McDowell
In his book Mind and World, John McDowell attempts to give an account of experience that avoids two potential pitfalls driven by two assumptions that appear to be in tension. One assumption is that the ability to have thoughts at all depends on the ability to think thoughts that are empirically based. The world, that is, must have some input to our thought. The other assumption is that thoughts are essentially rationally connected and that this rational connection depends on both elements that are connected being conceptually structured. Our only model of a rational connection is between two conceptually structured entities. An account of the empirical grounding of thought thus oscillates, according to McDowell, between two opposing but unsatisfactory positions depending on which of the two assumptions dominates. Playing up the second, it can take the form of a coherentist account of thought. A belief is justified if it coheres with our other beliefs, for example. But if so, this picture threatens to undermine any connection between thought and the empirical world. It becomes a frictionless spinning in the void. If an account plays up the first assumption then it may take the form of a commitment to what McDowell following the US philosopher Wilfrid Sellars calls the ‘Myth of the Given’ [Sellars 1997]. Thought is, indeed, connected to the empirical world but only, impossibly, via brute causal impacts that cannot, in fact, sustain any kind of rational constraint on what we ought to think.
The seesaw can be avoided by crediting experience itself with a conceptual structure. When, for example, we open our eyes, our conceptual capacities are passively drawn on. To articulate this position, McDowell quotes Kant: ‘Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind’ [Kant 1929: 93, A51, B75]. Providing that the intuitions and concepts that together form empirical experiences are not thought of as potentially separable elements of a compound, Kant’s slogan forms a clue to a description of experience that avoids the oscillation.
Just as experience is conceptually structured, so, McDowell argues, is the behavioural ‘output’ of thought. Echoing the Kantian slogan above he says: ‘Similarly, intentions without overt activity are idle, and movements of limbs without concepts are mere happenings, not expressions of agency’ [McDowell 1994: 89]. So action, like perception, is permeated with conceptual rationality.
When a rational agent catches a frisbee, she is realizing a concept of a thing to do. In the case of a skilled agent, she does not do that by realizing other concepts of things to do... But she does realize a concept of, say, catching this…
When a dog catches a frisbee, he is not realizing any practical concept; in the relevant sense, he has none. The point of saying that the rational agent, unlike the dog, is realizing a concept in doing what she does is that her doing, underr a specification that captures the content of the practical concept that she is realizing, comes within the scope of her practical rationality. [McDowell 2007a: 368-9]
Dreyfus rejects this view. He asks, explicitly and rhetorically:
Can we accept McDowell’s Sellarsian claim that perception is conceptual ‘all the way out,’ thereby denying the more basic perceptual capacities we seem to share with prelinguistic infants and higher animals? More generally, can philosophers successfully describe the conceptual upper floors of the edifice of knowledge while ignoring the embodied coping going on on the ground floor; in effect declaring that human experience is upper stories all the way down? [Dreyfus 2006: 43]
Dreyfus offers a number of arguments against McDowell’s view and in defence of his own deeply tacit account of skilled coping. But are his arguments compelling? If not, what is McDowell’s rival account of the role of concepts in practical action. What picture of tacit knowledge would this give? And how tacit would the result be?
Reading
Dreyfus, H.L. (2006) ‘Overcoming the myth of the mental’ Topoi 25: 43-49
Dreyfus, H.L. (2007a) ‘The Return of the Myth of the Mental’ Inquiry 50, 4: 352–365.
Dreyfus, H.L. (2007b) ‘Response to McDowell’ Inquiry 50, 4: 371–377.
McDowell, J. (2007a) ‘Response to Dreyfus’ Inquiry, 50: 366-370
McDowell, J. (2007b) ‘What Myth?’ Inquiry, 50: 338-351
Reflections on McDowell
