McDowell and reason externalism

The problem discussed in ‘Knowledge and the internal’ is more general than the problem of other minds discussed in the previous section. But McDowell’s suggested solution is similar. Schematically, he rejects the view that construes the criteria for other minds as withdrawn from embracing those other minds (or more precisely their expression) and back in the direction of the putatively knowing subject as far as the skin of the other person. On the mistaken view, the subject can ensure that the criteria are satisfied but only, according to McDowell, at the risk of making the actual obtaining of other minds an accidental extra. Similarly in this more general context, McDowell rejects the idea that withdraws good reasons back from the world in this case as far as the subject’s experiences. On this approach possession of good reasons can be ensured by a putatively knowing subject but only at the cost of severing the connection between those reasons and the world.

In total McDowell outlines five responses to the problem raised by the argument from illusion. They are:

1. Scepticism. This is the normal conclusion of the argument from illusion. The resources of reason, construed as not requiring that the world does one a favour, are insufficient to guarantee knowledge.
2. An implausible optimism that there are methods of basing beliefs about the world on mere appearances which are risk free.
3. A hybrid picture which combines an interiorized conception of justification with an additional external condition: truth.
4. Full blown externalist reliabilism which rejects McDowell’s Sellarsian assumption that knowledge has to do with reasons.
5. McDowell’s proposal that a standing in the space of reasons is not, after all, independent of worldly favours.

For the moment I will not consider the first two positions. McDowell also rejects the fourth - full blown reliabilism - with the comment that ‘it is at most a matter of superficial idiom that we do not attribute knowledge to properly functioning thermometers’ [McDowell 1995b: 882; 1998a: 401]. He does not aim to dissuade philosophers who take that view but instead directs his attention to those who share the intuition that knowledge is connected to the possession of reasons but then adopt the third, hybrid position above.

The hybrid position fits naturally with a traditional analysis of knowledge as justified true belief. Justification is taken to be an ‘internal’ condition and a subject can ensure that it is met. It is matter of ensuring the pedigree of a belief and thus, hopefully, its reliability or likeliness of truth. But it is merely a necessary, and not a sufficient, condition for knowledge for which a further, external, condition has also to be met. That further condition is truth.

There are two key difficulties with this position. Firstly, placing truth and reason on different sides of the divide between the internal and external rules out the role that reason is surely supposed to play: ensuring the reliability of methods of arriving at beliefs [McDowell 1995b: 884; 1998a: 403]. The judgement that a method really is reliable, and does not just appear to be so, is one whose correctness depends on a favour from the world. Thus it cannot be established by reason if that is restricted to areas where no such favours are required. (Note that the hybrid position contrasts with conventional externalist reliabilist epistemology. In that latter case, the reliability of a method of arriving at beliefs is not assessed by a putative knower. It is simply a fact about the method, a worldly fact. Reliability is, as it were, assessed from a perspective external to the knower.)

Secondly, the division undermines a central motivation for a concept of knowledge: that knowledge is not merely accidentally true belief. On the hybrid conception, the justificatory condition can be met whether or not a belief turns out to be true. Its truth depends on a favour of the world which in turn seems a mere accidental addition to possession of an internally constituted justification. McDowell puts this by asking ‘how can the unconnected obtaining of the fact have any intelligible bearing on an epistemic position that the person’s standing in the space of reasons is supposed to help constitute?’ [McDowell 1995b: 884; 1998a: 403]. This picks up the same point made against a conventional view of criteria as defeasible. If so, the obtaining of the fact which is criterially supported seems an accidental extra which cannot contribute to a knower’s epistemic standing.

So much then for the negative arguments. They suggest that a hybrid position - combining an internal conception of reasons with a further external constraint in the form of truth - is unstable. What does that leave? And what can be said in the face of scepticism?

The key positive idea which McDowell defends is that the resources that reason can bring to bear on knowledge claims do not need to be immune to the effects of luck. He rejects the view that:

reason must be credited with a province within which it has absolute control over the acceptability of positions achievable by its exercise, without laying itself open to risk from an unkind world. [McDowell 1998a: 442]

In other words, on the favoured account, luck enters at a different stage from the hybrid picture. Even to enjoy a particular epistemological status - a ‘standing in the space of reasons’ - requires luck. But no further luck is required to transform that degree of justification or warrant into knowledge.

Reading

- McDowell, J. (1995) ‘Knowledge and the Internal’. Available at http://www.jstor.org/pss/2108338. Reprinted in his Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality.