor is it obvious how such “quietism” is compatible with the meta-philosophical remarks of the later Woodbridge lectures, which surely do suggest that philosophy is capable of theorising in a quite substantive sense. In the next section it will be argued that philosophy, done properly, is indeed quietist, but in a phenomenological rather than Wittgensteinian spirit. It will also be argued that a phenomenological quietism much more accurately reflects McDowell’s philosophical practice in Mind and World and his meta-philosophical remarks in the Woodbridge lectures.

§ 2: Quiet but not Silent McDowell’s meta-philosophical remarks in his Woodbridge lectures do not connect up in any obvious way with the Wittgensteinian “quietism” he professes in Mind and World. This is not to say that there need be any inconsistency here. Even so, some explanation is needed – explanation of how one can advocate some kind of first person, transcendentally driven epistemological reflection on the very being of empirical intentionality while simultaneously embracing Wittgenstein’s idea that philosophy is not a form of positive theoretical inquiry, but rather a kind of thinking which stills the temptation to ask philosophical questions. The need for some such elaboration becomes all the more pressing once one descends from the meta-philosophical heights to the level of philosophical questioning itself and there realises that McDowell engages in some fairly hefty theorising of his own. Is not the account of singular thought and its distinctively object-dependent kind of content, with its reliance not just on Evans, but on a highly reconstructive interpretation of Frege, a piece of substantive philosophical theorising? Is not McDowell’s elaboration of this idea into the view that the perceptual content

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of veridical perceptual experience literally is the bit of reality which makes the experience veridical a very unordinary view, precisely the kind of view whose point one can only understand after considerable initiation into the specialist rites of theoretical philosophy? In the Postscript to Lecture V McDowell interprets Wittgenstein’s “quietism” and seeks to defend it against certain objections from Crispin Wright. Wright sees a tension between Wittgenstein’s strictly critical, therapeutic meta-philosophical conception and what seem to be substantive claims about meaning in Wittgenstein’s later writings. According to McDowell, Wright errs in his conviction that in his later writings Wittgenstein is seriously raising and answering substantive questions about meaning, that is, questions such that answers to them would not be readily available pre-philosophically and would potentially constitute an “affront to what passes for commonsense.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 175) “(I)t is a mistake,” claims McDowell, “to think Wittgenstein points up a good question about how meaning is possible.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 176) Unfortunately, in his Postscript McDowell never really makes clear why and in what way it is a mistake to think that Wittgenstein is raising a good question about meaning. Instead, McDowell simply elaborates what he understands Wittgenstein’s quietism to be without ever explaining the precise status of those claims about meaning which according to Wright are substantive enough to contradict this quietism. In effect, McDowell simply restates the meta-philosophical position which according to Wright we should reject as incompatible with Wittgenstein’s substantive and insightful views on meaning. Consequently, if Wright is correct in his claim that there is a tension between philosophy and meta-philosophy in Wittgenstein, then presumably this tension will transfer itself across to McDowell, causing for him whatever embarrassment it causes for Wittgenstein. Of course, determining whether Wright is correct is not easy. This reflects the fact that Wittgenstein’s texts are not really expansive enough to enable one unambiguously to resolve the issue. Moreover, one might argue that the metaphors of malady and cure, of diagnosis and therapy, encouraged by Wittgenstein’s meta-philosophical reflections yield no coherent account of philosophy irrespective of whether, and to what degree, one is to take seriously what at least appear to be the strong theoretical claims about meaning and other issues contained in Wittgenstein’s texts. We shall now attempt to show how the richer and more expansively elaborated meta-philosophical position implicit in Husserl’s idea of phenomenology is better able to provide the resources needed for identifying

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a sense in which philosophy is quietist enough to satisfy McDowell yet can still coherently claim to be a form of genuinely theoretical inquiry. If this is so, then McDowell could profitably drop his Wittgensteinian quietism in favour of a more phenomenological one on the grounds that the latter is better elaborated, hence less likely to entangle one in unprofitable disputes. Before, however, we venture upon this task, a word of clarification and caution is in order: the goal is not to find some way of reading Wittgenstein which shows his remarks about meaning to be consistent with his view that philosophy is not a form of substantive theorising. Rather, our goal is to use Husserl in order so to clarify the notion of philosophy that one can do justice to the point of Wittgenstein’s “quietism” without creating so much as the appearance of tension which Wright takes seriously, hence regards as an embarrassment for Wittgenstein. So at this point we may safely let Wittgenstein’s views on meaning, as well as Wright’s interest in them, drop out of the picture in favour of this more general objective. Neither McDowell nor indeed Wittgenstein understands by “quietism” simply the kind of call made by Rorty to stop doing philosophy altogether, that is, to move to a post-philosophical culture – see McDowell 1994b, p. 177. Rather, the call is, as far as Wittgenstein at least appears to be at least sometimes concerned, to continue doing it precisely as negative therapeutic critique rather than positive theoretical inquiry. But now an obvious question arises: How could there be any critique which was both purely negative yet genuinely therapeutic, that is, went beyond identifying mere formal inconsistency and invalidity? Surely all therapy, and surely all not exclusively formal critique, must involve or presuppose some substantive theory. The clinical practice of psychoanalysis rests, for example, on some very substantive theory. To the extent, then, that the “quietism” of philosophy is not simply an ignorant pre-philosophical refusal to countenance philosophy at all, but rather has a ‘therapeutic’ or ‘diagnostic’ dimension to it, it cannot literally be “the avoidance of any substantive philosophy …” (McDowell 1994b, p. 176) whatsoever. It must have some kind of substantively theoretical story to tell about why nothing traditionally regarded as a distinctively philosophical theory or problem really counts as such. It seems, then, that to characterise philosophy as quietist in the sense of avoiding all substantive theorising is a bad way of making a good point. This is confirmed by the fact that philosophy could only ever be diagnostic in the sense of identifying where one errs in what one claims;

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it could never be diagnostic in the fashion, say, of psychoanalysis, which identifies why one behaves as one does. We encounter here the limits of the metaphor of diagnosis and therapy: the psycho-analyst simply helps the patient to understand what this latter’s behaviour and beliefs are and how they have come about – their nature and their genesis. But at least for McDowell, and certainly for Husserl, philosophy administers its therapy in the form of critique, hence does not simply presuppose a certain theory as psycho-analysis does, it also administers its theory as its therapy. In other words, philosophy seeks to ‘cure’ its patient by seeking this latter’s assent to certain positive claims. Only this kind of ‘therapy’ could it conceivably offer. Even if the therapeutic claim of philosophy should be that certain ways of thinking which engender philosophical problems falsely seem to us to be obligatory because of the grip exerted on us by certain pictures, it still has to present its theory to its patient and make a case for it. We leave to one side the fact that this conception, which is most explicitly advocated by Rorty, presupposes that “pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements, … determine most of our philosophical convictions”32 (Rorty 1979, pp. 12 – 13) – a claim which is arguably false since a picture requires discursive interpretation in order to play any role in fixing convictions. Thus, not only is philosophy, properly understood, not simply a purely negative, therapeutic exercise without substantive theoretical claims of its own, it is also in principle not primarily or essentially characterisable in these terms. If it is anything at all, that is, not completely and utterly a spurious enterprise deserving only to be superseded once and for all by a post-philosophical culture, then philosophy can only be primarily and essentially a form of substantive theoretical inquiry. Perhaps indeed it has a negative, therapeutic or rather, a critical employment. Perhaps indeed it has this employment necessarily, inasmuch as philosophy, properly conducted, only ever comes about as a response to certain felt absurdities engendered by philosophy, improperly conducted. Even so, it can only ever be a form of substantive theoretical inquiry, however this may be conceived more precisely, and however much it may be a form of theoretical inquiry quite unlike any others. Either one concedes this or concludes with Rorty that philosophy is nothing at all. There can be no fudging here, as there would be should one concede that philoso32 Incidentally, at this point Rorty explicitly identifies this false claim as the essential presupposition of his book, indeed, the very reason for its title.

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phy makes substantive, theoretical claims only in order immediately to take this back by saying that these claims are only ever meant ironically, for the sake of relieving philosophical cramps and the like. So to characterise philosophy as quietist in the sense of avoiding all substantive theory must indeed be to put a good point badly. Presumably, whatever substance there is to such talk can only come to this: philosophy is not just one more form of theoretical inquiry alongside others – as if it, too, had its own distinctive set of problems in just the same sense as other forms of inquiry, to which it sought to find its own distinctive set of solutions. Rather, in a manner quite unlike other kinds of theoretical activity, it must find its problems in the ways one is tempted to interpret the relations between the diverse forms of theoretical and practical endeavour and to understand the wider significance of what these diverse forms of theoretical and practical endeavour accomplish. These temptations to interpret are, of course, themselves originally and implicitly philosophical; they are thus in this sense proto- or pre-philosophical rather than entirely non-philosophical. And they can go wrong not, or not primarily, in the sense of being mistaken, but in the sense of misfiring. That is, these initial, pre-philosophical temptations to interpret primarily go wrong not simply in the sense that they make claims which, although possibly warranted by contemporary lights, are, as it happens, false. Rather, their primary form of error consists in their making claims about how the various dimensions of rational endeavour relate to, or are significant for one another, which are incoherent or ‘perplexing’ in the sense that, in a fashion typically hard to track down, they affront “what passes for commonsense.”33 (McDowell 1994b, p. 175) Now it is clear that, on this conception of philosophy, modern naturalism must count as such a misfiring, just as the demonstration undertaken in Chapter Six that there is nothing inherently absurd in denying it counts as the appropriate ‘therapy’ for it. Crucially, this meta-philosophical conception is clearly not quietist in the sense of avoiding substantive theorising. Furthermore, McDowell comes close to endorsing it, at least in his actual philosophical practice. For even as he talks of “the avoidance 33 This means that – while in one way all forms of theoretical activity involve efforts to correct whatever previous attempts there are to answer the questions they take as their own – philosophy manifests this self-correcting character in a particularly radical fashion. In this sense, philosophy is inherently ‘critical’ and ‘negative’ while other forms of theoretical inquiry are essentially (and quite legitimately) ‘dogmatic’ and ‘positive’.

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of any substantive philosophy … .” (McDowell 1994b, p. 176), he is nonetheless able to say, The question [of meaning] looks like an urgent one from the standpoint of a world-view that is inhospitable to meaning: a standpoint from which it looks like a task for philosophy to shoehorn into the world something as close as we can get to our previous conception of meaning. But philosophy’s task is to dislodge the assumptions that make it look difficult to find a place for meaning in the world. (McDowell 1994b, p. 176)

The point of this passage is primarily to elaborate and develop Wittgenstein’s idea that philosophy’s task is to show us that everything is in fact alright as it is, in other words, that there was no need to ask philosophical questions about meaning in the first place. Yet more is also going on here. When McDowell speaks of dislodging assumptions which seem to shut meaning out of the world, he is clearly referring to his own efforts to undermine that traditional identification of empirical reality with first nature which constrains the thinking of Davidson and Evans. As we have seen, McDowell’s efforts hover unclearly between two positions, either a restatement of the sophisticated, non-bald naturalism endorsed by Davidson and Evans, or a substantive challenge to a substantive metaphysical position, viz., ontological naturalism. But either way they surely constitute a form of philosophical theorising which is prohibited by “quietism” of the kind at least often attributed, rightly or wrongly, to Wittgenstein. Indeed, particularly when understood in the spirit of the latter, more radical disjunct, the dislodgement of which McDowell speaks here must involve considerable philosophical and meta-philosophical argument, and must implicate a substantive philosophical account of perceptual experience. Talk of this position as quietist, at least in a Wittgensteinian spirit, is therefore misleading. But where does this leave the clearly Wittgensteinian idea which McDowell is trying to elaborate here, namely, that philosophy shows everything to be alright as it is? In fact, it is left untouched. There is no reason to think that to understand philosophy as charged with showing that everything is alright as it is is to preclude an understanding of it as a form of substantive theorising, with its own distinctive questions, goals and methods. When McDowell insists against Wright that for Wittgenstein “quietism, the avoidance of any substantive philosophy, is really the point” (McDowell 1994b, p. 176), he appears to mean by “substantive philosophy” the raising and answering of substantive questions in ways which would not be available pre-philosophically and might potentially constitute an “affront to what passes for commonsense.” (McDowell

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1994b, p. 175) But this could be taken in one of two different ways. Emphasis might be placed on the idea that philosophy cannot raise and answer substantive questions. In this case, the claim would indeed express a genuinely radical, perhaps genuinely Wittgensteinian “quietism” according to which philosophy was not a form of substantive theoretical inquiry at all. Such “quietism” not only makes no sense, it does not accurately represent McDowell’s actual philosophical practice. Emphasis could, however, be placed on the qualification “in ways which would not be available pre-philosophically and might potentially constitute an “affront to what passes for commonsense.”” Presumably, non-philosophical forms of theoretical inquiry do raise and address their kinds of substantive question in ways which are not necessarily available pre-philosophically, which thus do potentially affront what McDowell calls commonsense. So when we place emphasis on this qualification, we are taking the claim as maintaining that while philosophy can and must be a form of substantive theoretical inquiry, the criteria of its theoretical success are qualitatively different from those of other forms of theoretical inquiry. Specifically, philosophy is only successful as the distinctive form of substantive theoretical inquiry that it is if the answers it gives to its substantive questions are in some sense available pre-philosophically, and in particular, do not affront, but accord with, commonsense. To push interpretation of the claim down this path is, however, to head towards understanding the “quietism” of philosophy not as silence but as reconciliation: philosophy shows everything to be alright as it is in the sense that it resolves conflicts arising out of attempts, themselves at least implicitly philosophical, to interpret the significance which the accomplishments of the diverse dimensions of human rational endeavour have both for each other and for our existence as a whole. Philosophy clarifies those initial, hence proto-philosophical moves to understand this significance, that is, to comprehend the whole not simply bit by bit but in its wholeness, which engender substantive perplexities. Examples of such moves would be precisely the modern metaphysics of dualism (non-naturalism) and of naturalism, and then, underpinning both, the modern metaphysics of nature. Further examples would be those affronts to commonsense understanding of the capacities of human perception and knowledge in which the various problems of epistemology consist. Naturally, these examples are interrelated, for as we shall see in the Conclusion, these latter affronts to commonsense arise only as a result of the modern metaphysics of nature.

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It is crucial to note that nothing said thus far requires one to understand the idea of reconciliation in a reactionary spirit – as if the effort to show that everything is alright as it is entailed commitment to the idea that how everything currently is is how it had always been and always should be. The notion of reconciliation here is of reconciliation between parties each with a fundamental commitment to reason, for were this not so, one could not engage philosophically with them. The mediation at issue thus consists in giving each party to the conflict its rational due, which in turn entails that the unity to be restored is not necessarily the very same unity there had always been. True, underlying the notion of reconciliation is the idea that preserving commonsense and respecting what affronts it is to be taken seriously as a criterion of success; to this extent, the notion of reconciliation is conservative. But it is only conservative in a Burkean sense. As such, it does not entail that the commonsense it seeks in the first instance to preserve is set in concrete and cannot evolve – not the least as a result of the effort at reconciliation itself.34 Now this way of understanding what McDowell might mean by “quietism”, of showing that everything is alright as it is, not only accords much better with McDowell’s actual philosophical practice; it also accords much better with his highly general meta-philosophical remarks in the Woodbridge lectures. These remarks constitute, however, claims entailed by Husserl’s richer idea of philosophy as transcendentally phenomenological reflection on the very being of intentionality (‘natural thinking’) and its subject. After all, philosophy as Husserl understands it is defined by its essentially critical objective of correcting certain forms of theorising which, guided by the metaphysical agenda of naturalism, have answered the substantive question of what empirically cognitive intentionality is in ways which are not pre-philosophically available or assessable. These answers have affronted commonsense in that they have rendered problematic what commonsense – ‘natural thinking’ itself – takes for granted, namely that it by and large succeeds in its claims to know.

34 This conception of philosophy, with its Hegelian and indeed Gadamerian overtones, should be congenial to McDowell. Gadamer expresses a similar, if not completely identical view of philosophy when he says that “(s)ince the seventeenth century, the real task of philosophy has been to mediate [the] new [scientific] employment of man’s cognitive and constructive capacities with the totality of our experience of life.” (Gadamer 1976, p. 3)

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Philosophy as Husserl understands it arises in response to this, namely, as the effort to restore to ‘natural thinking’ its confidence in itself. And it does this, indeed can only do this, by exhibiting the legitimacy, the rational basis, of this confidence. So philosophy, properly understood, must be both a form of substantive theorising and yet one quite different from other forms of theorising. Motivated by the conviction that traditional epistemological problems and puzzles arise because a certain spuriously or insufficiently philosophical style of theorising about knowing has misunderstood the very being of empirical thinking specifically and ‘natural thinking’ more generally, it goes back to the intentionality thus misunderstood in order to bring it not simply into view in first person reflection (‘introspection’), but in a manner which excludes all claims about it that can only be justified from “side-ways on”. In this sense, then, it goes back “to the things themselves”. Once there, it seeks to describe the things themselves in such a way that thereby an alternative ontology of ‘natural thinking’ and its subject is revealed which shows that everything is as ‘natural thinking’ had assumed all along. In this sense, it shows that everything is alright as it is. Husserl’s idea of phenomenology thus intimates the general direction in which McDowell’s “quietism” has begun, at least tentatively, to head. Indeed, it intimates the general direction in which McDowell’s meta-philosophical thinking should head. (Note that this is not at all to deny that Husserl’s idea of phenomenology may itself contain quite specific difficulties which constitute reasons for not buying into it completely.) It is not hard to see, at least in general terms, why this is so, that is, why Husserl’s conception of philosophy has no problem reconciling the status of philosophy as a form of substantive theoretical inquiry with the claim that philosophy is a quietist stilling of the urge to do philosophy. For Husserl never thinks of the problems which create this urge simply as ‘tangles’ of some unspecified nature arising piecemeal one knows not how. Rather, he always sees them as specific, substantive truth claims about the very being of ‘natural’, in particular, empirical thinking, claims which themselves arise systematically out of highly substantive theoretical commitments. This view of where the traditional problems of philosophy come from reflects a fundamental conviction underlying Husserl’s conception of philosophy which distinguishes him from many analytic philosophers: the defining ‘problems’ of epistemology are not generated solely at the intu-

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ition pump,35 simply through reflection on our ordinary, pre-philosophical concepts of knowledge, justification and perceptual experience. Rather, they arise because one has, as a philosopher, from the outset misconstrued the sense in which transcendent reality transcends the knowing of it. As far as specifically empirical thinking is concerned, this misconstrual consists in that distinctively Cartesian ontology of empirical intentionality and its subject according to which these are worldless in the sense defined in previous chapters. In general, the central problems of epistemology arise when ‘natural thinking’ turns to account for itself while remaining itself, i. e., without transforming itself, via phenomenological epoch, into ‘philosophical thinking’. Because it fails to do this, thinks Husserl, ‘natural thinking’ cannot but treat itself naturalistically. “Cannot but treat itself naturalistically?” one will ask. Surely, it would be much more plausible to say that when ‘natural thinking’ turns to account for itself without adopting the philosophical attitude, it merely tends to misinterpret itself naturalistically. The strength of Husserl’s position here goes hand in hand with some difficulties to which we shall briefly return in the Conclusion. For the moment, we need only note that Husserl’s position is consistent with, although stronger than, McDowell’s. McDowell suggests “that our philosophical anxieties are due to the intelligible grip on our thinking of a modern naturalism, and we can work at loosening that grip.”36 (McDowell 1994b, p. 177) He thus shares with Husserl the conviction that the cause of epistemological worries is intelligible; to this extent, his “quietism” is Husserlian in spirit. Indeed, McDowell here calls the cause of epistemological worry by name, a name wielded more often by Husserl than by Wittgenstein: “modern naturalism”, which, properly understood, is neither an arational “mental 35 This is not to deny, of course, that intuition pumping plays a role in the solution of epistemological problems. 36 “Had one ever gone back to the full, original concretion of the world, just as this world is always experienced in nave originality, had one, while performing one’s methodological abstractions, never lost sight of this concretely perceptible world as the original source (Ursprungsfeld), then the absurdities of naturalistic psychology and human science would not have been possible, the temptation would never have arisen to interpret the mind (Geist) as a mere causal annex of material bodies or as a causal ordering parallel to that of physical materiality. One would never have been able to construe humans and animals as psychophysical machines or indeed as parallel double machines.” (Husserl 1962, § 6, H 55 – 56; my translation) As Husserl puts it later in the same work, “… the full and concrete world does not have the mere style of a nature. … The naturalist prejudice must be dropped.” (§ 25, H 143; my translation)

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block”, nor a picture, but precisely a proposition, however much one may find it useful, perhaps even necessary, to illustrate this proposition with a picture. Because this cause of distinctively modern epistemological worry is a distinctively modern metaphysical proposition, the only therapy to which its symptoms can be subjected consists in taking the proposition which generates them seriously as the truth claim that it is. Precisely for this reason, the metaphors of malady and cure, of diagnosis and therapy, encouraged by Wittgenstein can be dangerously misleading. Yet even at this point McDowell is inclined to lapse back into characteristically Wittgensteinian turns of phrase which imply that the causes of epistemological worry are arational rather than rational in nature. Having made the suggestion just quoted concerning the cause of epistemological worries, he now says, It is a way of making this suggestion vivid to picture a frame of mind in which we have definitively shrugged off the influences on our thinking that lead to philosophical anxieties, even if we do not suppose we could ever have such a frame of mind as a permanent and stable possession. Even so, this identification of a source for our apparent difficulties can be one of our resources for overcoming recurrences of the philosophical impulse: recurrences that we know there will be. (McDowell 1994b, pp. 177 – 178)

But how can this be? Surely, the only therapy appropriate for something that exercises an intelligible grip is an intelligible one – in which case we have not shrugged it off, but argued successfully against it, in which case, too, it and the worries it gives rise to cannot recur (or rather, can only recur if new and better arguments for them are given). Identification of how epistemological problems are intelligibly caused must indeed be one resource, indeed it is the only resource, for overcoming any inclination to take these problems seriously. So why is McDowell so equivocal? Perhaps he fears that a genuinely Husserlian, genuinely phenomenological “quietism” will not be quiet enough. When we pursue epistemology properly, as transcendentally driven, first person reflection on ‘natural thinking’ and its subject which attributes to such intentional experience nothing but what is contained in it, precisely as it is contained in it,37 we come up with an account of perceptual experience which appears to have consequences beyond philosophy itself. In particular, the idea that perceptual experience is a unity of the conceptual and sensually impressional seems to have im37 See Husserl 1992a, § 90, H 209.

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portant consequences for certain, highly ambitious research programmes within cognitive science. Thus, if perceptual experience is a matter of registering from here how things there are what they are, then surely, pace the computationalist approach to cognitive processes, not all ‘representations’ can be sentence-like; and, pace the connectionist approach, not all representations can be pattern- or picture-like. Moreover, if perceptual experience unifies the conceptual and sensually impressional in such a non-aggretative fashion that the latter does not make an even notionally separable contribution to its co-operation with the former, then one cannot overcome the complementary weaknesses of these two competing approaches simply by glueing them together – as if, having seen that perceptual experience is analogous neither to a picture nor to the small engraved plate under the picture, one thought it were simply the sum of both. In addition, a phenomenological “quietism”, which takes the cause of epistemological worry to be intelligible and attacks it as such, must have implications at a more general level for such ambitious research programmes as these within cognitive science. For the kind of research programme exemplified by both the computationalism of the nineteen seventies and eighties and the connectionism of the late nineteen eighties and nineties is tacitly committed to modern, that is to say, ontological naturalism, at least in the sense that if they succeed, then the range of phenomena with which they deal, namely, cognitive states, experiences and processes, will have shown themselves to constitute no exception to such naturalism. So any attack on “modern naturalism,” properly understood, must call into question the possibility of this kind of research programme, which seeks not simply to isolate individual psychophysical connections or to represent individual cognitive processes for heuristic purposes in either computational or connectionist terms, but positively to model, in totalising fashion, cognition and intelligent intentional behaviour as such. McDowell will have none of this: “I do not mean,” he says, “to be objecting to anything in cognitive science.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 121) He thus appears to recognise that any effort less quietist than his to “shrug off ” the metaphysics of naturalism may well bring one into conflict with these kinds of approach within cognitive science. Yet the matter is not clear, for at another point in the text his attitude is not quite so deferential. Having said that, “(i)t would be dangerous to deny, from a philosophical armchair, that cognitive psychology is an intellectually respectable discipline,” he immediately qualifies this claim by saying that it is only true “so long as it [cognitive psychology] stays within its proper

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bounds.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 55) Thereby he turns what looks at first merely like a conventional remonstration against philosophical armchairs into something more interesting. For if, as McDowell claims here, cognitive psychology has proper bounds, surely it must have them in a way in which, say, physics or chemistry could not. What, after all, could it mean to speak of either physics or chemistry going astray in a manner which entitled one to push it back behind some proper bounds? It seems, then, that by conceding that cognitive science has proper bounds, McDowell is acknowledging that cognitive science can become wrong-headedly philosophical in a way in which physics and chemistry cannot. Presumably, it does so when it seeks the kind of total explanatory model of cognition or intelligent intentional behaviour which entails commitment to the clearly metaphysical, hence philosophical thesis of “modern naturalism.” If, however, this is so, then cognitive science, unlike physics or chemistry, must from the outset stand in some essential relation of dependency upon philosophical thinking. Cognitive science, and indeed all attempts at a natural-scientifically oriented explanatory psychology cannot, by their very nature, free themselves of philosophy in the manner in which physics and chemistry have done – in which case it must be wrong to take physics and its historical development as a model for all forms of natural science. The explanation, then, why we encounter here as elsewhere a tendency to step in a certain direction, then immediately backtrack, is that McDowell is unsure about just how radical he can afford to be. His line of thought is pushing him in a more ambitious, more phenomenological understanding of the “quietism” he takes from Wittgenstein. When, however, he realises that it is pushing him into direct conflict with one of the great shibboleths of contemporary philosophy, viz., the danger of armchairs,38 he makes things sound less discordant to contem38 Who are all these past philosophers who have foolishly told science what to do? It is noteworthy that those prone to remonstrate against philosophical armchairs rarely give names. Rorty mentions Kant and the neo-Kantians as advocates of philosophy-with-a-capital-P, which is “… the attempt to underwrite or debunk claims to knowledge made by science, morality, art, or religion. … Philosophy can be foundational in respect to the rest of culture because culture is the assemblage of claims to knowledge, and philosophy adjudicates such claims. ….” (Rorty 1979, p. 3) But this is a serious misunderstanding not just of the neoKantians, but of Kant and the Kantian metaphor of the tribunal of Reason. Pace Rorty, Reason, that is to say, philosophy does not haul “the rest of culture” before it, but rather itself. The tribunal of Reason is the critique of Reason; the

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porary ears by talking in more gnomically Wittgensteinian fashion of philosophy as something merely perplexing rather than something which trades in substantive perplexities. Wittgensteinian metaphors of malady now start to look appropriate while philosophy itself becomes an impulse or urge which, like malaria, constantly recurs, hence constantly requires medication to still it. But as soon as McDowell takes this step backwards, one no longer knows how to take his clear and bold claim that “(i)t would be a cheat, a merely verbal manoeuvre, to object that naturalism about nature cannot be open to question.” (McDowell 1994b, p. 77) We have seen how McDowell’s introduction of second nature as a second concept of nature initially looks radical, but then fades into a more orthodox rejection of bald naturalism quite consistent with “modern naturalism” as such.39 The same fate befalls his call to loosen the intelligible grip of “modern naturalism” upon us: it ends up diluted by the assurance that such loosening will not have the consequences one might think. Clearly, had McDowell been less cautious, he would have avoided this situation. In order to loosen the grip of something intelligible on us, it certainly helps to imagine what it would be like not to endorse what exerts the intelligible grip. This is confirmed precisely by Chapter Six, which sought to imagine, indeed to elaborate discursively, what it would be to deny that “modern naturalism” which constitutes the ground of classically modern epistemological worries. But the only real way to loosen the intelligible grip of a truth claim is by undermining the arguments adduced for it. Thereby one shows what Chapter Six also sought to show, namely, that there is no (distinctively philosophical) reason to stand in this intelligible grip. But then the loosening accomplished cannot but be “a permanent and stable possession.” And as long as we do not lose our minds, no “philosophical impulse” or “urge” to question this loosening can ever recur. At this point, McDowell’s tendency to deny these points, preposition ‘of ’ in the metaphor is both subjectively and objectively genitive – see p. 166 for a clear indication of Rorty’s failure to understand this self-referentiality of Kant’s juridical metaphor. True, Kant does – in a manner explicitly criticised and rejected by the neo-Kantians, incidentally – claim that certain strictly empirical propositions, e. g., the three-dimensionality of space, are a priori necessary. But this claim, as opposed to the claim that some kind of spatial (and temporal) intuition is a condition of the possibility of experience, is simply a paralogistic over-interpretation by Kant himself of the Transcendental Aesthetic. 39 Precisely because it does not really challenge “modern naturalism,” it shows itself to be something McDowell himself rejects, namely, the attempt to shoehorn meaning into the world – see McDowell 1994b, p. 176.

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and in general to endorse a “quietism” which motivates itself by construing “unquiet” philosophy as an arational affliction, indicates unclarity as to the direction in which his meta-philosophical reflections are heading. These reflections point towards a more Husserlian, more phenomenological kind of quietism. Philosophical quietism in this sense certainly reassures us that everything is alright as it is, that is, as we originally, hence naively took it to be – but only by substantively theorising well where previously we had theorised poorly.

Conclusion: From McDowell to Husserl and Beyond The previous chapter has argued that Husserl’s idea of philosophy as transcendental phenomenology properly contains and expands McDowell’s idea of epistemology as transcendentally driven reflection on the very being of empirical intentionality and its subject, reflection which is not simply first person (‘introspective’), but methodologically resolved to work only with what shows itself from this perspective. Yet this is not to say that McDowell would or should endorse all of Husserl’s position. For it is certainly not to maintain that there are no problems with the latter. These there are indeed, and we shall end Part I by sketching the overall shape of these difficulties, thereby setting the stage for Part II. One striking feature of Husserl’s meta-philosophy is his claim that ‘natural thinking’, when it first attempts to theorise about ‘natural thinking’, cannot but miscontrue itself, this because its first attempts are characterised by failure to transform itself, via phenomenological epoch, into ‘philosophical thinking’ – see, e. g., Husserl 1973, H 3 and H 19 – 22. Given that according to Husserl such misconstrual consists in interpreting ‘natural thinking’ naturalistically, this amounts to the claim that ‘natural thinking’ about ‘natural thinking’ is inherently ‘naturalistic thinking’. But why should we think this is so? When ‘natural thinking’ attempts to theorise about itself whilst remaining ‘natural’, it is engaging in some kind of empirical psychology. But why must empirical psychology, even of the kind which is unequivocally oriented towards natural science, e. g., the psychology of perception, interpret ‘natural thinking’ naturalistically? No doubt certain kinds of research programme within cognitive science are inherently ‘naturalistic’. To engage in these kinds of empirical psychology is therefore to attempt to understand ‘natural thinking’ naturalistically. But this only drives the crucial point home: the claim that empirical psychology is inherently committed to naturalism is true only when the term ‘empirical psychology’ is taken in a very restrictive, indeed too restrictive sense. We encounter here the problem of just what motivates naturalism. Where do the tendencies to interpret knowing, the knowing subject

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and the transcendence of the objects known naturalistically come from? At times, it seems as if Husserl, at least in the writings of his early and middle periods, just assumes natural science to be inherently committed to naturalism. Thus, in Erste Philosophie I we are told that “the influence of natural science and the naturalistic way of thinking which it sanctifies shows itself in yet another, very significant peculiarity (Eigenheit) of the Lockean theory of knowledge, a peculiarity which has determined future developments in a particularly unfortunate way, in what, namely, we call the naturalisation of consciousness.” (Husserl 1956a, Lecture 14, H 96 – 97; italics added) Of course, what Husserl says here is equivocal. He could be interpreted simply as saying that the success of natural science has seemed to modern thinkers like Locke sufficient reason for hypothesising that all causal relations in and between both external and internal reality are ‘at bottom’ of a kind some substratal natural science ascertains. If this is what Husserl is getting at, then he is not committed to the claim that natural science is inherently naturalistic, a claim we have already seen to be false. But how Husserl, in the early to middle period of his development, conceives the relation between ‘natural thinking’ and naturalism precisely remains unclear, and to this extent he never adequately confronts the issue of how naturalism and its goal of naturalising consciousness arise. Nor does McDowell in Mind and World confront this issue beyond making remarks to the effect that as a matter of historical fact, this metaphysics has appeared increasingly attractive, even obligatory, to philosophers. In an earlier essay (McDowell 1986) he does attempt to explain the appeal to modern thinkers of the picture of empirical thinking as enclosed within its own inner sphere from beyond which an external reality impinges causally upon it. To this extent, he does attempt to explain why the goal of naturalising consciousness could come to appear so attractive. Yet this explanation is odd: according to McDowell, the picture arises out of various theological, ethical or epistemological considerations extraneous to the requirements of natural science, indeed so much so that – at least “at a certain juncture in the history of science” – this picture itself engenders a commitment to immaterialism.1 It hardly seems right to think that a picture to which Davidson, Evans and many other modern thinkers are wedded could at any juncture engender a commitment to immaterialism. Perhaps this claim is an early form of the mistake McDowell makes in Mind and World when he claims 1

See McDowell 1986, pp. 153 – 154.

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that the picture arises because of commitment both to the sui generis status of spontaneity and to the equation of empirical reality with (first) nature. Husserl does not make this mistake. Yet the fact that McDowell regards this and other considerations putatively motivating the picture as extraneous to natural science shows that he sees more clearly than Husserl that natural science is not essentially committed to “modern naturalism”, however much this modern metaphysics of nature arose in historical conjunction with natural science. To this extent, McDowell’s earlier explanation is on the right track. At the same time, McDowell includes certain unspecified epistemological concerns in his list of the considerations extraneous to natural science which drive “modern naturalism” and the goal of naturalising consciousness. Here McDowell goes wrong in a way in which Husserl does not. For no epistemological considerations explain, even in part, the picture which expresses the goal of naturalising consciousness. Quite the contrary, the order of explanation is the other way around: the picture, or rather the metaphysical propositions it is used to express, explain at least those epistemological considerations in which the pseudo-problems of modern epistemology consist. No independent epistemological considerations could motivate the idea that a subject’s cogitationes constitute a not merely distinguishable but notionally separable (worldless) realm of inner facts which are so inner that the whole idea of cognitive access to them at least ‘from outside’ becomes problematic. Rather, this conception of the very being of one’s cogitationes as worldless is itself a product of the conception and picture of ‘consciousness’ (empirical thinking) forced upon both Descartes and contemporary ontological naturalists by their equation of nature with “the realm of law” (in the general rather than specific sense). Insofar, then, as ontological naturalism is, in virtue of its more coherent character, the destiny of this general equation, we may say that the worldlessness of empirical intentionality and its subject, as well as McDowell’s picture of them, are equally mere consequences or expressions of commitment to such naturalism. It therefore comes as no surprise that Descartes, just as he recognises that his attempt to unseat our natural confidence in the reliability of the senses – more accurately, his attempt to undermine parity of certainty between our claims to know external reality and our claims to know our own minds – presupposes an understanding of empirical intentionality and its subject as worldless, also recognises where this assumption of worldlessness comes from: the modern metaphysics of nature, as embodied in that general equation of nature with “the realm of law” which uni-

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tes him with the ontological naturalist. In the Sixth Meditation, in which he completes his demonstration that the mind is distinct from the body, Descartes notices that “…the mind is immediately affected not by all parts of the body, but rather only by the brain ….”2 Then, three paragraphs later, speaking of how injury to the foot excites pain in the mind, he observes that the nature of a human being, as a composite of mind and body, cannot not be sometimes deceptive. For if some cause, not in the foot, but in whichever other one you will of the parts through which the nerves are extended from the foot to the brain, or even in the brain itself, were to excite fully the same movement which is usually excited by the badly affected foot, then the pain will be sensed as if it were in the foot – and the senses will naturally be deceived: because since that same movement in the brain could not but always carry the same sensation into the mind, and it would usually arise much more frequently from a cause that hurts the foot than from another one existing somewhere else, it is agreeable to reason that it would always exhibit the pain to the mind as the pain of the foot rather than as a pain of another part.3

It is not relevant here whether this really explains why the mind experiences as in the foot pain caused by an injury to some part of the body when the sensation of pain caused in the mind by the injury is sufficiently similar to those regularly caused by injuries to the foot.4 Nor is it relevant whether this picture of how mind, brain and body relate to one another can really accommodate, as Descartes assumes, the idea, indeed the experience, of pain as something localised in one part of the body rather than another. Relevant is only that Descartes derives a uniquely human potential for error from the way in which mind, brain and body are connected. The mind is immediately connected to the brain in the sense that certain movements of the brain, unlike movements of any other part of the body, directly suffice for certain sensations and perceptions. Furthermore, this connection between brain and mind is such that brain movement can cause the very same sensations and perceptions in the mind whatever the causes of these brain movements themselves. Descartes clearly recognises this; only for this reason does he speak of a uniquely human potential for error at all. Descartes thus regards himself as entitled to presuppose the worldlessness of empirical intentionality and its subject because 2 3 4

Descartes 1641 (1990), Sixth Meditation, § 20, AT vii. 86. ibid., § 23, AT vii. 88 – 89; translation modified. It is thus not relevant here whether this really explains the phenomenon of phantom limbs.

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it follows from his account of mind as causally connected, first with the brain, then with the body and finally with the external world.5 We catch here a glimpse of why Descartes is positively seeking the problem of the external world, or rather, the problem that if he is alone, such that he can draw only upon on his own empirically cognitive resources, then there is no accounting for the legitimacy of his pre-philosophical, ‘natural’ conviction that he is capable of empirical knowing. That conception of how mind relates to brain, body and world which entails the worldlessness of empirical intentionality and its subject is itself entailed by Descartes’ metaphysics of nature. And so a fundamental cognitive limitation of the human subject seems inherent to this metaphysics, a limitation which is only overcome if this subject is not alone, but exists in the presence of God. Moreover, the human subject can only rationally claim to be able to overcome this limitation, hence to be capable of empirical knowing, if it can rationally claim to know the existence of God. Thus, inherent in Descartes’ metaphysics of nature and the natural philosophy underpinned by this metaphysics is a fundamental dependency on the ability of the human subject to be able to know, to prove, the existence of God. Descartes’ Galilean kind of natural philosophy, unlike the older Aristotelian natural philosophy, positively requires complementation and supplementation by theological metaphysics – precisely that form of theoretical inquiry practised by those most learned and distinguished gentlemen of the Sorbonne to whom Descartes addresses his Meditationes de prima¯ philosophia¯. 6 Note, however, that implicit in Descartes’ conception of how mind relates to brain, body and world is a general picture with no necessary connection to his dualism, immaterialism and belief in immortal souls. For this conception construes self-conscious empirical thinking as enclosed, not only within its own inner sphere beyond which external reality 5

6

This is not necessarily question-begging: Descartes might be seen as presupposing the worldlessness of empirical intentionality in the sense of assuming it provisionally in order then to have the metaphysics of nature and mind which yields it grounded by speculative metaphysics. Of course, however one interprets the status of this presupposition, Descartes’ making it entails that he is not applying his method of doubt consistently, but rather illicitly sparing his metaphysics of nature from it. This way of reading Descartes thus agrees with the general spirit and much of the detail of Gaukroger 1995, as manifest in this latter’s claim that “(s)ystematic doubt is used as a prelude to legitimating a contentious natural philosophy, not to providing ‘knowledge’ with a firm foundation.” (p. 321)

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lies, but within an inner sphere under which material reality lies, specifically, the brain, understood as material precisely in the sense of being something which satisfies the descriptions and predicates of (Descartes’ favoured brand of ) substratal natural science. On this general picture, the material reality which lies under the inner sphere of mind connects this internal reality up with external reality lying beyond it, both at a time and across time. So both internal and external reality are equally founded in, or underlain by, such material reality, which constitutes the ultimate causal substance of all things insofar as they are ‘in nature’ (in the first and primary sense in which Descartes might speak of being ‘in nature’). True, the specific sense in which Descartes regards material reality as underlying the inner sphere of ‘mind’ is not that of identity or constitution (supervenience) but of substantial union. As Descartes sees things, the inner sphere of mind is in the outer sphere of empirical reality in virtue of standing in particularly intimate causal relation to that part of empirical reality which underlies the inner (which empirical observation has shown to be the brain).7 The reason why he sees things this way is that he wishes, as we have already seen, to hold apart the extensions of those two senses in which he might speak of something as occurring ‘in nature’ (or in the universe, world, empirical reality, etc.): (a) that sense according to which something occurs ‘in nature’, hence is natural, physical or material, if and only if it is capable of interacting with other things only in the mechanical manner ascertained by Descartes’ preferred brand of substratal natural science; and (b) that sense according to which something is natural or in nature (in the universe, world, empirical reality, etc.) if, at particular points of space and time, it can interact with certain other things ‘in nature’ and not others (whereby Descartes grounds this second sense in the first). The human mind is only ever ‘in nature’, an item in empirical reality, natural, etc., in the second sense, not the first. 7

As the picture suggests, this is to construe the brain as underlying the mind in virtue of a distinctively vertical causation. The mind thus stands in horizontal causal relations with external empirical reality in virtue of its distinctively vertical causal relation with the brain. Talk of vertical causation may at first lull one into overlooking what is so intensely problematic about this way of construing the sense in which the brain underlies the mind. For it may encourage one to think of material causation and sufficiency. But Descartes cannot and does not mean this: because mind and brain are conceived as two distinct substances, the causal relations between them are efficient. We thus have the oxymoron of a distinctively vertical efficient causation.

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But by construing the sense in which nature in the first sense underlies the mind as substantial union, Descartes denies causal closure. This denial then yields the problem of explaining why the mind should even need to be attached to any such material vehicle as the pineal gland in order to be able to act, and be acted upon by, material things.8 How indeed could it stand in any more intimate relation to one material thing rather than another? Or, to put the same point another way, why should it be able to act, and be acted upon by, only some material things and not others? Because it contains this incoherence, Descartes’ picture of mind (empirical thinking) as connected to body, brain and world by substantial union has an inherent dialectical tendency to pass over into one in which the connection is understood to be supervenience – precisely the picture of empirical thinking which fixes the space of options within which Davidson, Evans and so many others move. For this reason, the picture of empirical thinking drawn by Descartes does not differ essentially from that which fixes the space of options within which Davidson and Evans move even though Descartes would not endorse ontological naturalism.9 If, however, this is so, then ontologically naturalist versions of the picture will have the same epistemological consequences as those which Descartes recognises his version to have. Whether one conceives the sense in which brain and body underlie the mind as supervenience, as does the ontological naturalist proper, or as substantial union, as does Descartes, one will still (unless, of course, one embraces Davidson’s causal externalism) have to construe what goes on within the inner sphere of empirical thinking as necessarily independent of what goes on within the external reality enclosing it in the sense that the latter might be radically unlike what the mind takes it to be on the basis of how it causally affects the mind. Or as McDowell might put it, one will still have to construe 8

9

Formally speaking, Leibnizian parallelism, which is just as dependent on the picture and the underlying metaphysics of nature implicit in the picture as Descartes’ interactionism, avoids this problem and preserves closure, but only by sacrificing the intuitive plausibility of interactionism. Epiphenomenalism is surely even more ad hoc and counterintuitive since (a) a merely uni-directional causality from the natural to the non-natural no more preserves causal closure than a Cartesian bi-directional one; (b) one now has to explain how something B can be affected by something A without being itself able to affect either A itself or other items of the same substance as A; and (c) one still has to explain why the non-natural should at least appear to be able to affect the natural. Perhaps nothing better illustrates this similarity than Fodor 1982.

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how things strike the believer as capable of remaining the same even as changes are rung on the environment which strikes the believer.10 In other words, short of embracing Davidson’s causal externalism, one will still have to understand empirical intentionality and its subject as worldless. Precisely this subtle dependence of Descartes’ conviction that empirical thinking is worldless on clearly substantive specifically metaphysical claims concerning the ontological structure of empirical reality (the world) shows that Husserl is nave to think that ‘natural thinking’ becomes ‘naturalistic thinking’ as soon as it first reflects on itself. Before the former can become the latter, not only is some real theoretical investment needed, but this investment must itself be fundamentally philosophical in that it amounts to a distinctive ontology of the world forged in the light of certain specifically metaphysical pre-conceptions. So natural science, in the specific shape of empirical psychology, is not essentially committed to the “naturalisation of consciousness”. Moreover, had Husserl seen this more clearly, he would have been better able to resolve a serious difficulty encountered by his conception of philosophy as transcendental phenomenology. This difficulty constitutes, as will be elaborated and demonstrated in Part II, the point of departure for Heidegger’s claim that the idea of phenomenology must be radicalised beyond Husserl’s conception of it if phenomenology is to realise its true potential. The difficulty is bound up with a remarkable feature of the mature Husserl’s thinking: for all his emphasis on the ego and self-consciousness, he gives no sustained account of the logical form of distinctively first person thinking. When a subject thinks to itself, “I am thus and so”, a content is thought therein. But what is the content thought? Husserl never clarifies this issue, and this has consequences for the notion of phenomenological epoch: an adequate account of the content thought in self-conscious, first person thinking entails the ab10 This is, of course, what Descartes was really getting when he insisted that as much as our ideas might proceed from things different to us, “it does not follow from this that they must be similar to these things.” (Descartes, op. cit., Third Meditation, § 11, AT vii. 39) In saying this, he is not simply claiming that “the world may be different from our perceptual image of it”; “what Descartes is really trying to steer us towards is the idea that our perceptual image may not even be a guide to how the world is.” (Gaukroger, op. cit., p. 228) This idea also underlies the interesting move Descartes makes in his treatise Le Monde from a pictorial to a linguistic model of how information is represented in perceptual processes – see AT xi. 4, quoted by Gaukroger at p. 284.

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surdity of Husserl’s phenomenological method even when it is saved from caricature in the manner of the previous chapter. In section two of the preceding chapter, we saw how one could avoid interpreting Husserl as drawing from the possibility of suspending the general thesis of the world the conclusion that consciousness might exist in complete independence of the world. It was argued that one had to take Husserl’s insistence seriously that phenomenological epoch is not Cartesian doubt: epoch suspends (puts out of action), it does not doubt (call into question), the thesis of the existence of the world into which one’s intentional states and experiences refer. Husserl’s claim is that one can refer to, describe and explicate the structures of intentionality without being guided in one’s descriptive and explicatory behaviour specifically by the thesis that the world in this sense exists. This claim, he maintains, is not incompatible with the claim that empirical intentionality always comes so to speak with, or rather in, the world into which it refers. Phenomenological epoch does not show that the existence of oneself as thinking such and such cogitationes, together with the existence of these cogitationes themselves, is certain while the existence of the world is not. Rather, it shows that precisely when ‘bad’ epistemology and scepticism have made one uncertain of, that is, unclear about, the certainty of the existence of the world presented in one’s cogitationes, one must be certain of, indeed making use of, the thesis that one is as thinking these cogitationes. Consequently, it reveals, says Husserl, the object-domain for a distinctively critical kind of reflection, one which seeks to dispell this uncertainty about certainty by rendering intelligible the parity of certainty de facto acknowledged in the natural attitude. But what if an adequate and full account of the contentfulness of first person thought and talk were to show that one could not pick out acts of distinctively first person thinking, hence the contents of such acts, unless one positively made use of some judgement of the form “I am S”, or “I am the F that is G”, that is, of empirical apperception in Kant’s sense? Phenomenological epoch does not consist in revoking any commitments one might have to the transcendent, in particular, to one’s identity as such and such an empirical or natural subject. Yet it is supposed to consist in putting out of action, that is, in declining to make use of, the general thesis of the world, hence empirical apperception. If, however, one could not so much as suspend all acts of empirical apperception, then an insuperable problem would arise. This problem is not that by performing epoch one would have irretrievably lost simply the world (because one had tacitly assumed the worldlessness of natural thinking and its subject). Rather,

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the problem is that by performing epoch one would have lost both the world and natural thinking itself (because one had tacitly offended against the fact that one could not so much as identify what one is thinking without making use of one’s conviction that one is such and such a natural or empirical subject). By appeal to his so-called method of doubt, Descartes shows that, however much one’s natural certainty concerning the world presented in one’s cogitationes might have been undermined by sceptical doubt, one cannot but remain certain of, and indeed continue to make use of, the thesis that one exists at least as thinking these cogitationes. Attempting either to deny or to suspend the thesis of one’s own existence as thinking is self-defeating precisely because, and in the sense that, one must make use of the thesis in order so much as to attempt to deny or suspend it.11 The lesson, then, of the cogito and its indubitability is that there can be commitments whose certainty consists in the pragmatic absurdity, the self-defeatingness, of attempting to suspend or put them out of action. If, however, one could not pick out one’s own cogitationes as one’s own unless one continued to appeal to the truth of some judgement of the form “I am S”, or “I am the F that is G”, then there would also be transcendent judgements and commitments which one could not suspend. For this conceptual link between one’s capacity to identify one’s own cogitationes as one’s own and such acts of ‘empirical apperception’ would mean that in order to exercise the former, one would have to make use of the latter. Clearly, this would undermine the very possibility of philosophical thinking and the philosophical attitude as Husserl understands it: the putative subject of such thinking could never distance itself from its ‘natural’ or empirical identity in the way Husserl imagines, hence could never engage in, or be the distinctively pure transcendental subject of, such philosophical thinking. If one could not genuinely suspend all acts of empirical apperception, then one could not genuinely suspend the general thesis of the world (since to suspend the latter must be, amongst many other things as well, to suspend the former). So phenomenological epoch, at least as Husserl understands it, would be strictly impossible and the specifically Husserlian project of transcendental phenomenology would collapse. As if this problem were not enough! Husserl holds one thing indisputably in common with McDowell: he is from the outset primarily, indeed almost exclusively, focussed on knowing. Phenomenology is to pro11 In this sense, one cannot mention the thesis without using it.

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vide an ideology-critical description of how perceptual experience must be if self-conscious, rationally self-regulating theoretically empirical knowledge-claiming is to be possible. Thus, one crucial function from the viewpoint of which phenomenological description and explication is undertaken (Ideen I, § 86, H 197) is the role of perceptual experience in the identification and re-identification of entities given in experience as the referents of empirical knowledge claims (since the raising and evaluating of such claims requires one to know and be able to re-identify what it is one is raising and evaluating claims about). In other words, one question guiding phenomenological description and explication is how perceptual experience must be intentionally structured in order that it enable such identification and re-identification. But the identification and re-identification of entities presupposes that entities can appear in their capacity or identity as objective things, that is, as instantiating properties and relations which are objective in the sense that they constitute no inherent relevance or salience for the subject who is perceiving entities as instantiating them. For underlying the idea of self-conscious evaluation of empirical truth claims is the idea that such evaluation can and should ideally be carried out by a disinterested judge. This latter must be able to access the putative referents of the truth claims to be evaluated without having to share the truth claimer’s interests and preferences. In examining Davidson we saw that there is a sense in which empirically theoretical knowing and cognitive deliberation generally, however internal they might in one sense be, are nonetheless forms of self-regulating behavioural responsiveness towards entities. This raises an important question: could all forms of perceptually guided behavioural response involve perception of empirical entities in their capacity as objective things? Or might certain kinds of rationally, or at least intelligently, self-regulating behavioural response require for their very possibility that entities be perceived in their capacity as relevantly or saliently thus and so? While crossing a busy street, I see a semi-trailer bearing down on me and begin to run in order to get out of its way. But what exactly do I see? Might not my very ability to respond to the semi-trailer in a prudentially sensible manner presuppose that I see how a huge red semi-trailer is travelling, namely, dangerously, in particular, so fast towards me that unless I speed up it will hit me, thereby having the detrimental effect of killing or seriously injuring me? Did I not from the outset perceive this, I would have to perform some inference in order to move from what I do perceive to the relevance or salience of what I perceive for me, given my current

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situation, activity and interests. Yet there is no phenomenological evidence for such an inference. More importantly, it is hard to see how any account could be given of this inference which would accurately model my ability to respond sensibly and in real time to the semi-trailer bearing down upon me, and indeed to innumerable other threats significantly different from this one. If so, then Husserl’s particular conception and execution of transcendental phenomenology would be incomplete. Moreover, it would be chronically blind to its incompleteness. For the questions raised above concern not so much the intentional structure of perceptual experience as what kinds of perceptible property or relation one must admit in order to account for how perceptual experience guides, hence enables, intelligent, context-sensitive behaviour. To widen one’s phenomenological sights beyond the epistemic in the fashion suggested by these questions would therefore be at the same time to recognise that transcendental phenomenology cannot simply be epistemology in the sense of ideology-critical, transcendentally driven reflection on the very being of empirically cognitive intentionality. Transcendental phenomenology as Husserl conceives takes as its point of departure perceptual experience and empirical intentionality generally in which the entities referred to are taken as objective. That is, the properties and relations these entities are referred to as having or standing in are all subject-irrelative in the sense that they, or rather, their linguistic formulation, express no relevance or salience for the subject of intentionality, given its interests. They are thus exclusively such properties and relations as ‘being green’, ‘being a house’ and ‘being to the left of ’, rather than such subject-relative properties and relations as ‘being too heavy (for me to wield now)’, ‘being a house cold in winter and hot in summer (for a subject such as I am)’ or ‘travelling dangerously towards me (i. e., so fast that unless I move faster it will hit me, with deleterious consequences)’. But if intelligently self-regulating, context-sensitive behaviour of the kind I engage in when I hammer nails, buy houses or dodge traffic requires that I perceive entities in their capacity as bearing the latter kind of subject-relative, salient properties and relations,12 then one must widen the project of transcendental phenomenology beyond transcendental reflection on the being of intentionality and its subject to transcendental reflection on the being of the referents of such intentionality in their 12 Which are, of course, perfectly objective in the wider sense of being objectively the case, irrespective of what any subject believes or desires to be the case.

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capacity as such referents, that is, across the whole gamut of the ways entities can and must be such referents. In one way, of course, this would still be to study the essential structures and nature of empirical intentionality and its subject. Nonetheless, the move does represent a qualitative change. It is not simply a matter of widening one’s scope from first person reflection on how entities are given in perceptual experience of the kind one has when forming and evaluating an empirical knowledge claim to include first person reflection on how one must perceive when, say, moving to close a gate, avoiding puddles on a rain-soaked street 13 or dodging traffic on a busy road. For consider: Husserl’s brand of transcendental phenomenology studies the internal structures of individual, specifically cognitive forms of intentionality in order to see how they enable a specific way in which empirical thinking in the widest sense can bear on reality. This specific way or form of empirical thinking in the widest sense is, of course, rationally self-regulating empirical knowing. Consequently, if other forms of intelligent, context-sensitive behavioural responsiveness should require that the entities therein responded to perceptually appear to one in different ways – under different sets of ‘categories’, or better, under different applications of the same ‘categories’ – , then Husserl’s brand of transcendental phenomenology would be blind to this fact. In further consequence, it would be unable to address the issue of how numerically and qualitatively different stretches or phases of rationally self-regulating, context-sensitive behavioural responsiveness are integrated, as they surely must be, into the more or less coherent, ‘personal’ ‘life’14 of the one subject of such behavioural responsiveness. As soon as one appreciates this, one sees that a qualitative change is indeed looming here, one which goes further than a merely quantitative generalising of scope outwards to encompass non-epistemic forms of intentionality. We may summarise this qualitative shift in focus as follows: transcendental phenomenology would have to shift its fundamental concern away from the epistemological question of how various forms of empirical intentionality must be structured in order to enable specifically epistemic 13 See Leyendecker’s phenomenological description of this, which clearly anticipates Heidegger, in Leyendecker 1913 (1980). 14 In this regard one might agree with Heidegger that Dilthey was the first to understand the intentions of phenomenology – see Heidegger 1979a, § 13, H 165. Indeed precisely in this regard Dilthey understands the intentions of phenomenology better than Husserl.

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bearing on reality. Instead, it would have to take up the ontological question of how the being of the entities borne upon must be inflected in order for what bears upon them to be a coherent unity over time of different phases of rationally self-regulating behavioural responsiveness. In short, and in potentially misleading, sloganistic form, transcendental phenomenology would have to move beyond transcendentally driven epistemology and become transcendentally driven ontology: transcendentally driven reflection on how the entities towards which ‘natural thinking’ comports itself across all its processes of self-evaluation and self-revision must be in order to enable these processes to constitute in their totality a coherent, ‘personal’ life. The functional viewpoint from which phenomenological reflection on ‘natural thinking’ necessarily conducts itself would have then shifted away from any specific phase or kind of rationally self-regulating behavioural responsiveness to the unity across time of all such responsiveness – to the question of what it is to be a ‘natural’ ‘I’thinking, hence no doubt also ‘I’-saying subject or self. Note that such phenomenologically conducted transcendental ontology would still be critical in Husserl’s quasi-Kantian sense. The metaphysics of nature underpinning early modern interpretations of natural science as natural philosophy surely constitutes an ontological picture of the empirical reality in which ‘natural thinking’ and its subject find themselves, a picture, moreover, built upon the modern specifically metaphysical equation of empirical reality with nature qua “realm of law.” In short, the identification of empirical reality with ‘first’ nature encapsulates what Heidegger calls Descartes’ ontology of the world.15 Given this, it at least makes sense to construe an ontologically rather than epistemologically oriented transcendental phenomenology as analogously critical: it proceeds by sketching a correct alternative to that ‘bad’ ontology of the world which has engendered problems. Thereby ‘good’ ontology corrects the way ‘bad’ ontology has misconstrued external reality, internal reality (empirical thinking) and the perceptual experience mediating between external and internal reality. Then, in the light of this alternative, ‘good’ ontology ‘destroys’ ‘bad’ ontology by explaining at least signal events in the history of philosophy as lisping attempts to provide precisely a correct account of the world and of the subject always already placed in it. It is at least plausible to think that such an ontologically refashioned transcendental phenomenology would have to ensure that it avoids descriptions and explications which presuppose a metaphysically corrupted 15 See Heidegger 1979b, §§ 19 – 21.

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‘bad’ ontology. Here we glimpse a way in which one might preserve the general spirit of the method Husserl prescribes for transcendental phenomenology. We have already seen that, pace Husserl, ‘natural thinking’ does not automatically become ‘naturalistic thinking’ as soon as it reflects on itself. This insight now proves useful. For it permits us to distinguish naturally from naturalistically transcendent truth claims. And this distinction permits us in turn to re-interpret phenomenological epoch as the identification and suspension of all naturalistically, indeed metaphysically transcendent claims. In consequence, phenomenological epoch becomes transcendental reduction not away from, but precisely back to, ‘natural thinking’ and the natural attitude. More precisely, philosophical thinking, properly understood, nows shows itself to be the methodically controlled return to pre-philosophical ‘natural thinking’, the non-nave resumption of ‘natural’ or everyday naivety. In particular, in the first instance it must be a methodically controlled return to how things show themselves in that kind of bearing upon reality, that kind of rational responsiveness, which both Husserl and McDowell ignore or at least downplay: non-theoretical, practical engagement with entities in their capacities as items occurring within the ordinary, everyday world, in particular, that kind of practical engagement which consists, not in planning to do, or deliberating about what one is to do, but in actually doing. For it is fundamentally here, if at all, that one will see whether ordinary empirical entities must be in different ways, and not simply or univocally as objective things. If this is right, then the mistake of which Heidegger accuses Husserl when he rhetorically asks whether what the latter calls the natural attitude is not rather the naturalistic attitude (Heidegger 1979a, § 12, H 155) would show itself to be no mere oversight. Rather, it would show itself to be a fundamental failure to understand the true nature and potential of transcendental phenomenology. And so Husserl would have to be saved from himself. The re-orientation of transcendental phenomenology towards the ontological would not simply correct or revise Husserl’s conception of it, it would truly radicalise it. Yet for all the radicality of this transformation, there would be no reason for thinking that phenomenology had ceased to be ‘transcendental’ in an at least generically Husserlian sense – as if one had so ‘de-transcendentalised’ it that some new name were needed, such as existential phenomenology.16 Moreover, this onto16 “The notion of a ‘pure Ego’ so little contains the a priori of ‘real’ subjectivity that it passes over, or does not see at all, the ontological characters of facticity and of the existential constitution (Seinsverfassung) of Dasein. The rejection of a ‘con-

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logical re-orientation would permit one to preserve Husserl’s analyses of perceptual experience and its worldliness. Indeed, it would constitute a significant enrichment and extension of these analyses and of the concept of world itself. Finally, this ontologically re-oriented transcendental phenomenology would also be quietistic in a distinctively Husserlian sense. For it, too, would consist in saving the phenomenon of ‘natural thinking’. That is, it, too, would show ‘natural thinking’ to be quite alright as it is by exposing, in decidedly non-quietistic fashion, the counter-sense (Widersinn) of unnaturally metaphysical philosophical interpretations of ‘natural thinking’. Enough has been said to intimate in very general terms the general direction in which Part II will head. And enough has also been said to render plausible one central claim of Part I: the path along which McDowell is objectively headed is a phenomenological one which leads at least to Husserl and possibly beyond him. This phenomenological path is the one to which McDowell is most plausibly brought back from the more or less unproductive paths of his professed views on the nature of ‘singular’ thought, the disjunctivist character of perceptual experience, the need to complement ‘first’ with ‘second’ nature and finally the Wittgensteinian sense in which philosophy itself is quietist. Of course, to take a phenomenological approach to the explication of intentionality, its subject and indeed the reality upon which these latter bear would be to break with an assumption deeply ingrained in an analytic philosopher like McDowell, an assumption which would presumably explain why he would not embrace the Husserl-derived account of perceptual experience envisaged here. This assumption is that linguistic intentionality is the paradigmatic form of intentionality. It is important not to misunderstand what breaking with this assumption comes to. In no way does it constitute a denial of the claim that a distinctively self-conscious, ‘I’-thinking subject must also be an ‘I’-saying one. That these are two quite distinct theses is shown by an example drawn from analytic philosophy itself: H. Paul Grice and his followers are all apparently happy to attribute extraordinarily complex forms of intentionality, possibly even first person awareness, to non-linguistic beings. They therefore deny the claim that seriously intentional, even self-conscious beings are necessarily linguistic beings. Yet they all apparently sciousness as such’ (Bewußtsein berhaupt) does not mean negation of the a priori, anymore than starting with an idealised subject guarantees arriving at an understanding of the aprioricity of Dasein which is truly grounded in the things themselves.” (Heidegger op. cit., § 44, H 229; my translation)

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share McDowell’s assumption. Given this, we should not be worried by Husserl’s readiness similarly to attribute complex forms of intentionality to non-linguistic beings – as, for example, when he insists that “there are indeed also animal ‘I’-subjects (tierische Ichsubjekte).” (Ideen I, § 35, H 73) A Husserlian analysis of perceptual experience as a unity of the conceptual and sensually impressional does not commit one to follow Husserl in this further respect. And in Part II we shall argue that a capacity for distinctively first person forms of intentionality does indeed entail a capacity to wield the first person in the literal, that is to say, linguistic sense. Given that the title of this study makes reference to the concept of the self, one might feel that this concept has received too little attention. In fact, the reference to this concept was anticipatory since doing justice to it requires one to elaborate the concept of the world more fully than has been done here. In particular, it requires one to elaborate fully the fundamental contention not just of Heidegger’s but also of Husserl’s phenomenology, namely, that intentional reference to an empirically existing entity is not just ‘a relation between subject and object’ but – if ‘relation’ is the right word at all – a ‘relation’ which inherently situates both itself, its subject and its object in the world. It does not suffice as a picture of (successful) empirically intentional reference to an object simply to draw an arrow extending out from a subject to some object. Subject, object and the arrow extending from the former to the latter must rather be depicted as enclosed within a circle which represents that wherein all empirically intentional reference, whether successful or not, necessarily occurs – the world. In this sense, the concepts of self and world go hand in hand with one another; they are, as Heidegger would say, equiprimordial (gleichursprnglich), hence only explicable in tandem. A fuller account of self and world must therefore await Part II and indeed, beyond this, the reconstruction of Being and Time (since as already intimated, even Husserl’s philosophical stance is still too narrowly focussed on the epistemic, hence as we shall see, insufficiently focussed on the central issue of self and world). Here it suffices to have accomplished two implicit objectives, one philosophical, the other meta-philosophical. Firstly, the notion of world has emerged as the genuine successor concept to all traditional understandings of the totality in which the empirically real entities of everyday perception and action occur – physis, natura, God’s creation, (‘first’) nature or whatever other way the tradition might contain of tacitly equating empirical reality with the domain of some preferred form or forms of theoretical inquiry. Much more must be said, of course, about this concept, particularly as Heidegger regards

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Husserl and indeed the entire philosophical tradition as chronically unable to elaborate it properly – see Heidegger 1979b, § 11, H 52. Secondly, the notion of world has emerged in a way which has begun to dislodge the traditional philosophical understanding of ‘mind’ as intellectus in favour of the pre-philosophical understanding implicit in such turns of phrase as “Mind that step!”, “Do you mind?!”, “Mind it for me, would you?” and “To my mind, this is not the right thing to do.” This intimates an important meta-philosophical issue implicit throughout the preceding: questions of what it is to be intentionally contentful, or again, to be something intentionally directed at an object, cannot be adequately addressed except within an overall account of self and world. It cannot be right to explicate the notions of intentional or linguistic content (‘meaning’), and the questions arising therefrom, in particular, questions concerning truth and reference, in isolated, piecemeal fashion. The notion of content has more work to do than one de facto acknowledges when one explicates content in terms of inferential role. Content is not simply the currency exchanged in the giving and taking of reasons; it is also and primarily a necessary condition of the being-in-the-world of the self as such. Only as such, therefore, can it be truly understood.

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Author Index Anscombe, G.E. 293 Aristotle 213f., 229, 234, 265f., 280 Benitez, R. 266 Brandom, R. 1, 20f., 64, 117, 215, 219 Caputo, J.D. 1 Cassirer, E. 4 Cohen, H. 5f. Crane, T. 112, 116f. Davidson, D. 2, 4, 6, 8–10, 16, 23–60, 62–69, 73–87, 90–94, 96–106, 108–117, 121f., 124–130, 140f., 157, 159, 161–167, 169–175, 184–186, 189–191, 194, 196–203, 205–213, 217–220, 223–225, 229f., 233–239, 242, 247–249, 253f., 261f., 265, 284, 291, 295f., 299, 304, 308–312, 315, 352, 363, 368f., 372 Dennett, D. 117, 128 Descartes, R. 4, 7, 67–75, 78–80, 85, 183, 187, 189f., 225–232, 234, 238, 248, 250, 255–257, 259, 262, 264, 266f., 269, 291, 298, 306, 335, 338–342, 344–346, 364–369, 371, 375 Dewey, J. 1, 6, 304 Dilthey, W. 3, 5, 215, 219, 300f., 374 Dretske, F. 83, 186, 197 Dreyfus, H.L. 1, 7 Eccles, J. 226 Evans, G. 8, 18, 28, 40, 47, 58, 60, 111f., 131f., 150, 171, 176, 180,

205–211, 213, 217–220, 224f., 229f., 235–237, 239, 248f., 253, 261f., 265, 291, 312, 315f., 347, 352, 363, 368 Fichte, J.G. 214 Fodor, J.A. 83, 186, 197, 237, 368 Frege, G. 347 Gadamer, H.-G. 12, 103, 120, 175, 304, 308f., 354 Gaukroger, S. 226f., 306, 366, 369 Grice, H. P. 158, 377 Haugeland, J. 1, 7 Hegel, G.W.F. 161, 214f., 219 Heidegger, M. 1–5, 6–8, 10f., 140, 198, 266, 300–302, 304, 307–309, 331, 346, 369, 374–379 Helmholtz, H. von 7, 161f. Herder, J.G. von 214 Hobbes, T. 237 Humboldt, A. and W. von 214 Hume, D. 25, 38, 270 Husserl, E. 6–11, 136, 143, 151, 159, 177f., 181, 191, 195, 291, 301f., 307, 309, 313f., 316, 328–350, 354–357, 362–364, 369–371, 373–379 James, W. 1, 172 Jaspers, K. 6f. Kant, I. 6, 11, 20f., 24, 40, 57, 186, 198, 267, 292, 300, 302, 306, 316, 318, 335, 359f., 370 Kripke, S.A. 200 Leibniz, G.W.

231–233, 286

390

Author Index

Leyendecker, H. 374 Lewis, D.K. 241f., 276, 279f. Locke, J. 135, 363 Macarthur, D. 241, 246 Marx, K. 308 Mersenne, M. 226–228, 232, 234, 250, 256, 298 Moore, G.E. 48 Mulhall, S. 1 Natorp, P. 6f., 104, 277f., 316, 335 Nietzsche, F. 3f. Peacocke, C. 131f., 136, 192, 208f., 255 Peirce, C.S. 9, 26f., 43 Plato 266 Polt, R.F.H. 1, 3 Popper, K. 226 Putnam, H. 197, 199f., 315 Quine, W.V.O.

100

Reid, T. 161f., 187 Rickert, H. 3–5, 219 Rorty, R. 1, 3f., 64–66, 75, 77, 81, 103, 170–175, 187, 203, 210, 219, 268, 323, 334, 349f., 359f.

Rudder-Baker, L. Ryle, G. 6

233

Schelling, F.W.J. von 214 Searle, J. 155, 197, 199, 293 Sellars, W. 1, 8, 11–13, 17, 19, 21, 23f., 36, 41, 45, 53–60, 164, 219, 250, 259, 262, 306, 314f., 317–327, 334 Sheehan, T. 1 Simmel, G. 215, 219 Smart, J. 237 Snowdon, P.F. 85, 161 Tarski, A. 29f. Taylor, C. 1, 103, 175, 211f., 217, 219, 301 van Buren, J.

1

Weber, M. 211, 217f., 225 Windelband, W. 21 Wittgenstein, L. 1, 6, 104, 138, 215, 219, 301, 303f., 313, 347–349, 352, 356f., 359 Wright, C. 9, 54, 219, 313, 348f., 352

Subject Index Animals 5, 40, 92, 96f., 120, 205, 214, 261, 307, 356, 378 – intentionality of 157f., 167–169 Apophansis 9, 22, 24, 37, 48, 130, 139, 205f., 208, 249, 257 Apperception 319f. – analytic unity of 105 – empirical 370f. Attitude, propositional 10, 24, 169, 310f. – Davidson on the social character of 103–105 Bildung 214f. Bodily movement

144f., 166, 283

Cartesian philosophy 182 Causality 25, 33, 79–81, 83, 86, 104, 108, 115, 117, 124, 150, 161, 175, 203, 235, 242, 247f., 305, 368, Causation 6, 85, 87, 112f., 115, 117, 160, 163, 196, 227, 248, 271, 281, 286, 294, 297, 311, 367 Certainty 3, 68, 71–77, 79–81, 85, 186, 190f., 194, 314, 342–346, 364, 370f. Charity, principle of 32f., 86, 94, 103 Claim, validity 5f. Closure, causal 230f., 235, 238f., 248, 264, 287, 298, 368 Cognitive psychology See cognitive science Cognitive science 243, 268, 279, 281, 296f., 358f., 362 Coherentism 8f., 13f., 16f., 28–43, 50f., 53–57, 60, 62, 65, 80f., 85, 109–112, 129, 150, 164, 176, 190, 201f., 204, 206 Community 197, 215, 219, 301f., – of inquiry 6

Conjunctivism 179, 181, 185–189, 200 – and scepticism 183–189 Conservation, laws of 264, 269f. Disjunctivism 165, 171, 176–190, 196, 200f., 326, 377 – and scepticism 179–190 Disposition, causal 115 Dualism 4, 227, 230f., 238, 248, 353, 366–368 – epiphenomenalist 227, 368 – interactionist 226, 238, 248 – of the natural and normative 4, 231, 312 – of scheme and content 2, 27f., 28, 63, 141, 162 – parallelist 227, 231–233, 368 – substance 230, 238, 248, 264, 294, 367 Eliminativism 210, 251f. Evidence, Husserl’s concept of 159 Explanation 4f., 10, 24, 31, 99f., 112–118, 126, 227, 235, 252, 285, 297, 304f., 311f. – intentional 112f., 166f. Explanatory adequacy 241, 276f., 279f. Externalism 32–34, 39, 62, 67f., 73–75, 79f., 83–86, 96, 108–111, 190f., 196–200, 295, 315, 368f. First person 20, 71, 120f., 128, 140f., 162, 164, 308, 319, 323–328, 336, 339, 341, 343–347, 355, 357, 362, 369f., 374, 377f. First philosophy 7, 265f., 280 Firstness 9, 26, 43, 47, 53–61, 129, 159, 192, 201

392

Subject Index

Functionalism 210, 296 Fusion of horizons 12, 103, 175 ‘Here-there’ character of perceptual experience 157, 192–194 Horizon, perceptual 181, 191, 195f. Idealisation 272f. Idealism 3, 341, 377 – absolute 6 – German 214, 219, 292, 300f. – objective 5, 222f., 276–278, 342 – transcendental 5 Immaterialism 264, 269, 363, 366 Impression 9, 13f., 25–27, 38f., 41f., 44f., 47–49, 54f., 57, 59f., 62f., 86, 97, 112, 122, 127–130, 138, 141, 151–154, 159, 161, 170f., 176f., 192, 202, 207–209, 216, 248f., 255, 258, 261–263, 265, 306, 321f., 324–327, 336, 357f., 378 – perceptual 41–49, 51f., 55f., 58f., 129, 141, 159, 175, 178, 180 – sense 17, 38, 161, 205, 318, 322 – sensory 208, 236, 249 Inferential role 253, 260, 379 Inferentialism 6, 379 Intention-in-action 144 Intentionality 8, 25, 47, 49, 63, 66, 68–70, 72f., 75, 78–86, 97, 99f., 103, 105, 108–110, 113, 118, 120, 122, 124, 127, 140, 143, 157f., 160f., 163–165, 181–183, 185–192, 194, 196–200, 202f., 210, 215, 219, 251f., 255, 261, 263–265, 277f., 301–305, 308, 313–319, 322f., 326–328, 330, 334–338, 340f., 343f., 346f., 354–356, 362, 364–366, 369f., 373f., 377f. – and language 143, 303–304, 377–378 – perceptual 7, 10, 56, 59f., 80, 86, 110, 124, 136, 147, 177, 187–190, 196, 252, 265, 301, 303, 305, 322 – pictorial 147 – social character of 303–304

– worldliness of empirical 10, 66–70, 75, 79f., 85, 109, 122, 164, 189–191, 194, 197–200, 203, 301, 303, 306, 308, 341, 377 Internalism 199f., 315 Interpretation 16, 33–35, 62, 66, 73–75, 78, 81, 83–86, 91–96, 99, 103, 105–113, 117, 121f., 124–127, 154, 164, 166f., 169, 172–175, 185, 191, 200–203, 260, 315f., 350 – of the sensual character of perceptual experience 151, 158 – radical 30f., 33f., 86–96, 103, 107f., 172–175, 203 Introspection 2, 20, 26, 128, 138, 141, 264, 319, 3213–328, 355, 362 Intuition 41, 57, 80, 128, 130, 131–139, 149f., 163f., 178, 205f., 208, 236, 265, 360 – eidetic 336 – in Kant 38, 40, 57, 69, 205, 302, 360 – in Sellars 22, 255 – philosophical and pre-philosophical 70, 75, 105, 291f., 315, 322, 355f. Judgement 4f., 9, 17–29, 32–35, 37f., 40–49, 51f., 56–60, 63f., 68, 76, 80, 84f., 98, 122, 124, 127f., 137, 142, 144f., 150, 157–159, 162f., 165f., 186, 192, 194, 205f., 208, 217, 220–222, 249, 253f., 257f., 261f., 283, 295, 304–306, 338, 340, 370f. – ethical 220f., Justification 5, 17, 22f., 166, 206, 209, 275f., 312 Language 5f., 29–31, 87, 172f., 214, 303, 312 – philosophy of 1, 6 – public character of 104, 303 Lebensphilosophie 2–4, 6, 301. See also philosophy of life Life, philosophy of 309

Subject Index

Metaphysics 72, 228, 247f., 265–268, 274–278, 280f., 292, 295, 297, 299f., 303f., 322, 331, 353, 358, 363f., 366, 368, 375 Myth of the Given 8, 13f., 16–18, 20–24, 28f., 36–43, 53–55, 57, 111, 129, 150, 159, 176, 204–206 Naturalism 72, 207, 210–212, 216, 218–220, 223–226, 235, 237, 242, 244–246, 248–250, 253, 255, 257, 265f., 268–274, 276–281, 287f., 291f., 294f., 298f., 305–307, 309–312, 316, 351–354, 356, 358–360, 362–364, 369, 376 – bald 83, 207, 209f., 215, 218–220, 224f., 233, 237, 250f., 254, 310, 331, 360 – epistemological 226 – ontological 224–235, esp. 226; 238f., 241–245, 247–251, 255, 257, 260, 265f., 268, 273, 284, 295, 315, 352, 358, 364f., 368. See also naturalism – smooth 83, 218f., 223f., 231, 233, 238, 240, 253–255, 265, 312, 331, 352 Natural philosophy 226–228, 292, 366, 375 Nature 6, 8, 72, 113, 207–220, 222–232, 234–242, 245–248, 251, 255–257, 260, 262, 264, 266, 269–271, 273–276, 280f., 284, 286–288, 291–293, 295–300, 307–309, 312, 315f., 322, 330, 352f., 356, 360, 364, 366–368, 375, 378 – modern metaphysics of 247, 275f., 281, 292, 295, 297, 322, 353, 364, 366, 368, 375 – second 214–217, 219–221, 223f., 240, 298, 300–303, 307–309, 312f., 360, 377 neo-Kantianism 2–7, 21,119f., 219, 268, 309, 312, 331, 359f. – Marburg 4, 6f., 104, 274–278 Norms and normativity 3–6, 8, 13, 20, 34, 172, 197, 207, 210, 212f.,

393

215f., 218, 220f., 223, 231, 251, 254f., 259, 264, 269, 273, 312, 331 Ontology 72, 256, 264, 266–268, 304, 315, 355f., 369, 375f. Perception of time and change 143f., 167, 195, 327 Perceptual horizon 181, 191, 195f. Perceptual perspective 137–139 Phenomenological epoch 328, 338, 342, 345f., 356, 362, 376 – and apperception 369–371 Physicalism 241–244, 246, 268 Platonism 214 Practice, social 104f., 215f., 219, 293, 301f., 309 Pragmatism 1–3, 6f., 74, 127, 303 Primary qualities 293 Psychology, philosophical 277f. Reasons, space of 21, 23f., 42, 63, 163, 165, 172, 205f., 209f., 213f., 222, 249, 310 Reductionism 207, 209, 238 Receptivity 5, 8f., 37, 39f., 42–45, 47–50, 53–56, 59f., 86, 111f., 122, 124, 127, 129f., 137, 139, 143, 156, 158f., 171, 175–177, 180, 190, 201, 205–209, 216–218, 224, 235–237, 239f., 249, 265, 320f. Recollection 132, 146f., 150, 155f., 178 Representation 94, 105, 120, 151, 157, 358 – nominal 22, 338 Representational mode 199 Romanticism 214f., 219, 300f., 309, 313 Rules 3, 15, 29, 120, 200, 212, 253, 258–261 Scepticism 14, 28, 39, 56f., 63, 79–81, 109, 161–165, 176–178, 187–191, 194, 201f., 222, 315, 317

394

Subject Index

– Husserl’s response to 329–331, 334, 339, 344, 370 – Davidson’s response to 64–78, 83, 85 – McDowell’s response to 179–186, 196, 222 Secondary qualities 125 Secondness 26, 43f., 54, 59f., 130, 175, 192, 201 Self 2f., 6, 8, 10, 20, 45, 69, 94, 104, 121f., 127–129, 139–141, 155, 164f., 169, 192f., 195, 257, 260f., 290f., 301, 308f., 313, 337, 346, 369, 371, 374f., 377–379 – Descartes’ conception of 227f., 364–369 – Natorp on 278 Self-consciousness 2, 74, 162–165, 369 Sensation 2, 9f., 24–28, 37f., 40, 43f., 50, 52, 54f., 57, 59, 80, 122, 124, 126, 128, 137, 141, 149f., 152, 157, 161f., 171, 205, 208, 249, 251, 257, 265, 306, 317–327, 365 – philosophical concept of 261–264 Sense data 5, 9, 17, 23, 38, 43, 98, 141, 149, 161, 187, 249 Sense-impression inference 318, 322 Sensibility 24, 50, 53, 63, 206, 208, 211–213, 217, 222, 236 Spirit, objective 215, 219, 300–302, 309 Spontaneity 8f., 20f., 37, 39f., 43f., 49f., 54–56, 60, 86, 111f., 122, 124, 127, 129f., 137, 139, 143, 149, 156, 158f., 171, 176f., 180, 190, 201, 205–213, 216–218, 224, 235–237, 239f., 249, 255, 262, 264f., 310, 364 Stellungnahme 119 Subject 2, 6, 15, 18, 20, 24, 26, 28, 31, 48, 51f., 63, 66, 68–70, 72–76, 78–85, 88, 97, 99, 103, 105, 108–110, 117f., 120, 122, 124f.,

127–129, 131f., 139–141, 145, 155, 157, 160, 162, 169, 177f., 181, 183, 185f., 189–200, 202, 215, 238, 240, 250, 254, 258–260, 263f., 294, 299–303, 305, 309, 313–320, 323, 326, 328, 334–337, 339–346, 354–357, 362, 369–378 – Descartes’ conception of 227f., 364–369 Subjectivity 3–6, 8, 111, 120, 122, 127, 257, 260f., 291, 301, 313, 346, 376 Thirdness 26, 43f., 54, 192 Tradition 214f., 301, 303, 307–309, 316 – philosophical 1f., 6, 9–11, 13, 143, 161, 268, 302f., 304, 378f. Triangulation 101–107 Truth 4f., 7f., 11, 29, 33 – coherence criterion of 34f. – correspondence theory of 50 – Tarskian theory of 29–31 World 10, 14–16, 18f., 21, 32, 35f., 44, 48, 63–86, 91f., 97, 99, 101f., 104, 108–110, 118f., 143, 149, 173, 175, 177f., 182–184, 186–191, 195f., 198–203, 208, 222, 226, 230, 234–236, 248, 267, 271f., 281, 286, 294f., 297–310, 312f., 315–317, 330, 339–346, 352, 356, 360, 366–371, 375–379 – Descartes’ ontology of 72, 375 – in Davidson’s causal sense 68f., 79f., 82–86, 108–110, 140, 190f., 203 – in the perceptual and intentional sense 79f., 82–86, 108–110, 118, 122f., 124f., 140f., 160f., 163f., 190f., 200, 203, 294, 302–304 – phenomenological concept of 301f., 307–312 – possible 303