摘要 這篇哲學論文是對約翰.麥克道爾(John McDowell)對「主體性」(subjectivity)看 法的一個探究。這個計畫由兩部分所組成。一方面,我將討論麥克道爾如何理解 並回應他所處理的諸多議題;另一方面,我將藉由考慮主體性的不同面向來進行 相關的討論:一個主體是一個存在世界中的知覺者、知識者、思想者、說話者、 行動者、具人格者(person)、以及(自我)意識者。我藉由指出並消解一個出自於「理 性動物」這個概念的緊張關係來開始這個探究:人類是自然的,卻也同時是理性 的。稍後這個探究藉由考慮麥克道爾的「第二自然∕天性」(second nature)概念 如何使我們成為具有多重面貌的人類主體來推進。透過細究麥克道爾的診斷與回 應,現代與當代哲學中的兩個中心錯誤–狹窄的自然觀以及「笛卡兒式的內在空 間」(Cartesian inner space)–將被指出並且拒斥。 在導論章裡我首先建議我們應該為某個對「世界」的看法留下空間。我進一 步論證「心靈性」(mentality)具有許多面向,而了解這些面向便是去了解人類主 體的多重面貌。在第一章裡,我解釋為了消解「理性動物」這個概念所產生的緊 張關係,亞里斯多德(Aristotle)的「第二自然∕天性」概念如何被引進。其後我 回應一些對這個策略的擔憂,包括萊特(Crispin Wright)及其它哲學家的批評。高 達美(Hans-Georg Gadamer)的「世界∕環境」區分也被引介並關聯到麥克道爾的 思想。第二章討論知覺與知識;麥克道爾的主要標的–笛卡兒式的內在空間–被 引進並批評。我也對史卓(Barry Stroud)與布雷克本(Simon Blackburn)的相關立場 進行評價。稍後我把心靈與世界(Mind and World)的主題和現有的脈絡關聯起 來;具體來說,我討論麥克道爾對戴維森(Donald Davidson)與康德(Immanuel Kant) 的引用與延伸。然後我討論一個常被提及的「觀念論」指控,以及布蘭登(Robert Brandom)的「殘餘笛卡兒主義」(residual Cartesianism)批評。第三章專注於庫律 普基(Saul Kripke)的維根斯坦(Ludwig Wittgenstein),指出在規則依循背後的一個 主要論題是內在空間模型的一個版本,而且庫律普基的維根斯坦其實並不是真正 的維根斯坦。我回應來自庫許 (Martin Kusch)的許多批評;達美特 (Michael Dummett)對化約論的要求也被駁斥。其後,我考慮戴維森的「無語言」宣稱, 並討論麥克道爾在多大的程度上同意他。第四章我衡量來自德雷弗斯(Hubert Dreyfus)關於行動和行動者的批評。我討論麥克道爾如何論證德雷弗斯與梅洛龐 蒂(Maurice Merleau-Ponty)都犯了「無身體的智性主體迷思」(the Myth of the Disembodied Intellect)。討論當中也回應了艾爾斯(Michael Ayers)的智性主義指 控。其後我引入麥克道爾對帕菲特(Derek Parfit)人格看法、以及對戴維森對心物 關聯說法的批評。在第五章我專注於意識和自我意識。麥克道爾將他對帕菲特的 論證應用在康德身上,但基尼斯弗(Maximilian de Gaynesford)認為麥克道爾誤讀 了康德。我為麥克道爾回應這些批評。我進一步把這個討論關聯到麥克道爾對「概 念架構–內容二元論」(scheme-content dualism)的攻擊。這把我們帶領到麥克道 爾式看法對「感質」(qualia)的拒斥,並進一步到錯覺論證脈絡下「意向主義」 (intentionalism)和「選言主義」(disjunctivism)的爭論。我批評克瑞(Tim Crane)設 想意向主義以及錯覺論證的方式。我也討論了許多版本的選言主義。在結論章 裡,我表達了對麥克道爾「自我決定主體性」(self-determining subjectivity)這個 概念的疑慮。根據麥克道爾,人類的自由為「理由空間中的因果關係」(causations in the space of reasons)所構成,但如同賈斯金(Richard Gaskin)所指出,對它的一 個完整說明尚未被提供。我以一些關於要如何填滿這個麥克道爾式圖像的約略想 法來作結。 Abstract This essay is an inquiry into John McDowell's thinking on 'subjectivity.' The project consists in two parts. On the one hand, I will discuss how McDowell understands and responds to the various issues he is tackling; on the other, I will approach relevant issues concerning subjectivity by considering different aspects of it: a subject as a perceiver, knower, thinker, speaker, agent, person and (self-) conscious being in the world. The inquiry begins by identifying and resolving a tension generated by the very idea of 'rational animal': human beings are at the same time natural and rational. Later the inquiry proceeds by considering how McDowell's notion of 'second nature' enables us to be human subjects with many faces. By going through the diagnoses and responses of McDowell, two central problems in modern and contemporary philosophy – the narrow conception of nature and the Cartesian inner space model – are identified and repelled. In Episode N I first urge that we should leave room for a certain notion of 'world.' I further argue that mentality has many aspects, and to understand those aspects is to understand the many faces of human subject. In Episode I the Aristotelian notion of 'second nature' is discussed in order to resolve the tension in the very idea of 'rational animal.' Later I reply to some worries about this maneuver, including the objection from Crispin Wright. Hans-Georg Gadamer's distinction between world and environment is introduced and related to McDowell's thinking. Episode II discusses perception and knowledge; McDowell's main target – the Cartesian inner space – is introduced and criticized. Barry Stroud's and Simon Blackburn's positions are evaluated. Later I connect the main theme of Mind and World to the present context; in particular, I discuss McDowell's invocation of Donald Davidson and Immanuel Kant. And then I discuss a common accusation of idealism, and Robert Brandom's accusation of 'residual individualism.' Episode III concentrates on Saul Kripke's Wittgenstein, arguing that the master thesis behind the rule-following paradox is a version of the inner space model, and that Kripke's Wittgenstein is not Wittgenstein. Martin Kusch's objections are answered; Michael Dummett's demand of reductionism is rebutted. After this, I turn to Davidson's 'no language' claim, and discuss to what extent McDowell agrees with him. In Episode IV I evaluate objections from Hubert Dreyfus concerning action and agency. I discuss how Dreyfus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty commit 'the Myth of the Disembodied Intellect' identified by McDowell. I answer Michael Ayer's charge of intellectualism in passing. Later I bring in McDowell's objections to Derek Parfit on personhood and to Davidson on the mind-body relation. In Episode V I focus on consciousness and self-consciousness. McDowell applies his argument against Parfit to Kant, but Maximilian de Gaynesford dissents. I reply to his objections on McDowell's behalf. I further connect this to McDowell's attacks on the dualism of scheme and content. This leads to my McDowellian rejection to the existence of qualia, and further brings me to the debate between intentionalism and disjunctivism in the context of the argument from illusion. I argue against Tim Crane's ways of conceiving issues about intentionalism and the argument from illusion. Varieties of disjunctivism are also discussed. In my Epilogue, I express my worry about McDowell's notion of 'self-determining subjectivity.' According to McDowell, human freedom consists in causations in the space of reason, but as Richard Gaskin points out, a satisfying story of it is yet to be provided. I close this essay with some rough ideas about how to fill in the details of the McDowellian picture. World and Subject With John McDowell Conference on McDowell's Philosophy March 2006 W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T ‧‧‧ Themes from McDowell ‧‧‧ Huei Ying (Tony) Cheng N A T I O N A L C H E N G – C H I U N I V E R S I T Y Department of Philosophy Taipei, Taiwan With My Parents Their 23rd Wedding Anniversary October 2003 獻給我的父母, 鄭松茂 張艾蓉 Contents Analytical Contents ix Preface (in Chinese) xix Preface xxv Episode N. The Many Faces of Human Subject 1 Episode I. Cogito and Homo sapiens 10 Episode II. Perceiver and Knower 23 Episode III. Thinker and Speaker 47 Episode IV. Agent and Person 72 Episode V. Apperceiver and Homo sentiens 98 Epilogue. Self-Determining Subjectivity 126 Bibliography 133 Analytical Contents Episode N. The Many Faces of Human Subject World 1. I introduce the main theme of this essay, distinguishing my leading concern – human subject and its place in the world – from the one in philosophy of mind in the narrow sense, i.e. about the mind and its place in nature. The notion of 'nature' will be pivotal throughout the essay, so I intend to have a more careful treatment of it. 2. I discuss why my title starts with 'world' rather than 'subject.' In doing this, the central thesis of the essay – the world and minded human subject are constitutively interdependent – is anticipated. A neutral attitude towards the notion of 'world' is recommended through considering the traditional way of conceiving the problem of perception: metaphysics first (realism or not), and then epistemology (directness or not). A. D. Smith, who exemplifies this way of thinking, assumes that we have the world at the beginning. I argue that the methodology behind this way of thinking is metaphysically biased. A similar failure, though with the opposite direction, is attributed to René Descartes, in particular his 'method of doubt.' In Descartes' case, the world is 'bracket' at the starting point. Subject 1. Here I mainly argue for two points. First, the problems about mentality and those about human subject should be tackled together, for to think otherwise is to separate 'mind' and 'self.' Second, to understand human subject is to understand various aspects of it, for a self is always a functioning self. I also distinguish 'subject' from 'self' in the course of discussion, arguing that only the former is broad enough for my purpose. Analytical Contents x 2. John McDowell, my main figure, is introduced at this point. I note that his style of philosophizing creates difficulties for his commentators. In particular, we need to balance between the question-oriented and the figure-centered styles. I emphasis more on the latter because I hope to provide a more systematic investigation of McDowell's philosophy as an integrated whole and its place in the philosophical map. 3. I identify two strands of my project. The first one is about the tension between the rational and the natural; the second one is about how the biological-rooted rational capacities enable us to be perceivers, knowers, thinkers, speakers, agents, persons, and (self-) conscious subjects. I emphasize the latter strand. And I summarize McDowell's engagements with other philosophers, including Aristotle, Robert Brandom, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Crispin Wright, Saul Kripke, Michael Dummett, Donald Davidson, Hubert Dreyfus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Derek Parfit, and Immanuel Kant, among others. I also say why I need an epilogue on self-determining subjectivity. Episode I. Cogito and Homo sapiens Nature 1. The tension between reason and nature (conceived with scientific terms) is characterized, and the fact that to have a satisfying self-image is to relieve this putative tension is noted. 2. Wilfrid Sellars's remark is quoted here to pave the way for distinguishing 'the space of reasons' and 'the realm of law,' corresponding to Sellars's 'manifest image' and 'scientific image.' I introduce two ways of confronting this distinction – bald naturalism and rampant platonism – and discuss why McDowell thinks both of them are unsatisfying. Nurture 1. McDowell's alternative picture – a naturalism of second nature, or naturalized platonism – is described as a middle course between bald naturalism and rampant platonism. I then briefly discuss the notion of 'second nature' in Aristotle. The naturalistic credential of 'phronesis' is urged by relating it to the notion of Bildung in German philosophy. And then I discuss how McDowell invokes these resources to argue against a factorizing understanding of Aristotle's thought that humans are rational animals. 2. Two lines of objection are described and answered. They concern the contrast between the space of reasons and the realm of law, and the differences between naturalized and rampant platonism. Two key points are argued; first, there are two Analytical Contents xi kinds of causality according to McDowell, and second, McDowell never attempts to knock rampant platonism down. 3. McDowell's view on mere animals is illustrated by the distinction between world and environment from Hans-Georg Gadamer. The notion of 'world' is connected to 'language,' 'freedom,' and 'openness.' I explain how this distinction helps us avoid two strands in the Cartesian thinking, that mere animals are automata, and humans are immaterial souls. 4. Brandom's accusation of residual individualism is partially answered by considering McDowell's criticism to Davidson's 'triangulation,' and a reservation of McDowell's presentation of Davidson – that is, triangulation is between 'self-standing subjects' – is made. Episode II. Perceiver and Knower Primeness 1. I invoke Timothy Williamson's two notions 'broadness' and 'primeness' to illustrate the differences between internalism and weak / strong externalism: internalism rejects both, weak externalism accepts broadness but rejects primeness, and strong externalism accepts both. 2. How Cartesian 'method of doubt' results in the 'inner space model' is discussed. McDowell's objection to skepticism is distinguished from others' ones, for example Barry Stroud's objection to the KK principle. The case of perception is identified as a prominent example of the inner space model. I discuss the debate between the common kind theory and disjunctivism, and relate this to the traditional debate about the analysis of knowledge raised by Edmund Gettier. Later an objection from Simon Blackburn is discussed and answered. 3. McDowell argues that the inner space model makes intentionality unavailable to us, because on that model we are never in touch with the world. Two motivations of the inner space model – from modern science and first-person authority – are damped: the former unjustly eliminates the space of reasons, and the latter renders our authority excessive. A stronger argument from the Fregean sense is answered by introducing the correct understanding of the notion of 'the cognitive realm.' 4. I go back to the parallel story in epistemology. The relation between justification and epistemic luck is strengthened in McDowell's picture. And then I discuss how McDowell's argument against the 'interiorization of the space of reasons' works against the traditional hybrid view of knowledge. According to him, the traditional view cannot make sense of our critical reasons and epistemic lucks, and it is ad hoc as far as skepticism is concerned. Traditionalist' argument from BIV is also answered by Analytical Contents xii noting the distinction between justification and exculpation. Openness 1. Primeness naturally leads to openness. I discuss how McDowell combines Kant's discursivity thesis and Davidson's objection with the dualism of scheme and content. The dialectic between coherentism and the Myth of the Given is characterized, with McDowell's 'seesaw' metaphor: we need external as well as rational constraint, but the seesaw seems to show that we cannot have it both ways. Bald naturalism appears here as a possible way of dismounting the seesaw through repudiating the sui generis character of the space of reasons. And then I introduce McDowell's central claim in his Locke Lecture that experiences are passively conceptual all the way out. 2. McDowell's central transcendental argument concerning how intentionality is possible is discussed. And his denial of 'the ontological gap' is explained. I then turn to the charge of idealism against the 'unboundedness of the conceptual' and how McDowell uses the act / content distinction to reply. 3. Brandom argues against McDowell's emphasis on 'experience,' and thinks that the emphasis betrays a 'residual individualism.' I reply to this by clarifying the notion of 'experience' adopted by McDowell; the significance of this is reflected by the fact that the same misreading seems to occur in other philosophers' thoughts, notably Michael Ayers. This leads to the question about how McDowell conceives the social elements of intentionality. Episode III. Thinker and Speaker Custom 1. I investigate McDowell's conception of the social elements of intentionality by considering his criticisms to Kripke's Wittgensteinian skeptical paradox. Kripke's skeptical doubt from 'the infinite regress of interpretation' and his corresponding skeptical solution are characterized. 2. Wittgenstein's remarks in PI §201 are referred to indicate a way to say no to the skeptic. I then explain why we should see Wittgenstein as distancing himself from reductionism about meaning. McDowell's various citations from Wittgenstein are interpreted, and Kripke's ways of pressing the skeptical challenge are discussed. In answering the challenge, I introduce Wittgenstein's notion of 'bedrock.' 3. I contrast McDowell's way of understanding 'communal' practices with Kripke's and Wright's ones; the former respects Wittgenstein's notion of 'custom,' while the latter renders a group of people 'a wooden community.' It turns out that Brandom's picture has a similar problem. I connect the wooden picture to the inner space model Analytical Contents xiii introduced before. 4. Kripke's objections to McDowell's so-called 'primitivism' are discussed. I put the emphasis on objections raised by Martin Kusch. Kusch argues that dispositionalism does not rely on the infinite regress of interpretation, and McDowell's view is similar to dispositionalism. I dispute both of these. In addition, I rebut Kusch's insistence that Kripke's picture is essentially social. I also disagree with his way of connecting the indeterminacy of meaning to reductionism. Finally, I briefly argue that McDowell advocates a delicate version of realism about meaning. 5. I trace the source of Kripke's and Wright's conviction in reductionism to the traditional dichotomy between the Cartesian and the Rylean, between psychologism and behaviorism. Quine is also responsible for this dichotomy. I discuss Dummett's effort to avoid the problem and McDowell's criticisms to it. Dummett distinguishes between 'full-blooded' and 'modest' theory of meaning, and thinks the latter unavoidably collapses into psychologism. I explain how McDowell invokes his conception of 'membership' to sustain the claim that in conversations we 'hear someone else's meaning in his words.' I then shift from McDowell's emphasis on custom and in turn on language to Davidson's claim that 'there is no such a thing as a language.' Bildung 1. I introduce Davidson's target – the conventional view of communication – and his putative counterexamples from malapropism. Although McDowell agrees on this, he nevertheless dissent to Davidson's 'leap,' that a public language plays no role in the constitution of subjectivity. This reflects their different conceptions of 'language games.' 2. I argue that McDowell sides with Davidson that we should not participate the rule-following discussions generated by Kripke's celebrated work on Wittgenstein. This involves giving up the conviction that communication is constituted by shared rules or conventions. The relevance of Bildung is also indicated. Episode IV. Agent and Person Embodiment 1. I start the argumentation by deepen my characterization of conceptualism, which has been introduced in the context of 'openness.' I emphasize McDowell's distinction between 'responsiveness to reasons' and 'responsiveness to reasons as such.' This concerns the relation he draws between conceptuality and rationality. Another crucial distinction about the way conceptual capacities enters the picture – between 'exercise' Analytical Contents xiv and 'operative' – is also explained. I then consider Ayers's objection that the picture recommended by McDowell makes our experiences 'quasi-linguistic.' This is a misunderstanding based on the dualism of the sensory and the intellectual. I then show that McDowell has a parallel story for 'action,' indicating that the locus of the disagreement between him and Dreyfus is the very idea of 'passivity' in perceptions and actions. 2. I note that Dreyfus launches his objections by contrasting McDowell with Samuel Todes's Body and World. Dreyfus first introduces his general framework between 'detached rule-following' and 'situation-specific way of coping.' I argue that actually McDowell regards conceptual capacities as situation-specific, and we can see this in his objections to Kripke's 'infinite regress of interpretation.' 3. Dreyfus improves his framework by replacing the original distinction with the one between 'subjectivity' and 'absorption.' However, I argue that his example from the baseball player Chuck Knoblauch betrays his confusion of 'conceptual mindedness' and 'attention.' I then argue that McDowell never regards attention as central in his picture. And I explain why Dreyfus's conception of self-awareness is problematic and how McDowell argues that Dreyfus and sometimes Maurice Merleau-Ponty lapse into 'the Myth of the Disembodied Intellect.' 4. I argue that Dreyfus conflates the Myth of the Given and foundationalism, and thereby unwittingly falls into the former: his notion of 'solicitation' belongs to the realm of law, but it is used by him to do the 'base-providing' work. I then note that Dreyfus is ambivalent about the status of human body: sometimes it is distinctively human-like, but sometimes it is like an automaton. 5. I remind my readers that the Myth of the Disembodied Intellect is in effect a version of the inner space model. And I connect McDowell's talks about 'I' to his conception of 'personhood.' Embedment 1. Derek Parfit's reductive approach to develop John Locke's general picture about self-consciousness is introduced. Against this, McDowell elaborates Gareth Evans's argument based on 'identification-freedom.' Parfit's thinking is faulty because in responding to the identification-freedom in the first person case, he implicitly holds the so-called 'narrow assumption.' 2. Since the trouble is due to the narrow assumption, McDowell's argument against it is from the notion of 'broadness'; in this context, this amounts to the emphasis on the third-person perspective. McDowell's diagnosis of Parfit is that the latter, as well as many others, mistakenly thought the root of the Cartesian is immaterialism. I then explain how McDowell reconciles Locke's insight with 'animalism.' Later I discuss Analytical Contents xv McDowell's argument that any account based on the notion of 'quasi-memory' – first introduced by Sydney Shoemaker and endorsed by Parfit – nevertheless commits the factorizing way of conceiving memory. 3. In talking about personhood, McDowell seems to oblige himself to take a stance towards the mind-body problem. I envisage what McDowell would say by discussing his criticisms against Davidson's anomalous monism. Two motivations – the unity of science and avoidance of Cartesian dualism – are dislodged. I explain why McDowell thinks that the premise to be renounced is 'the Principle of the Nomological Character of Causality.' Furthermore, McDowell argues that Davidson's position leads to epiphenomenalism. Finally, McDowell's own position 'event dualism' is sketched but without elaborations. Episode V. Apperceiver and Homo sentiens Objectivity 1. The Evans-Strawson argument based on 'identification-freedom' is applied to Kant's thinking about 'apperception.' McDowell argues that the interdependence of self-consciousness and consciousness of the world argued by Kant in Transcendental Deduction would be more satisfying if it can accommodate the fact that humans are 'bodily presences in the world.' Unlike Parfit, Kant is not attracted by reductionism; instead he argues that the 'I think' must be a merely formal condition. Nevertheless, McDowell's argument against Parfit works in Kant's case as well. 2. Here I consider Maximilian De Gaynesford's objections that McDowell's Kant is not Kant. His reconstruction of McDowell's argument, however, is problematic at many points. For example, he thinks that McDowell's argument relies crucially on the notion of 'reference,' and that McDowell mistakenly attributes the anti-immaterialism premise and the narrow assumption to Kant, and so on. I dispute all of these. 3. I argue that McDowell's argument against Kant's formal 'I think' is an example of his general denial of 'scheme-content dualism.' Davidson's initial introduction to this dualism is discussed. I concentrate on McDowell's construal of it, discussing several applications of his criticisms, including anti-interiorization of the space of reasons, the conceptuality of experience, a novel reading of the private language argument, and his repudiation of 'Nomological Character of Causality,' the fourth dogma of empiricism. McDowell's thought is that we can retain real objectivity only if we firmly reject forms of scheme-content dualism. Subjectivity 1. The narrow sense of 'subjectivity' – the 'what it is like' respect – is the main Analytical Contents xvi theme here. I start with Ned Block's claim that the great chasm in philosophy of mind is between the qualia theory and representationalism. The essential features of 'qualia' are identified as 'non-cognitive' and 'intrinsic.' I argue that McDowell case against them can be found in his holism of the mental and his objections to scheme-content dualism. As a result, McDowell is a representationalist in philosophy of mind. 2. 'Representationalism' and 'intentionalism' are often interchangeable terms, so I need to address Tim Crane's claim that intentionalism and disjunctivism are incompatible. In order to engage with this point, I investigate versions of McDowell's disjunctivism. According to my interpretation, McDowell commits state, reason, content, and (weak) phenomenal disjunctivism (the 'state' and 'reason' ones are my own terminology). I take issue with Alex Byrne and Heather Logue concerning McDowell's commitment to metaphysical (in my term, 'state') disjunctivism. 3. Since the issues between disjunctivism and intentionalism originally arise from the argument from illusion / hallucination, I introduce a version of the argument and identify two crucial features of it, arguing that we can anchor the debate with either of them, but Crane's framework corresponds to neither. I prefer one of the framework since it reflects nowadays' heated debate between disjunctivism and the 'common kind theory.' This framework helps us to see the essential claim of intentionalism. And I further relate the present discussion to the internalism / externalism debate. I thereby argue that the 'disjunctive versus factorizing framework' proposed by Tamar Szabó Gendler and John Hawthorne is not fine-grained enough. 4. I suggest that we should not use 'representationalism' and 'intentionalism' interchangeably. The former is a theory in philosophy of mind in general, claiming that 'all' mental facts are representational facts; the latter is a theory in philosophy of perception in particular, claiming that 'intentional object' is a better explanation than sense-datum. I also find fault in Crane's assimilation of the adverbial theory and the qualia theory. The failure to distinguish representationalism from intentionalism is due to a misunderstanding of the transparency (if any) of experience and a misreading of the main aim of the argument from illusion, I submit. I tentatively conclude that in philosophy of mind McDowell is an inter-model weak representationalist, and in philosophy of perception he is a disjunctive intentionalist. Epilogue. Self-Determining Subjectivity Freedom 1. McDowell identifies 'the space of reasons' with 'the realm of freedom,' which is closely related to our 'self-determining subjectivity.' To understand this, we need to have an intelligible notion of 'the space of reasons causation.' I agree with Richard Analytical Contents xvii Gaskin that McDowell has not provided a fully satisfying conception of it. However. I think McDowell's transcendental argument for the existence of that kind of causality is convincing. Besides, I suggest that though providing a satisfying explanation of this kind of causality does not lie in the heart of McDowell's philosophical outlook, still it would be better if we have a deeper understanding of it. 2. I note the fact that McDowell says a lot about self-determining subjectivity in the context of German Idealism, but those efforts do not directly improve the situation. My own suggestion is that self-determining subjectivity is socially real, but the details of this sketchy picture have not been wrought out. Wisdom 1. I remind that the same considerations about self-determining subjectivity apply to McDowell's thinking about practical wisdom. I suggest that philosophers of science should leave open the possibility of the naturalism of second nature, so that they can help us to understand more about causality in the space of reasons, if any. 2. I close the essay by relating McDowell's emphasis on wisdom to the familiar hierarchy of understanding from data, information, knowledge, to wisdom. McDowell provides a fruitful way for us to reconsider the importance of wisdom. I then rehearse my main theme that practical wisdom initiates us into the space of reasons, and this second nature endows each of us a cogito, which can be a perceiver, knower, thinker, speaker, agent, person, and (self-) conscious being in the world. 前言 在我的學習生涯中,支持我的人們,包括父母、親人、以及諸多師長和朋友都是 以中文為主要語言的,因此在這裡我要以我們共同的母語來表達對他們的感謝。 而因為上了大學以後,開始有了許多以英文為母語或不諳中文的師長以及朋友, 所以在後面我會有一個以英文書寫的前言。這兩段前言的內容不是重覆的。 首先最要感謝的是我的父母,鄭松茂與張艾蓉。他們除了總是給我最完善的 心理上、物質上的支持,也總是在各方面賦予我最好的培養與最大的自由。所謂 最好的培養,包括父親以耳濡目染的方式加強我的推理能力及自發態度,以及母 親透過身教以及為我挑選好的教育環境來養成我的寫作與其它基本能力。而最大 的自由是指,雖然他們都對我的發展盡心盡力,卻從未替我未來的路做出任何選 擇,而總是以輔助者的角色來陪伴我。一路走來從高中、大學的志願、碩士班、 甚至到未來的博士學位,他們對我都只有支持與鼓勵。沒有如此堅毅且貼心的父 母,就不會有今天的我。其中特別值得一提的是,父親年輕時便對哲學很有興趣, 但無奈於當時的家庭考量,使得他未能朝這個方向發展。不過他一直保持對這方 面的興趣與閱讀,並在我大學推薦甄選時,建議我選填哲學系,並給我一些相關 的基本概念。雖然後來自己所走的領域和當初理解的部分差距甚遠,但進來了這 個系所讓我發現了完完全全符合自己志向的事業,這樣的幸運都得感謝父親的判 斷,以及母親的鼓勵。此外我的所有親人們也都全力支持我,為我驕傲;他們也 同樣是我很重要的動力來源。 接下來我必需感謝我的指導老師林從一教授。我大一時林老師也剛進政大不 久,同樣是新鮮人的我們都很有決心在這個環境努力。林老師是我的哲學啟蒙老 師,他的哲學概論對我影響深遠。在這門課中不論是議題內容還是思考分析的方 式,都深深吸引著我。後來大二的語言哲學、大三的心靈哲學,讓我更加確定對 這條路的熱愛。其後透過哲學論文寫作指導這門課,我在林老師的幫助之下寫了 我的學士論文「程式運轉與人格」;這是我第一次學習寫專業的學術論文,在過 前言 xx 程中林老師給了我許多幫助。後來在他的分析哲學課上,我第一次嘗試以英文寫 期末報告,也很受他的鼓勵。大四開始旁聽林老師的研究所課程,也讓我更進一 步了解學術研究的諸多面向。這七年來我與林老師的學術互動無法以幾段話就帶 過,其中的進展與快樂是只有我自己能了解的。此外,由於我生性較為拘謹,林 老師特有的幽默也為我的學術生活增添了一些愉快。在今年的布蘭登哲學研討會 上,我們首次合寫一篇文章;我十分期待在我學成歸國後,能繼續和林老師有各 種的互動與合作。對他的啟蒙與提拔之恩,我會永遠銘記在心。 接下來我要感謝的這位十分特別;他是說中文時間和我幾乎一樣長的美籍教 授藍亭(Timothy Lane)。大四那一年我旁聽了藍老師在研究所開設的心靈哲學 課;當時上課的同學不多,老師鼓勵我們每次準備問題積極討論。在這門課裡, 我第一次學到如何把自己的想法用比較完整的方法表達出來,也確立了自己在心 靈哲學這方面的興趣。藍老師的課堂是我待過最多的,我們的學術互動也總是良 好且具啟發性。在課堂外,藍老師是我很好的朋友,即使後來因為彼此忙碌而較 少見面,我們還是會偶而聚會、打球;藍老師開玩笑說我們成了酒肉朋友。雖然 後來我因現實考量而並未在論文中採用藍老師所提倡的經驗科學研究方式,但我 謹記在心他所強調的嚴謹分析和實事求是態度。每當有外國學者訪問時,他也總 是盡力為我引薦,我因而受益良多。他可說是我的另一位啟蒙老師,而我也十分 希望未來可以與他有更進一步的合作。 再來我要感謝我口試委員方萬全教授。在我大學時期,中央研究院歐美所在 數年間辦理了「新實用主義哲學研討會」,在這個場合我對方老師印象深刻。方 老師犀利的分析和嚴謹的治學,都是身為後輩的我的最好榜樣。後來有幸在東吳 大學上了一整年方老師的兼任課程,更令我受益良多。此外,我也常透過方老師 借閱到最新的書籍,這也對我的研究很有幫助。特別值得一提的是在新實用主義 的場合裡我也結識了鄧育仁教授與何志青教授,他們在各個會議的表現也讓我學 習不少。在當鄧老師的兼任助理一學期的一段日子,每週都有機會與他討論;我 們對哲學的許多看法都不相近,因此也總是有最刺激的辯論。與何老師的學術接 觸雖然比較不直接,但這幾年下來也聽過數次他的演講,在他身上學到不少思 考。自己在學生時代就可以從中央研究院受益如此良多,也是我始料未及的。 我的另一位口試委員鄭凱元教授也同樣影響我多年。自大學時代的台灣哲學 學會以及其它許多場合,都看得到鄭老師的身影。雖然因為地緣關係使得我沒有 機會參與鄭老師的課堂,但我們在會議上和私底下也都常交換意見。鄭老師與我 年紀相對接近,也使得我們亦師亦友的情誼更為特別。在討論的過程中,鄭老師 總是對我充滿鼓勵,我期許自己以後也能以這樣正面積極的態度來面對後輩們。 在此我要特別感謝德籍教授文哲(Christian Wenzel);我與文哲老師很早就常 在研討會上碰面,但一直到我進入碩士階段才真正與他結識。在文哲老師於本所 兼課期間,我們隔週五早上碰面,下午討論這兩週大家各自的進展。我和文哲老 師分享許多哲學興趣與處事態度,即使因地緣關係而較少碰面,卻常以電子郵件 保持聯繫。我期許自己在未來能學好德文,以閱讀他的德文作品,並與他更深入 前言 xxi 討論德國哲學。這是個很困難的任務,但在他的鼓勵之下我會盡力去嘗試。 在研究的具體內容方面,影響我最深的是梁益堉教授。在梁老師的帶領之 下,我讀了 McDowell 的 Mind and World 的前半兩次,以及 A. D. Smith 的 The Problem of Perception 兩次。其中前者幾乎決定了我現在以及未來的哲學走向, 而後者奠定了我對知覺相關議題的基本想法。此外,除了內容本身,梁老師細緻 的讀書與討論方式對我也有很大幫助。可惜我碩士的後兩年梁老師因個人規劃而 暫時未在研究所開課,不過我很期待將來有更多機會與梁老師在課堂與其它場合 討論,想必屆時也會如以往一般,有十分豐富的收穫。 關於課堂上的學習,林正弘教授是另一位讓我受益良多的老師。林老師是台 灣哲學界的老前輩,雖然他本人總是過於謙虛,但其實他的重要性與貢獻是整個 社群有目共睹的。在這樣的狀況下,他卻總是和學生沒有距離,以最淺顯易懂的 方式來教導我們。在林老師的課堂上,我常不太說話,靜靜地聽老師的講解,還 有笑話。比較遺憾的是我因為時間分配的關係,上的課集中於林老師知識論方面 的課程,希望將來有機會可以和林老師學習科學哲學的部分;也希望這位可敬的 長者長保身體健康,做更多後輩的榜樣。 我也在米建國教授的課堂上學習很多。米老師與學生打成一片,也十分熱衷 於舉辦活動;我除了要感謝他在課堂上的指導外,更要謝謝他總是努力籌辦富有 意義的活動,包括迷你課程與許多大型研討會。去年我在東吳的國際分析哲學會 議上發表文章,也是米老師提供的機會。那是我第一次以英文在許多西方學者面 前發表,是很好的經驗。未來我也會以米老師為榜樣,為哲學社群盡一己之力。 在碩士生涯的初期,透過趙之振教授的讀書會我研讀了 Sellars 的'Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind',對我後來了解 McDowell 的想法很有幫助。趙老師 細膩的分析讓我印象深刻,在會議上的發表也總讓我很有收穫。趙老師也十分關 心學生,即使我們分屬不同學校,我仍受到他許多照顧;很期待今後有更多機會 向他學習。與趙老師同在清大的吳瑞媛教授也同樣對我照顧有加。在大學時,我 就對吳老師犀利的提問以及對哲學的熱忱印象深刻。吳老師也對舉辦活動很有熱 情,清大的當代哲學家系列便是由她及其同事共同努力創辦並維持至今。透過這 個活動,我有更多機會去了解 Davidson、Peacocke、McDowell、Brandom 的思想。 在最近的這一次,吳老師讓我有機會與林從一老師合寫文章與 Brandom 本人討 論,對我是很重要的經驗。未來我也會積極參與這個活動,共同延續這個重要且 美好的傳統。 我也曾上過兩次陳瑞麟教授的課程;陳老師因聽力受損,求學與研究過程一 路都比我們艱辛許多,然而在他身上我總看到堅毅與樂觀。在課堂研討會上,陳 老師不厭其煩地透過紙筆來與他人溝通,其中對學術的熱愛深深感動我。在去年 國際分析哲學會議後,我與陳老師及師母帶著學者一同前往阿里山及附近景點健 行,老師與師母對我非常照顧,那短短幾天帶給我很美好的回憶。 彭孟堯教授近年來在研究所較少開課,但我在他大學部的心靈哲學課程中受 益良多。彭老師專長的心靈哲學部分與我的興趣重疊,討論起來特別有意思。很 前言 xxii 期待以後有機會能在彭老師的研究所課堂上,更深入討論彼此都有興趣的議題。 看到彭老師的時候,通常也是看到王文方教授的時候。因為時間安排關係,我還 沒有機會在王老師的課堂上學習。王老師為人風趣,在聚會中常是話題的焦點, 加上酒量奇佳,身邊總是很熱鬧。透過王老師,我也和來自 Iowa 哲學系的老師 聊了更多有趣的事;在學術圈內能有如此快樂的記憶,讓我很珍惜。 楊金穆教授也是我很早便認識的師長之一;楊老師因為採用英式的師徒制, 我未能有機會在課堂上接受他的教導。不過楊老師常在研討會出現,此外我們也 在誠品書店遇見數次,因此也有不少交流機會。楊老師為人好客,我也被他招待 過很多次;希望未來成為同事後,能與他有更多實質的學術交流。 雖然領域不盡相同,這幾年我和苑舉正教授常因研討會而有機會碰面。苑老 師對學術充滿熱情,總是精力飽滿地在討論場合中發問。他也很喜歡和我聊學術 圈內的事,一起彼此勉勵。苑老師的專長科學哲學也是我需要加強的部分,希望 以後有機會能和苑老師多學習。 侯維之教授也是近年來常在研討會遇見的老師。侯老師發表時清晰有力,下 了台後卻總是一派輕鬆,令我印象深刻。每次在會間或會後的空檔時間,我們總 少不了有趣的話題。侯老師是另一位我因地緣關係而無法多接觸的老師,同樣也 只能寄望於將來,能夠與他有更密切的學術互動。 剛步入職業生涯的鄭喜恆教授是我去清大參加活動時總會遇到的老師;雖然 我比較少看到他發表文章的場合,但他在會中的提問常引發我更多思考。鄭老師 主要研究的實用主義以及相關的早期分析哲學也是我很有興趣的部分,將來想必 也有許多需要向他請益之處。 雖然到目前為止交流不多,與蔡政宏教授的互動也值得一記。蔡老師是林正 弘老師的學生,以前偶有機會碰面,也在林老師的課堂討論過幾次。蔡老師剛加 入東吳的哲學團隊,我不僅為他們的學生高興,也為自己以後比較有機會和他討 論而高興。蔡老師剛步入職業生涯,學術表現就令人讚賞,是後輩的最佳榜樣。 我也必需感謝帶領我進入康德哲學的張鼎國教授。大二的一整年我修習了張 老師的康德哲學,對我有深遠的影響;這門課和林從一老師的語言哲學同樣讓我 對哲學產生了無比的熱忱,而這也解釋了為什麼至今我還是繼續接觸康德及其它 德國哲學。此外我也上過張老師的德國觀念論和詮釋學,雖然都是大學部的課, 但對我後來對德國哲學的自修奠下良好的基礎。 在大學時代,蔡美麗教授也給了我很大的幫助。剛進哲學系的頭兩年,聽不 懂的課比懂的多得多,而蔡老師的課程總是淺顯易懂而不失深度,對那時的我有 很大學業上以及心理上的幫助。上研究所後,我旁聽了蔡老師討論康德第三批判 的課堂;雖然當時因為時間安排而未能完整參與,但我還是從中學習許多,蔡老 師即將退休,未來或許沒有機會在課堂上再交流,但我仍期盼能在其它場合見面。 在碩士的最後階段認識了羅麗君教授也是一件很令人高興的事。羅老師待學 生親切,上課認真並清楚,讓我對現象學有了初步的認識。在跨領域的狀況能有 那麼好的討論,讓我很珍惜。至今對現象學粗淺的了解,也讓我在意識學會的期 前言 xxiii 刊 Psyche 出版了第一篇書評。希望今後有更多機會透過羅老師對現象學有更進 一步的理解。 最後我想感謝的是謝世民教授。謝老師與我領域不同,但他對於參與活動和 討論孜孜不倦,因此在研討會上常聽到他的想法與評論。在西方學者面前,謝老 師總會很熱心地把我介紹給他們。相信未來也還是能夠常在活動中見到謝老師的 身影,也希望以後能夠有領域間合作的機會。 在學長姊方面,特別感謝大一時帶我走過西洋哲學史的王靈康學長、大二時 帶康德讀書會的蔡幸芝學姊、還有因領域相近而常保聯絡的張卜文學長。祝福你 們各自的學業順利,也期待以後與你們當同事的日子。 同學的部分我要特別感謝翟君剛。我們從大一就認識,並常常一起閒晃,走 過快樂的大學生活。他比我早開始對哲學有興趣,而在我也決定更投入以後,我 們便總是一起去參加各種活動,從一開始的台哲會、中研院的新實用主義研討 會、清大的當代哲學家系列,到後來東吳的迷你課程、北京的中英澳康德哲學暑 期班、倫敦的 Sellars 會議、還有為時一學期的 U. C. Berkeley 訪問學生、以及兩 次美國哲學學會的年會;期間的中小型活動更是不計其數。我相信我們創下的學 術活動參與紀錄是不會被打破的。在這些活動中,我們都學到很多很多,從一開 始幾乎類似的背景,到現在漸漸區分出彼此的差異,但卻仍保持重疊的研究領 域,真的很難能可貴。透過參與這些活動,我們也有很多機會一起旅遊,也因此 一起體驗了哲學以外的人生面向。他對於旅遊以及許多生活上的事都比我有研 究,我不僅常受到他的照顧,也從他身上學習了很多。此外他也總是人群中歡笑 的來源,透過他我和其它朋友也有了更多的互動,這樣的體驗真的很難得也很重 要。近年我們都要申請美國的博士班,我祝福他順利進入心目中的學校就讀,並 希望像以前一樣,與我在人生的路上一起努力、一起成長、一起分享。 我也要感謝和翟君剛與我常玩在一起的蘇郁庭。他因為家住較遠,大學一開 始不太常參與活動,但後來因為住宿的關係,我們得以更常碰面;他特別喜歡玩 一些男生的東西,我們也因此保留了中學時代青少年的一面。碩二時我們在翟君 剛的介紹下一起去補習 GRE,三人一起準備考試;其中的歡笑遠遠大於辛苦。 後來我們也一起出國考試,並參加康德暑期班。雖然蘇郁庭與我們的領域不同, 但我們還是常一同討論,是很好的學術伙伴。今後我們三人也會是很好的同事。 政大的學術伙伴還包括一起組成康德讀書會的吳晉緯、陳鳴諍、林正昊、李 政國、以及薛明立等人。晉緯與政國為討論帶入現象學的成份,鳴諍與正昊則是 康德專業,常提點我們必要的相關知識。明立是一路和我一起努力的學弟,從大 學時代的懵懂,到現在已漸有能力做獨立研究;雖然還是帶著一點傻氣,但其間 的進步讓我倍感欣慰。期許大家都勇敢朝哲學之路繼續邁進。 台大的伙伴李國揚和梁慧川與東吳的伙伴呂柏駒總是讓討論更加豐富,而私 下我們也都是好朋友。東吳的學弟妹高寬蓉、徐國益、鄭俊憲、康立孝、德龍也 給我許多幫助與陪伴。這幾年下來,政大以及其它學校有太多朋友以各種方式支 持我,實在無法一一致謝;我會記得以往與你們走過的日子,並期待以後繼續和 前言 xxiv 你們分享的時光。 碩士生涯最後的一兩年我常待在系上,和許多好友們度過難忘的校園生活; 以下只能就記憶所及列出最常見面的幾位,他們是熊、小招、柏安、小玉、老談、 蔣盃、沈汪、對不起、周大為、阿金、瑞清、small 君、小花、連媽媽、小天、 李伊、何追星、孝儀、安琪、鈺娟、亞筠、雅倩、士奇、以及小蘭學姊和阿仁學 長。很謝謝你們還有很多我一時遺漏的人們,你們都是我碩士生涯的快樂來源。 在康德暑期班認識的潘潘、倩、小詣、拉風、曉旭;在 Berkeley 認識的 Andy、 Inas、Jess、Justin、Leo、Pius,都是我的對岸好友。在兩岸問題還沒解決之前, 我已經在那裡找到了很多同伴。現在大家四散各地,期待有一天再聚首。 雖然這本碩士論文只是很小的成就,但我希望藉此前言記錄下充實我校園生 活的人們,希望他們也和我一樣快樂、希望我們以後還是可以一起快樂。 Preface In my academic life I am indebted to many people who can read my gratitude only through English, so I have this preface for them. I cannot list all of them and expatiate on my indebtedness, to be sure. My preceding preface in Chinese contains things I want to say to my families, teachers, and friends, and I shall not repeat them here. Since 2006, I have had more chances to meet western people, and those experiences are very important. In what follows I shall identify those who help me most. I would like to express my highest gratitude to Professor John McDowell. I first met him at 'Conference on McDowell's Philosophy' held by National Tsing-Hua University in March 2006, Taipei. During the three-day conference, McDowell gave his 'Intention in Action' lectures, and paid much attention to queries and criticisms from philosophers in Taiwan. At the time I talked to him during the panel discussions and meals. Although I did not understand most of what he said due to my inability in real-life English, he was very nice to me and to everyone else at that occasion. After he went back to Pittsburgh I wrote emails to him for some questions, and he kindly replied me in details. Three months later, I met him again at 'Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind after 50 Years: Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of Sellars's Lectures in the University of London.' And the latest meeting between us was at the Eastern APA annual meeting at Washington D. C., December 2006. There we had a coffee, with my best friend Wesley Chai, and we discussed my paper 'Towards a Conceptualist Account of Action: Answering Phenomenological Considerations.' McDowell read the paper carefully and told what he thought about it. The paper have evolved into a new piece 'Self, Action, and Passivity,' which is currently under review. After that I keep him posted about my progress, sometimes with questions, and he always replies me with warm helps. In this essay I venture to defend and sometimes Preface xxvi elaborate his views, and in my final episode I express my misgivings about his project: though I myself is all for the project, I do not think we McDowellians have provided the last word about relevant issues. Maybe he will not happy with what I say about him, but I hope he will understand that my reservations are due to my hope to improve the project. Anyway, I will keep trying and I really appreciate his good will. I could not imagine that I can have so much help from a person like him. At the Sellars conference I also met Professor Robert Brandom, Paul Coates, Tim Crane, Willem deVries, M. G. F. Martin, James O'Shea, Jay Rosenberg, Johanna Seibt, Paul Snowdon, Meredith Williams, and Michael Williams; all of them are very nice to me. That conference influences me permanently, so I would like to especially thank the director of Institute of Philosophy, Tim Crane, who helped me about the trip and had some discussions with me during the conference. Although I express my dissatisfactions about his various thoughts on perception, I respect him personally and expect good discussions between us in the future. I have incessant email correspondences with Paul Coates, Willem deVries, and Jay Rosenberg. I haven't had chance to peruse Coates's book The Metaphysics of Perception: Wilfrid Sellars, Perceptual Consciousness and Critical Realism, but I hope I can read it as soon as possible, maybe during my military service. I always benefit from exchanges with deVries; he is one among those who really care about students; in particular he comments on my 'Openness and the Social Initiation into the Space of Reasons,' co-authored with my supervisor Lin, presented at 'Conference on Brandom's Philosophy.' I draw some of the materials from that paper in my first and second episodes here. Brandom offers many opinions about the paper, and we discussed a lot during his trip to Taiwan; my history of meeting Brandom in this or that conference is too long, so let me skip it and just express my special thanks to him. And I am really sorry about Jay; he was always nice to me and he brought happiness to wherever he was. Although I am not a dualist, I hope he knows my appreciation and how he has influenced me on my works. I want to say thanks again to everyone I listed above; this conference means a lot to me. After the Sellars conference, Wesley and I flew to Beijing for 'Philosophy Summer School in China, 2006 Session: Kant's Philosophy.' We had Professor Sebastian Gardner, Onora O'Neill, Thomas Pogge, and Garrath Williams as our speakers. I was in Williams's seminar 'Kant's Concept of Reason in the First Critique.' He always elegantly put what he wanted to get across. I also talked a lot to Pogge and Gardner during the open discussion cessions. I thank all of them for their patience. My term paper '"Refutation of Idealism" Reconsidered' earns a distinction ranked 6th. I met Pogge again during his trip in Taiwan in March 2008, and we had a good time. I hope I can learn more about Kant from them in the future. Preface xxvii Right after that, Wesley and I visited U. C. Berkeley as visiting students in fall 2006. We enrolled in three seminars: Professor Hubert Dreyfus's and Hannah Ginsborg's 'McDowell and Merleau-Ponty,' Barry Stroud's 'Meaning, Understanding, and the Attribution of Attitudes,' and Brandon Fitelson's and Sherrilyn Roush's 'Knowledge and Its Limits.' In Dreyfus's and Ginsborg's seminar we discussed McDowell's Mind and World and part of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. I have become a McDowellian before the seminar, so I decided to defend McDowell against phenomenological considerations, and my major opponent was Dreyfus, one of the instructors. He kindly accepted my challenges, though never really convinced by me; we become good friends and I hope to learn more from him. I gained much help from Ginsborg during her office hours; she was always nice to me and took my writings seriously. The term paper now evolves into 'Self, Action, and Passivity,' as mentioned above. And it constitutes my main arguments of the fourth episode here. By the way, I would like to thank J. C. Berendzen for sending me his draft on Dreyfus's criticisms against McDowell. Joseph Rouse also helps me at this point, through emails and his paper 'Mind, Body, and World: Todes and McDowell on Bodies and Language'; he is extremely patient to reply me and I really appreciate this. In Stroud's seminar we focused on Kripke's Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, and I also benefited a lot from his office hours. The term paper, 'Between the Cartesian and the Rylean: Lessons from Kripke's Semantic Skepticism,' has evolved into 'The Skeptical Paradox and the Nature of Self,' which has been published in Aurora 2; it constitutes the main part of my third episode here. In Fitelson's and Roush's seminar we wrought on Timothy Williamson's Knowledge and Its Limits. The book itself is highly challenging, and the members of the seminar made the situation even harder for us: they were just too good; I shall mention Kenny Easwaran, Mike Titelbaum, and Professor Jonathan Vogel from U. C. Davies. But I still managed to develop my own thoughts in my term paper 'A Subjective Notion of "Evidence",' and its descendent 'Evaluating Williamson's Anti-Skepticism' has been published in Sorites 21. I am not good at this kind of epistemology, but I took the seminar very seriously. I thank both Fitelson and Roush for their help and patience. Timothy Williamson also presented in the seminar once as a guest, and I thank him for answering my premature questions. I was also an audience of Professor John Campbell's 'Theory of Meaning,' Alva Noë's 'Nature of Mind,' and John Searle's 'Philosophy of Mind.' Campbell's humor made the lecture extremely interesting, Noë's eloquence made the lecture highly productive, and Searle's rigor made the lecture very exciting. Besides, I learned a lot from all of their office hours. Finally, let me express my special thanks to Professor John MacFarlane and Marga Vega. Wesley and I met MacFarlane at the conference 'Logic and Cognition' at Guanzhou, summer Preface xxviii 2005. He was very nice to us and he later helped us apply for the status of visiting student of U. C. Berkeley. I am sorry for myself that at that time I was not in his seminars or lectures for practical reasons, and I hope I can learn more from him in the future. I also met Henry Jackman at that conference, and I met him again at the Eastern APA 2006. I thank him for discussing with me both in person and in emails, in particular on my piece 'Openness and the Social Initiation into the Space of Reasons.' Marga was a teaching assistant of Searle's lecture, and I was in her tutorial group. We talked a lot during the cessions and we had coffee together from time to time. She encouraged me a lot and that was very important for me: people in the philosophy department there were just too good, and I was sort of terrified. Anyway I express my gratitude to all of the people I met there. Life in Berkeley is just wonderful. 2006 was really a long year. Before the Sellars's conference, I met Professor Gregory Landini, David McCarty, and Danielle Macbeth in Taipei. McCarty and Landini were the instructors of 'Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Early Analytic Philosophy,' and Macbeth was the instructor of 'Frege's Logic.' The two courses were held by the philosophy department of Soochow University. All of them were very nice to me, and I keep in touch with them through emails. In particular, Macbeth helped me with my paper 'Openness and the Social Initiation into the Space of Reasons.' Later I met all of them again at 'Soochow International Conference on Analytic Philosophy' in June 2007. There I presented 'The Skeptical Paradox and the Nature of Self,' and I was indebted to Professor Richard Fumerton, Edwin Mares, Francesco Orilia, Christopher Pincock, Scott Soames, and Kenneth Williford for helpful comments. In particular, Fumerton spent an afternoon with me for discussing some of my thoughts, and that indirectly influenced what I say in this essay. 2008 is another fruitful year. In May, I met Professor Alan Hájek at 'Workshop of Research Method in Philosophy,' again held by Soochow University. There I learned much about research and academic writing from him. More importantly, I discuss with him my draft 'Disjunctivism, Intentionalism, and the Argument from Illusion,' which is extracted from my fifth episode. Hájek carefully went through much of the draft and commented on various points. The piece is still under revision, and Hájek's suggestions on the structure of it are well taken. Professor Ernest Sosa is the other one who helps me greatly about the draft I am working on. We first met each other in 2006, at the conference 'Naturalized Epistemology and Philosophy of Science,' still another activity held by Soochow. Sosa visited again in 2008 for the first 'Soochow Lecture in Philosophy,' titled 'The Nature and Scope of Human Knowledge.' I learned much from this highly original lecture, and I also benefited from my discussion with Sosa on the draft I mentioned above. His philosophical as well as editorial suggestions are extremely helpful. I hope Preface xxix I can engage his thinking further in the future. After the Soochow Lecture, I participated the 12th annual meeting of 'Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness,' held in Taipei. There I talked to many people, but I shall only mention a few. At that occasion I met Professor Ned Block again. I first met him at 'Consciousness and Concept' in 2005, where we also had Susan Carey, Stan Dehaene, Susan Hurley, Victor Lamme, and Alva Noë. Block is very nice to me, and all of his talks are clear and solid. He also spends some time on my draft; I appreciate his good will very much. I also want to give my very special thanks to Professor David Rosenthal. He is extremely friendly, and we spent few days together for discussing various things, including this essay. I am also indebted to Tim Bayne, Andrew Brook, Thomas Metzinger, Kristina Musholt, and Patrick Wilken. My interactions with them during the four days are intensive, but the most important part for me is their encouragements. At the present stage I am really wondering about my academic future, but after this meeting I feel more confident with myself. I am truly grateful for all of them. There are just too many thanks to say. Because there are just too many, let me mention those who also helped me at some points without identifying the details. They are Professor Henry Allison, José Luis Bermúdez, Bill Brewer, Nicholas Bunnin, Alex Byrne, David Chalmers, Murray Clarke, Jonathan Dancy, Jerry Fodor, James Genone, Roger Gibson, Ronald Giere, Patrick Hawley, Benj Hellie, Matthew Kennedy, Hilary Kornblith, Heikki Koskinen, Ernest Lepore, Lilian Alweissl, Michael Luntley, Fiona Macpherson, Marie McGinn, Adam Morton, Timothy O'Connor, Scott Sturgeon, Daniel Whiting, and Allen Wood. Not all of them help me about this essay directly, and I think many of them don't even remember me, but what they said to me, even only in emails, shape my thinking in one way or another. I hope they will feel fine if one day they find that their names are mentioned in a master thesis, written by a nobody. Finally I hope to express my gratitude to Professor Donald Davidson, whom I never have a chance to talk to. I met him when he came to Taiwan in 2002 for 'Conference on Davidson's Philosophy,' held by Tsing-Hua University. I was an undergraduate sophomore at that time, and I was too shy to talk to him. But since then I read a lot from him, especially papers in his Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective. His thinking paves a way for me to access McDowell's thinking. And my use of 'episode' instead of 'chapter' in this essay is inspired by him, for I spent plenty of efforts envisaging the structure of the essay, and I hope I can finally have 'a nice arrangement of episodes' for it. Besides, sometimes respect is transitive, and in the present case my respect extends to Professor W. V. O. Quine. Although the present essay is not Quinean in any significant sense, this big name nevertheless influences me throughout my earliest days in philosophy; I dedicate my title 'World and Subject' to him. World and Subject T H E E P I S O D E S E P I S O D E N The Many Faces of Human Subject Know thyself. – Plato, The First Alcibiades, quotes Socrates and The Delphian Inscription The I, the I is what is deeply mysterious. – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks World 1. The present essay is an attempt to understand human subject and its place in the world through explicating John McDowell's philosophy. This attempt includes the question part and the thinker part, and I shall explain them in turn. The way I put the question makes it sound like the leading question in contemporary philosophy of mind, that is, 'what is the mind's place in nature?' This question is theory-laden, for often the notion of 'nature' involved is 'physical nature,' the domain of physical laws. This implication is neutral between reductive and non-reductive physicalism: even those who regard 'supervenience' as the key notion of their theories use 'nature' as an abbreviation for 'physical nature.' Indeed, 'naturalism' and 'physicalism' are often, if not always, interchangeable terms. 1 I intend to avoid this implication in the formulation of my leading question. The notion of 'world' is also theory-laden, to be sure, but it will become clear that the implication I choose to avoid is a much more relevant one. 1 'Materialism' is also their kin, but it has become less popular since few decades ago, mainly for non-philosophical reasons, I believe. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 2 2. Through a quick browse of my table of contents, or indeed a glimpse of the title of this introduction, readers would notice that what I focus is the subjective, as opposed to the objective side. A natural query suggests itself: why I initiate my discussion with the title 'world,' rather than 'subject'? To answer this I must anticipate part of the dénouement: the world and minded human subject are constitutively interdependent. This statement is extremely vague or even empty before further elaborations, but I shall leave it for my later episodes and concentrate here on how it justifies my writing strategy. The query states that why I start with 'world,' and the reply 'the world and minded human subject are constitutively interdependent' is at best incomplete. Now obviously a writer needs to start somewhere, and given that for the writer 'world' and 'subject' have the same importance, theoretically speaking it is up to him to start with one among them randomly. It follows that I choose to start with 'world' for practical concerns. Recall the familiar leading question in philosophy of mind, about the mind and its place in nature. As I said, the notion of nature here is heavily theory-laden, and even if I try to avoid this by substituting it with 'world,' it is still quite possible for the implication and some related thoughts to slip in. Besides, the notion of 'world' also has different implications for different philosophers. The best way to cure this, I believe, is to start my discussion with some clarifications of this objective side. But there is a theoretical obstacle here: if 'world' and 'subject' are interdependent in some significant sense, how can I say anything substantial about one of them without also saying something substantial about the other? Now I think I can dodge this if in what follows I only give my readers some reminders of neutrality: do not take the absolute independence of the world for granted; it should be regarded as one of the central issues in the present essay, and it is controversial. Almost everyone agrees that we need to retain some important kind of independence for the world, but whether it is independence simplicier is an issue to be discussed. To see what is at stake, consider the traditional way of conceiving the problem of perceptual directness: do we (at least sometimes) enjoy direct contacts with the world through perceptions? The territory is often divided by direct realism, indirect realism, and idealism. First one decides her metaphysical position: if for her the world is mind-dependent, she is an idealist; if she thinks the world is mind-independent, then she needs to choose from direct and indirect realism. In The Problem of Perception, which is arguably the most important book on this topic during the last decade, A. D. Smith writes: [T]he topic of this work in the philosophical position known as 'Direct Realism' – a position that combines this issue of directness with a Realism about the physical Episode N. The Many Faces of Human Subject 3 world. Such Realism holds that the physical world has an existence that is not in any way dependent upon its being 'cognized'...[And it] is opposed to Idealism: the view that whatever seems to be physical is either reducible to, or at least supervenient upon, cognitive states of consciousness.2 Here Smith implies that the metaphysical part of one's position can be determined independent of, and therefore prior to, the epistemic part. This is exactly the thought I want to resist. But as I said, to argue against this I need to say more about both the subjective and the objective sides, and of course I cannot do this in this introduction. What I can do here is just to ask my readers stay neutral about whether we can reasonably conceive the situation in this factorized way; in other words, let's not take this 'divide-and-conquer' way of thinking for granted, pace Smith and many others. Whether this way of thinking is justified is an important issue to be evaluated, not the self-evident starting point. This is, unfortunately, not recognized by most philosophers in the analytic tradition, probably because of the persisting negative attitude towards the notorious 'German Idealism.' To divide the question into the metaphysical and the epistemic part reflects, at least partially, the ideal of division of labor. This methodology as such is innocent, but it doesn't follow that it won't cause any problem in certain contexts. In our case, the thing to be remembered is that epistemology is a relation to the world: notions like 'knowing' and 'seeing' are factive ones. So if we want to understand how, for example, perceptual directness is possible, we need to be careful about both poles of this epistemic relation, that is, the world and the epistemic subject. Perhaps it will turn out that Smith and many others get things right, but that needs arguments. To assume otherwise is to beg the question against some other positions. The point of division of labor is well taken, for if all philosophers start their reflections from refuting global skepticism, or vindicating free will, the intellectual progresses of the whole community will be stagnant. So I think Smith, and indeed all of us, are justified to restrict ourselves to some extent. What I would like to stress is that he restricts too much. To rule out idealism temporarily is fine, but to characterize the world as he does is excessive. What he should do is to insist that in what he is going to do in the book is to neglect the view that refuses to acknowledge the independence of the world in any sense. To do this, there is still room to contemplate upon the sense in which the world is independent. I cannot here argue that Smith's way of dividing the territory is indeed problematic, but I invite my readers to take an adventure with me, and indeed, with McDowell, to see if we were in fact too naïve 2 The Problem of Perception (Harvard University Press, 2002), p.1-2, my italics. This will be more relevant when I discuss how McDowell replies to the charge of idealism. See my second episode, footnote 70. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 4 about what the world is like. The situation discussed above is an example that methodology infects ontology. Another relevant example goes the opposite direction. Smith and many others assume the absolute independence of the world; the opposite example refuses to acknowledge the independence of the world altogether. The notable representative of this is René Descartes. To be sure, Descartes' contempt against the world is only methodological, indicated by the label the 'Method of Doubt.' But this method assumes that the constitution of the mind is totally independent of the world. Although with different directions, this strategy and Smith's one are in effect of the same spirit. The philosophers in question are well aware that they shouldn't assume metaphysical theses before they start their argumentations, and that's why they painstakingly emphasize the methodological nature of their presuppositions. But this line of reasoning assumes that methodological considerations are irrelevant to ontological propositions anyway, and this is what I want to resist. If one thinks he needs to have a full understanding of human being before he goes on to understand gender, he assumes a false ontology of human being in his methodology. Almost no one would commit this kind of mistake here, for in this case the falsity is obvious. In our case, by contrast, the truth or falsity of the metaphysics is far from obvious, so many people have wrongly thought that their methodologies are metaphysically innocent. Again, I invite my readers to bracket the sense in which the world is independent, to see whether we are really right about the world in our daily lives and philosophical inquiries. The Cartesian Method of Doubt will be a central target throughout the essay, but we should also bear Smith's case in mind in our investigations. Subject 1. To repeat, the leading question in this essay concerns human subject and its place in the world. A human subject is a Homo sapiens with a Cogito; that is, a human animal with mentality. So to understand human subject is to understand mentally equipped human animal. Mentality has different aspects, and to understand mentality is to understand the nature of those aspects. A human subject exhibits their mentality when it perceives, knows, thinks, speaks, acts, and feels; in this essay I venture to understand these varieties of mentality by explicating McDowell's thinking. Again, let me focus on questions and phenomena before saying more about the philosopher. In a recent article, Eric Olson proposes various relevant questions that 'are typically not about "the self" at all.'3 His examples include personal identity, first-person reference, 3 'There is No Problem of the Self,' in Brie Gertler and Lawrence Shapiro (eds.), Arguing about the Mind (Routledge, 2007), pp.262-77, at p.274. Episode N. The Many Faces of Human Subject 5 the unity of consciousness, moral agency, reflexive thought, and self-knowledge. This is of course, as he himself acknowledges, not an exhaustive list. The underlying thought is that there is no single, well-defined problem of the self. I cannot agree more. Since I was new to philosophy, I have always been confused by the fact that there is a philosophical question under the title 'the problem of the self.' It is not identical to the mind-body problem, though the two are definitely related. It looks like the problem of personal identity, but they are still different. The problem of consciousness is obviously relevant, but again they are not one and the same. I came to think that there is no problem of the self as such; instead, there are problems concerning the functioning self: the self functions as a perceiver, knower, thinker, speaker, agent, person, and (self-) conscious subject, among others. In the following episodes I investigate these aspects respectively.4 Some readers might notice that I begin this section by talking about 'mentality,' but soon the key concept became 'self' or 'subject.' Do I change the subject matter? Yes and no. Yes, because as a matter of fact, the questions concerning the self, notably personal identity and free agency, are only a portion of philosophy of mind. No, because I do not think issues concerning mentality and those concerning the self should be studied separately. Like the problem of the self, the problem of mentality can also be divided into various different sub-questions, such as perception, knowledge, thought, language, action, (self-) consciousness, among others. Now it would be highly unnatural to think that we can, say, investigate perceiving without also investigating perceiver. To think we can is to imply a three-fold picture: world, mind, and self. I do not think we can make any good sense of this.5 Philosophers of mind often talk about propositional attitudes, constituted by mental states (attitudes) and mental contents (propositions), but we need to remember that every propositional attitude goes with a self, functions as a perceiver, knower, or others. It doesn't make good sense to confine the problems concerning the self in a corner of philosophy of mind. To be sure, there can be certain branches concentrating on those problems in particular, but it does not follow that in most regions of philosophy of mind we can just forget about the self. Again, division of labor seems to be the trouble maker, though the method as such is innocent. The two points I just argued can be put in this way: there is no sharp line between the problems about mentality and those about the self or subject, and the problems of 4 Professor Christian Wenzel once asked me why I am so interested in topics surrounding self and subjectivity. At that time I couldn't come up with a satisfying answer; now I hope the present paragraph can serve to be an improvement: I have very broad interests in mentality; I am curious about perception, knowledge, thought, language, action, and consciousness, and I have come to think that all these phenomena should be understood together with the functioning self. So my special interest in self and subjectivity is actually derived from my broad interests in various mental aspects. 5 And I think this echoes what McDowell identifies the 'inner space' model, to be discussed especially in my second episode. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 6 the self or subject should be approached by understanding the nature of perceiver, knower, thinker, speaker, agent, person, and (self-) conscious being, among others. This expels a possible wrong impression that in focusing on 'subject,' I confine myself in a small region of philosophy of mind. By investigating various aspects of the self or subject, I hope to have a more comprehensive understanding of human mentality. A remaining question to be answered is this. So far I use the notions of 'self' and 'subject' interchangeably; does this mean that I do not think there is any distinction between them? Grammatically speaking, 'self' is a reflexive pronoun. This implies that questions under this title may be primarily about higher-order mentality.6 It should be clear that I am not only discussing that kind of mentality, however. That's why I use 'subject' exclusively in my later discussions. I also use 'self' in this section because in bringing out my points I invoked Olson's discussions, and what he uses is the notion of 'self,' though he does not intend to confine himself with higher-order mentality. His usage is understandable, for his opponents often conduct their discussions with 'self,' rather than 'subject.' In any case, I believe only the notion of 'subject' is broad enough to accommodate the aspects I would like to investigate in the present essay. Therefore throughout the discussions I will talk about human subject, as a perceiver when it perceives, a knower when it knows, and so on and so forth. 2. I said that I will conduct my discussions through explicating John McDowell's philosophy, so I shall say something very general about him here. In late 60's, McDowell started his career in Oxford. At that time he concentrated on Greek ethics and epistemology, including Aristotle's and Plato's thinking. Later he spent lots of time and energy doing philosophy of language, under Gareth Evans's 'non-stop barrage of intellectual barrage of intellectual stimulation.'7 He has also been highly influenced by P. F. Strawson's inspiring interpretation of Kant's first critique and his own descriptive metaphysics8, by Donald Davidson's thinking on action, meaning, and rationality9, and by Wilfrid Sellars's 'Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.'10 6 Some use it to capture the crucial difference between oneself and others, for example Thomas Nagel asks, 'how can it be the case that one of the people in the world is me?' See 'The Incompleteness of Objective Reality,' in Arguing about the Mind, pp.36-49, at p.36. Professor Timothy Lane does not think that this question makes good sense, but I am not determined about my own attitude. 7 Mind and World (Harvard University Press, 1996), p.viii. 8 The Bounds of Sense (Methuen, London, 1966); Individuals: an Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (Methuen, London, 1959), respectively. 9 I will refer to particular papers of Davidson when I discuss McDowell's engagements with him in my later episodes. 10 'Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,' in Herbert Feigl and Michael Scriven (eds.), Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 1 (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1956), pp.253-329. Episode N. The Many Faces of Human Subject 7 Later in 80's he moved to Pittsburgh, where he met his colleague Robert Brandom. He has been influenced by Brandom through both writings and conversations, notably his exposition of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Brandom's famous teacher, Richard Rorty, also shapes McDowell's thinking through his best-known work. 11 These contemporaries' influence on McDowell is acknowledged in the preface of his Locke Lecture, Mind and World. Like those who have influenced him, McDowell does not restrict himself to one or two branches in philosophy. His works range from history of philosophy, ethics, philosophy of mind and language, epistemology, and metaphysics. This may partially explain why he is often skeptical about the 'division of labor' methodology discussed above. In addition to these contemporary influences, McDowell also invokes resources from important thinkers in the history of western philosophy. As we shall see in later episodes, he adopts Aristotelian notion of 'second nature,' Kantian conception of the discursivity of experience, Hegelian absolute idealism, Wittgensteinian notion of 'form of life', and Gadamerian distinction between 'world' and 'environment,' and so on. In response to critics from other backgrounds, he also discusses Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. This makes it extraordinarily difficult to approach McDowell's thinking. In the present essay I will restrict myself not to get into exegeses of those abstruse materials, though I still need to say something about them from time to time. The nature of McDowell's philosophy poses a serious challenge to anyone who is willing to conduct a large-scale exposition of his thinking: given that he touches so many divergent issues in various branches of philosophy and so many unfathomable thoughts of various important philosophers in a highly systematic way, either the question-oriented way or the figure-centered way of exposition will very likely be unsatisfying. If one chooses the former, it will be very hard for one to give due weight to the convoluted relations between issues and those big names; if one adopts the latter, one will probably neglect detailed objections and replies in specific issues. Either way, the exposition is open to objections about its writing strategy.12 Although these two styles do not strictly exclude each other, still it is quite challenging for commentators to reach equilibrium. 11 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1979). 12 Anthologies aside, to my notice nowadays there are three introductory books exclusively on McDowell's philosophy. The first is John McDowell (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2004) by Tim Thornton. This one is very question-oriented, taking care of different areas of McDowell's thinking in a detailed fashion. In the same year, John McDowell (Polity Press, 2004) by Maximilian de Gaynesford was also published. This one is question-oriented too, but the author concentrates more on McDowell's own thinking. The third one, On Thinking and the World: John McDowell's Mind and World (Ashgate Publishing, 2005) by Sandra M. Dingli, emphasizes the relations between McDowell and other important thinkers, like Kant, Heidegger, and Davidson. All of them try to strike a balance between the question-oriented approach and the figure-centered one. The distinctiveness of my interpretation is that I focus on the very idea of 'subjectivity,' which is relatively absent in extant interpretations. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 8 So obviously I need to make a choice. In the present essay I tend to structure my argumentations with the figure-centered approach. The principal reason is that McDowell's philosophy, as an interconnected system, has not been well understood. This is of course a highly vague and bold verdict, but I will not defend it here. In any case, I think we should understand how he integrates miscellaneous elements from divergent areas and thinkers into a unified whole before going deeper in specific questions. Besides, at different stages of the essay, I will evaluate debates between McDowell and other important contemporary philosophers, in order to bring out McDowell's place in contemporary philosophy. Let me illustrate my approach with an example. In discussing McDowell's view on perceptual experience, I will concentrate on how his view in this area connects to his broader concern about the nature of the world and human subject, and how he confronts his important contemporaries, notably Robert Brandom, but won't get into how he responses to, say, some experiments in psychology concerning the discursivity of experience. It is not that psychological experiments or criticisms from less important people are valueless or irrelevant; it is just that they do not fit my present purpose. To recapitulate, in this essay I am closer to the figure-centered approach; 'figure' here includes McDowell and his important contemporaries. I take this stance because I hope to offer a more comprehensive exposition of McDowell's thinking, and further I want to place McDowell's thinking as a whole on the map of contemporary philosophy, and this requires me to focus mainly on other 'big names.' This does not mean that I will only scratch the surface, but I can prove this only through carrying my project out. 3. Let me connect these abstract considerations about the essay structure to my actual contents. The main theme, to repeat, is to understand human subject and its place in the world. There are two strands in this project: first, how does a Homo sapiens, an animal, can nevertheless be a Cogito, i.e., having the capacities to be responsive to reasons? Second, how does this minded human animal be a perceiver, knower, thinker, speaker, agent, person, and (self-) conscious being in the world? The former question pinpoints the tension between our animal, biological nature and spiritual capacities, and the latter concerns how our biologically-rooted spiritual capacities enable us to navigate in the world through varieties of our mentality. In this essay I start with the tension but concentrate on the applications. In my first episode I introduce the tension and discuss how McDowell manages to dissolve it and thereby find a place in the world for minded human subject. From the second to the fifth episodes, I discuss how McDowell's resolution to the putative tension applies to various mentalities, including perceiver and knower, thinker and speaker, agent and person, conscious and self-conscious subject; I discuss how McDowell avoids Episode N. The Many Faces of Human Subject 9 Brandom's charge of residual individualism, how he criticizes Kripke's Cartesian way of construing the skeptical paradox, how he objects to Dummett's 'full-blooded conception of theory of meaning,' how he finds Davidson's and Brandom's 'I-thou' conception of the publicity of intentionality unsatisfying, how he replies to Dreyfus's accusation of 'the Myth of the Mental,' how he discerns a Cartesian line of thought in Parfit's view of personal identity, and how he thinks Kant unwittingly lapses into the 'narrow assumption,' and so on. In my epilogue, I will discuss the root of those varieties of mentality, that is, our self-determining subjectivity. As we shall see, McDowell thinks human subject is special in the sense that it lives in the logical space of reasons, and this space is exhausted by conceptual connectedness, and finally, this space of rational-conceptual connectedness is identical with the realm of freedom. So arguably the heart of McDowell's thinking is his elaboration of this self-determining subjectivity. As the closing episode of my essay, it can hardly provide a full-fledged construction of that important notion, but I shall try to gesture at possible directions for us to think about. A few words about McDowell's 'quietism.' This Wittgensteinian component of his thinking is often understood as a refusal of offering positive or systematic accounts. So conceived, my present project is at odds with this attitude. However, quietism should not be understood that way. It is a reminder about our ways of seeing issues; it says that before engaging in substantial discussions, one should slow down and see whether there is any compulsory reason for us to accept the challenge in question. 'Quietism' itself is a big issue, especially when one takes it to be a discussion about Wittgenstein scholarship. However, in this essay I adopt a rather weak understanding of it, as just briefly characterized above. Therefore, I will not go into this in the rest of the essay.13 13 Here I am indebted to my committee member Cheng Kai Yuan for reminding me about relevant qualifications. E P I S O D E I Cogito and Homo sapiens Just as nature developed itself as a whole from the original act of self-consciousness, a second nature will emerge...from free self-determination. – F. W. J. Schelling, The System of Transcendental Philosophy ...man (the worker) feels that he is acting freely only in his animal functions – eating, drinking, and procreating, or at most in his dwelling and adornment – while in his human functions, he is nothing more than animal. – Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 Nature 1. We are human beings. This plain fact indicates, at least implicitly, that we are at the same time rational and natural. This may seduce us 'to see ourselves as peculiarly bifurcated, with a foothold in the animal kingdom and a mysterious separate involvement in an extra-natural world of rational connections,'1 John McDowell observes. We do not need reductive physicalism to ensure that we are Homo sapiens, and we do not need substance dualism to maintain that each of us is, or has, a Cogito. The trouble is that it is hard to see how we can be both natural and rational: if we conceive 'nature' as the domain exhausted by scientific investigations narrowly construed, it seems obvious that there is no room for the notion of 'reason.' But we cannot have a satisfying self-image without accommodating the element that makes us properly human. 1 Mind and World, p.78. Episode I. Cogito and Homo sapiens 11 2. Wilfrid Sellars once remarked: '[i]n characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says.'2 Relations in the space of reasons are rational, normative ones; they can be evaluated as correct or incorrect. McDowell contrasts the space of reasons with 'the realm of law,' which is demarcated by natural science.3 The Sellars-McDowell line of thought is that the two spaces are sui generis (i.e. different in kind)4. That is to say, if one attempts to reconstruct the intelligibility of the space of reasons from the resources of the realm of law, one '[falls] into a naturalistic fallacy.'5 Furthermore, the sui generis nature should not be secured by 'picturing the space of reasons as an autonomous structure – autonomous in that it is constituted independently of anything specifically human (the idea of the human is the idea of what pertains to a certain species of animals)...'6 This pair of thoughts serves to respect our commonsense that we are rational animals, without committing ourselves a presumably mystical 'supernaturalism' – a thought that renounces our status as natural beings.7 But things are not so simple. If the space of reasons is of its own kind, evading the net of natural sciences, how can we understand it without the notion of 'supernatural'? And if we are to avoid unpalatable supernaturalism, how can we preserve the idea that human beings are properly human precisely because we live in the space of reasons? The predicament is well characterized by a Sellarsian metaphor 'the clash of the images,' introduced by James O'Shea.8 The two images – the manifest image and the scientific image – clash because of the sui generis thesis, and supernaturalism seems to be the inescapable result of the clash. The Sellarsian task, which is taken up by McDowell as well as other Sellarsians, is to 'fuse the images,' put by Jay Rosenberg, 2 'Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,' pp. 298-9. 3 Mind and World, p.xv. Notice that the realm of law should not be understood as the space of 'causal relations to objects,' as Rorty does in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p.157. McDowell offers two reasons for this. First, following Russell's 'On the Notion of Cause,' in his Mysticism and Logic (George Allen and Unwin, London, 1917), pp.132-51, McDowell thinks that 'the idea of causation should be replaced, in the role of basic organizing principle for the world as viewed by natural science, with something like the idea of law-governed processes' (Mind and World, p.71, n.2). Second, 'it is also disputable in its implication that the idea of causal connections is restricted to thinking that is not framed by the space of reasons' (ibid., same footnote). Reasons can be causes; causations that figure in the space of reasons are called the 'space of reason causations' by Richard Gaskin, in his Experience and the World's Own Language (Oxford University Press, USA, 2006), p.28. This qualification will become important when we later consider some objections against McDowell's position. 4 Mind and World, p.xix. 5 Ibid., p.xiv. 6 Ibid., p.77. 7 Ibid., p.78. 8 Wilfrid Sellars: Naturalism with a Normative Turn (Polity Press, 2007), p.10. The metaphor is based on Sellars's classic paper 'Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,' in Robert Colodny (ed.), Frontiers of Science and Philosophy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1962), pp.35-78. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 12 O'Shea's teacher.9 But not everyone is Sellarsian. There are two main strands in response to the dilemma presented above. One is to '[deny] that the spontaneity of the understanding is sui generis in the way suggested by the link to the idea of freedom.'10 This is called 'bald naturalism.' It is 'bald' because it erases what is distinctively human. McDowell has no intention to argue that bald naturalism is false; he only suggests that the view is 'a less satisfying way to [solve the philosophical puzzlement in question] than [his] alternative,'11 which will emerge later. The other way is to regard 'the structure of the space of reasons' as 'simply extra-natural...as if we had a foothold outside the animal kingdom, in a splendidly non-human realm of identity.'12 This is called 'rampant platonism.' It is 'rampant' because it overemphasizes what is distinctively human. Here again, McDowell does not, and cannot knock it down. After all, though the view is indeed mysterious, it does not follow that it cannot be true in a mysterious way. What McDowell (and indeed everyone who opposes to it) can do is to elaborate one or another more satisfying way to understand human being.13 Nurture 1. The view McDowell recommends 'is a naturalism of second nature,' and it 'can equally see it as a naturalized platonism.'14 In order to understand this, first we need to learn more about the notion of 'second nature.' Recall that when the notion of the realm of law is introduced, it is supposed to be contrasted with the space of reasons. The realm of law is coextensive with, and indeed defined by, the domain of natural sciences. A natural, and indeed seemingly unavoidable thought followed from this is that nature is exhausted by the realm of law. This line of though is neutral with regard to the disagreement between bald naturalism and rampant platonism, for what they disagree is whether the space of reasons is sui 9 Wilfrid Sellars: Fusing the Images (Oxford University Press, USA, 2007). I first met Jay and Jim at the conference in memoriam of Sellars 'Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,' summer 2006, held by University College London. Although we did not discuss anything specific about Sellars at that occasion, still I am indebted to them very much, both through casual conversations and subsequent email correspondences. Jay passed away couple of weeks before I started to write this essay. I regret that I cannot dedicate the piece to him in person. To say that the task in question is a Sellarsian one is not to say that it is exclusively Sellarsian. Actually, many so-called 'naturalistic' philosophers aim to show that the mind depends on, and therefore is compatible with, natural phenomena, given that nature is understood as the realm of law. I say 'many' because there are also many other 'reductive naturalists' who repudiate the space of reason altogether. I will come back to this presently. 10 Mind and World, p.67. 11 Ibid., p.xxi. 12 Ibid., p.88. 13 I will say more about this later in this episode when I discuss Crispin Wright's objection. 14 Ibid., p.91, my italics. Episode I. Cogito and Homo sapiens 13 generis; their common ground is the equation between nature and the realm of law. McDowell manages to steer a middle course between the two by introducing the notion of 'second nature': the realm of nature includes both the realm of law and the space of reasons, so the thesis that the space of reasons is sui generis is compatible with the insistence that human beings are fully natural beings. To identify nature with the realm of law is distinctively modern; the development of this thought has often been called 'disenchantment.'15 In order to motivate his broader understanding of nature, McDowell goes back to the era before enlightenment, in particular ancient Greek. Let me quote him a bit: Virtue of character properly so called [by Aristotle] includes a specifically shaped state of the practical intellect: 'practical wisdom,' in the standard English translation. This is a responsiveness to some of the demands of reason...The picture is that ethics involves requirements of reason that are there whether we know it or not, and our eyes are opened to them by the acquisition of 'practical wisdom.'16 In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle's word for 'practical wisdom' is 'phronesis.' I emphasize 'are there' in this passage to indicate the objective character of ethical demands conceived by McDowell. Now he intends this 'to serve as a model for 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.'17 A further and crucial question is how this line of thought can help us out of the stalemate between bald naturalism and rampant platonism. As indicated above, the gambit is to develop a satisfying notion of second nature. So what we need are reasons for thinking that Aristotelian practical wisdom deserves to be called second 'nature.' McDowell suggests that '[we] are alerted to these demands by acquiring appropriate conceptual capacities. When a decent upbringing initiates us into the relevant way of thinking, our eyes are opened to the very existence of this tract of the space of reasons.'18 In saying this, what McDowell has in mind 'is what figures in German philosophy as Bildung.'19 Now this can be recognized as genuine nature because '[our] Bildung actualizes some of the potentialities we are born with'20: what we are born with is our animal first nature, which is not different in kind from those which are possessed by other animals. What is distinctively human is that our animal 15 Ibid., p.70. Correspondingly, McDowell calls his own position 'a partial reenchantment of nature' at p.97. 16 Ibid., p.79, my italics. 17 Ibid., p.79. 18 Ibid., p.82, my italics. 19 Ibid., p.84. 20 Ibid., p.88, my italics. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 14 first nature includes miscellaneous complex potentialities suitable for fostering the space of reasons. We have extraordinary complicated brains and sense organs, and these powerful resources help us, say, begin to parse strings of sounds emitted from other's mouths. McDowell, an empiricist to be sure, does not need to reject Chomskian innate faculties in this respect. Our second nature is what makes us special, but our remarkable first nature is also crucial for our rational animal lives. We can see that the Aristotelian distinction between potentiality and actuality is at work here: our potentialities relevant to the initiation into the space of reasons are our animal first nature, but when proper upbringing kicks in, those potentialities are actualized (or realized) as the capacities to be responsive to reasons.21 In this way, we gain a satisfying self-image 'without offering to reinstate 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 an utterance or some other kind of action.'22 What McDowell rejects is 'an intelligible distortion undergone by the Aristotelian idea that normal human beings are rational animals.'23 The root of this distortion is to conceive 'an animal endowed with reason [as] metaphysically split'24: we are natural because we are confined in the realm of law, but we are also supernatural because we are responsive to reasons. This distortion can be set straight by recognizing that for Aristotle, responsiveness to reasons is our second nature, which is realized by our first nature potentialities under suitable upbringing. We should recognize that 'rationality is integrally part of [human beings'] animal nature.'25 Our animal nature includes first and second natures, and this does justice to both the thought that our rational capacities are natural, and the thought that we share something with other animals. In accommodating the latter, we do not need to reject the idea that rationality is intrinsic to our animal nature. In the context of the conceptuality of experiences, McDowell says that 'it is not compulsory to attempt to accommodate the combination of something in common and a striking difference in [a] factorizing way: to suppose our perceptual lives include a core that we can also recognize in the perceptual life of a mere animal, and an extra ingredient in addition.'26 Although the contexts are 21 Part of this paragraph is appropriated from 'Openness and the Social Initiation into the Space of sistence that the meaningfulness of the world is different from that of he notion of 'factorization' is supposed to be contrasted with 'integration.' Reasons,' a piece I co-author with Professor Chung I Lin, my thesis supervisor. It was presented at the Conference on Brandom's Philosophy, held by Tsing Hua University, March 2008. I am indebted to Brandom for helpful comments. 22 Mind and World, p.72. This in the text will be important in my fourth episode, when I consider how McDowell replies to objections from Michael Ayers and Arthur Collins. 23 Ibid., p.108, my italics. 24 Ibid., p.108, my italics. 25 Ibid., p.109, my italics. 26 Ibid., p.64, my italics. T To say that AB can be factorized into A and B is to say that the individuation conditions of them respectively are independent of each others. Episode I. Cogito and Homo sapiens 15 ent, the general lesson should apply here too. one.'34 The distinction between the space of reasons and the realm of law, by contrast, differ 2. As we have seen, second nature is supposed to '[give] human reason enough of a foothold in the realm of law to satisfy any proper respect for modern natural science.'27 I shall discuss two objections that run at the opposite direction. The first maintains that in order to secure the foothold in the realm of law, second nature must be located in both the space of reasons and the realm of law, but this nonetheless leads to incoherence. The second maintains that the foothold in the realm of law cannot be secured anyway; that is, the insistence on second 'nature' leads to supernaturalism come what may. The first line of objection is taken by Paul Bartha and Steven Savitt (henceforth B&S).28 They assert that McDowell's position is 'simply untenable.'29 The general principle underlying their argument is that 'there is no way to account for an interactive relationship between [two wholly separate worlds] without undercutting the point of maintaining their separateness.'30 The main trouble of Cartesian dualism nicely illustrates this: if res cogitan and res extensia are different in kind, the putative interactions between them become unintelligible. And if one insists that there must be a bridge, this supposed bridge must thereby belong to both realms at the same time, but this violates the premise that the two realms are different in kind.31 They first notice, rightly, that second nature belongs to the space of reasons, for it is supposed to account for spontaneity. But they argue that it belongs to the realm of law either, for it 'must involve interaction with the natural environment.'32 If so, the sui generis character of the space of reasons collapses, given the lesson drawn from Cartesian dualism, and according to B&S, Passmore. No one, McDowell included, can sensibly deny that 'human perception (and therefore human reason) is also conditioned by the physical processes that govern the interaction between our sensory apparatus and our environment – processes that belong to the realm of law.'33 But the inference from this to the conclusion that second nature is also an inhabitant of the realm of law is a non sequitur. The sense of 'conditioning' here should be 'an enabling question,' as opposed to 'a constitutive ssing Second Nature,' Analysis 58 (1998), pp.252-63. John Passmore's Philosophical Reasoning (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1961), ' p.258. of Perceptual Experience,' The Philosophical Quarterly 44 (1994), pp.190-205; 27 Ibid., p.84. 28 'Second-Gue 29 Ibid., p.254. 30 Ibid., p.257. 31 B & S quotes p.44 at this point, but I think this is quite redundant, given that we are so familiar with the trouble instantiated by Cartesian dualism. 32 'Second-Guessing Second Nature, 33 Ibid., p.258. 34 'The Content W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 16 is obviously a constitutive matter. One can claim that perception and reason nevertheless belong to the realm of law, but that needs arguments, and the above non sequitur can do nothing about it. And that is not McDowell's position anyway.35 B&S thought that McDowell commits that second nature belongs to both the space n is proposed by Crispin Wright. 36 Wright thinks that (i) that the correctness of ethical judgment is constrained by 'contingencies of eds only an ordinary, unmysterious ethical education to initiate y within reach' of our ethical As I see it, only (ii) deserves our attention here, for (i) and (iii) are more like of reasons and the realm of law, and this is a straightforward misinterpretation. This misunderstanding is understandable, however, given that it seems to be a natural interpretation of the thought that reasons can be causes: if second nature is ultimately natural, it must be in the causal network, which means it must be in the realm of law as well. The falsity of this inference should now be clear: as I discussed in the third footnote, McDowell warns us that the opposite of the space of reasons should not be the space of causes, for if it is so, it follows that there is no causal relation in the space of reasons, and therefore reasons cannot be causes. B&S are nevertheless indifferent about this reminder, regarding the realm of law as the space of causes (and thereby unwittingly committing that reasons cannot be causes), and thinking that if McDowell is willing to do justice to the fact that reasons can be causes, he has to admit that second nature belongs to both the space of reasons and the realm of law, and the sui generis claim collapses. Their objection is based on a misunderstanding of the distinction between the space of reasons and the realm of law, as we have seen. McDowell would say that if we see the crucial contrast as between the space of reasons and the space of causes, it is 'too late' to insist that spontaneity belongs to both. And additionally, that position leads to incoherence, as B&S's rehearsal of the Cartesian trouble shows. The opposite objectio McDowell hasn't done enough work to exclude rampant platonism. He identifies and criticizes three criteria allegedly proposed by McDowell: our life'; (ii) that it ne people into 'the rational demands of ethics'; (iii) that correct ethical judgment is 'essentiall thinking.37 reprinted in his Mind, Value, and Reality, pp.341-58, at p.352, my italics. 35 B&S also cites the above paper from McDowell, but for another purpose. It is striking that they didn't notice the enabling / constitutive distinction in the very same paper. 36 'Human Nature?' in Nicholas H. Smith (ed.), Reading McDowell: on Mind and World (Routledge, 2002), pp.140-59. 37 Ibid., p.153. Episode I. Cogito and Homo sapiens 7 1 descriptions of McDowell's picture. I shall therefore focus on (ii). The point I am find any difficulty in the idea that it takes only an ordinary training to trigger the exercise of the social non-natural epistemic capacities H onism; he inks, rightly in my view, that McDowell's invocation of Bildung and related . In the case of rampant platonism, as I said in the previous do is to urge us to accept a much more going to argue, however, applies to (i) and (iii) as well, for the point is that McDowell never attempt to provide any criterion to distinguish naturalized platonism from its rampant relatives. In discussing (ii), Wright asks: Why should Rampant Platonists in which they believe? What exactly is the problem in that combination?38 ere Wright is pointing out the compatibility of Bildung and rampant plat th considerations does not exclude rampant platonism. But why is this compatibility a problem for McDowell? We need to bear in mind that McDowell never attempts to knock rampant platonism and bald naturalism down section, though 'the view is indeed mysterious, it does not follow that it cannot be true in a mysterious way.' Rampant platonism, by its nature, is irrefutable given the sui generis thesis; it asserts that the space of reasons is autonomous simplicier, which means it is wholly (holily?) independent of other kinds of intelligibility. Therefore the only way to repel rampant platonism is to refute the sui generis thesis, that is, to embrace bald naturalism. So the charge from Wright is unfair: rampant platonism is a thesis that can only be repelled by bald naturalism, but McDowell is clearly not a bald naturalist. It is understandable, nevertheless, why Wright has this demanding task in mind: he himself is a dedicated bald naturalist.39 But he had better remember that not everyone shares his metaphysical position. McDowell is well aware that given his anti-bald naturalism, he cannot refute rampant platonism. What he can sensibly moderate position, naturalized platonism, by elaborating a sensible notion of 'second nature.' Of course a rampant platonist can always say that given the sui generis thesis, he can accommodate whatever we say. But why should this matter? Consider the case of radical skepticism. Nowadays most people recognize that such a radical thesis is not refutable, so what we non-skeptics can do is to argue, in one way or another, that we have no good reason to believe in radical skepticism, or we have good reasons to believe otherwise. The situation is quite similar when it comes to rampant platonism. 38 Ibid., p.154, my italics. 39 To my knowledge, Wright never explicitly identifies himself as a bald naturalist, but his identity is clear in the context of the theory of meaning: he sides with his teacher Dummett in holding that a theory of meaning should be 'full-blooded.' I will say more about this in my third episode. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 18 Although bald naturalism is indeed incompatible with that version of platonism, the latter can always insists that the physicalist reduction in question is not successful, for there is no common ground for evaluating the success of reduction. So what we can hopefully have is something like McDowell's picture: provided a reasonable story about how human beings can become responsive to reasons – in his case, through Bildung, custom, and language – we have good reasons to believe in a naturalized platonism. Why needs more? 3. Now, given McDowell's demanding conception of human being, the question bout the status of mere animals becomes urgent. This can be fully answered only ugh] the concept of environment was first used for the purely human world...this concept can be used to comprehend all the conditions on which a living H s possession of languages: [on] the fact that man has a world at all. The world as world exists for man as for on other A between human beings' openness to the world and mere nimals' embedment in the environment is the very idea of 'freedom': the world is characterized by freedom from environment. This freedom implies the linguistic a after we say more about McDowell's view of experience, conceptual capacities, rationality, and self-consciousness, but I can here sketch a general picture with Hans-Georg Gadamer's distinction between 'world' and 'environment.'40 Gadamer writes: [Altho creature depends. But it is thus clear that man, unlike all other living creatures, has a 'world,' for other creatures do not in the same sense have a relationship to the world, but are, as it were, embedded in their environment.41 e further relates this openness to the world to human' Language is not just one of man's possessions in the world; rather, on it depends creature that is in the world. But this world is verbal in nature...that language is originarily human means at the same time that man's being in the world is primordially linguistic.42 nd the crucial difference a Moreover, unlike all other living creatures, man's relationship to 40 See Truth and Method (Continuum Publishing Group, 2004; rev. trans. by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall), pp.438-56. 41 Ibid., p.441. 42 Ibid., p.440. Episode I. Cogito and Homo sapiens 19 ere is not the place to defend Gadamer's distinction; I introduce it at this point only ds constitution of the world. Both belong together.43 H because it helps us to understand McDowell's general picture of mere animals.44 McDowell says that for his purpose, the point of the distinction 'is that it shows in some detail how we can acknowledge what is common between human beings and brutes, while preserving the difference that the Kantian thesis forces on us.'45 What is in common between us and them is that both, as living creatures, embed in and cope with our immediate environments; as animals, all of us are structured by our 'immediate biological imperatives.'46 '[A] merely animal life,' however, 'is shaped by goals whose control of the animal's behaviour at a given moment is an immediate outcome of biological forces. A mere animal does not weigh reasons and decide what to do.'47 In the case of human being, by contrast, we can say that '[to] acquire the spontaneity of the understanding is to become able, as Gadamer puts it, to "rise above the pressure of what impinges on us from the world" (Truth and Method, p.444) – that succession of problems and opportunities constituted as such by biological imperatives – into a "free, distanced orientation" (p.445).'48 In a word, human beings enjoy 'full-fledged subjectivity,' as opposed to mere animals' 'proto-subjectivity.'49 Thus, we can avoid a 'peculiarly bifurcated' ontology, exemplified by two stran of the Cartesian thoughts.50 On the one hand, the Cartesians maintain a position more radical than bald naturalism in their treatment of mere animals, regarding them as zombic automata. On the other hand, they insist on a position more radical than rampant platonism in the case of human being, seeing them as having immaterial mental substances. This strange two-fold view is more radical than bald naturalism, for in holding this naturalism one does not need to regard mere animals as zombies: the zombie thesis is far stronger than the idea that mere animals are locked in the realm of law. And this view is more radical than rampant platonism, for in urging this platonism one does not thereby commit the idea that human beings have, or are immaterial souls: the soul thesis is far stronger than the idea that human beings can 43 Ibid., p.441. 44 I will say more about this in my episode three, where I evaluate the debate between McDowell and Donald Davidson whether a public language plays any significant role in constituting the human intellect. 45 Mind and World, p.115. 46 Ibid., p.115. 47 Ibid., p.115. 48 Ibid., pp.115-6. 49 Ibid., pp.116-7. 50 Here I do not refer to Descartes in particular. Indeed, terms like 'platonism' and 'Cartesian' figured in McDowell's texts only serve to illustrate different ways of thinking vividly. On the contrary, he does refer to particular philosophers when he elaborates the relation between concept and intuition, the role of second nature, and the distinction between world and environment. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 20 reach a mysterious, non-animal space of reasons. Against both of these, McDowell urges that 'exercises of spontaneity belong to our way of actualizing ourselves as animal.'51 There might be some worries about McDowell's two presuppositions. One is that . I begin my exposition of McDowell's philosophy with the issues concerning In order to introduce the attractions of a relaxed naturalism, I have exploited his vital passage appears in his Lecture V, and therefore is, unfortunately, often human beings really enjoy freedom of the will; the other is that mere animals are non-rational. McDowell himself seems to be confident with both of them, but I think it is reasonable to formulate the essence of his thinking by conditionals: given that we humans do enjoy freedom of will, and given that mere animals are indeed non-rational, or at least do not possess rationality in the sense that they can respond to reasons as such,52 then the view McDowell recommends is much more satisfying than both bald naturalism and rampant platonism, since his picture reconciles two important facts about us: we are denizens of the animal kingdom, and we are rational beings.53 4 human beings' place in nature. I adopt this approach because I regard the following remarks of McDowell as quintessential: philosophical difficulties about perceptual experience. But this focus was not essential; the difficulties exemplify a type...Now the difficulty concerns not the passivity of experience as such, but its naturalness. The problem is that operations of sensibility are actualizations of a potentiality that is part of our nature. When we take sensing to be a way of being acted on by the world, we are thinking of it as a natural phenomenon, and then we have trouble seeing how a sui generis spontaneity could be anything but externally related to it. But passivity is not part of the very idea of what it is for a natural potentiality to be actualized. So we should be able to construct a train of thought about actualization of active natural powers, duplicating the difficulties I have exploited in the case of passive natural powers.54 T overlooked by philosophers in the analytic tradition. Even his colleague Robert Brandom complains that '[t]he social nature of spontaneity and the space of reasons is acknowledged, but only belatedly, in the discussion of the need for knowers and 51 Ibid., p.78, my italics. 52 The distinction between responsiveness to reasons and responsiveness to reasons as such will be important when it comes to the disagreements between McDowell and Hubert Dreyfus, but I shall leave the nuance in my fourth episode; for now I just want to stress that we are subjects who are in the games of giving and asking for reasons. 53 McDowell's presupposition about freedom will be briefly discussed in my epilogue. 54 Ibid., p.89, my italics. Episode I. Cogito and Homo sapiens 21 In recent work, Davidson has undertaken to build the concept of objectivity out of a seems to me that McDowell does not present Davidson's position accurately, for troduce the tension between reason and nature, and discuss how agents to be properly brought up in order to be sensitive to various sorts of norms.'55 He sees this as a ground for arguing that McDowell's overall picture is a 'residual individualism.'56 This line of criticism assumes that McDowell's writing strategy reveals his view about the conceptual order, which means he does not assign the conceptual priority to the social elements. But the fact is quite to the contrary. McDowell is the philosopher who insists on the conceptual priority for the social. He even finds fault in the picture depicted by Donald Davidson, who painstakingly stresses the essential importance of the social elements: 'triangulation' between these self-standing subjects, pairwise engaged in mutual interpretation. This comes into conflict with the Kantian thesis of interdependence that I consider in Lecture V, §5, and reconsider in Lecture VI, §4. By my lights, if subjects are already in place, it is too late to set about catering for the constitution of the concept of objectivity.57 It Davidson doesn't try to derive objectivity from 'self-standing subjects.' Rather, he makes clear that his aim is to show that knowing our own minds, knowing others' minds, and knowing the external world 'form a tripod; if any leg were lost, no part would stand.'58 But this mismatch is understandable, for McDowell's Locke Lecture was given in 1991, while most of Davidson's papers explicit on this topic were written after that. My purpose here is not to take part in the debate; what I would like to stress is that McDowell often finds other philosophers' do not give due weight to the priority of the social, so it is uncharitable to think that he himself does not acknowledge that priority. It is possible to argue that McDowell's 'too late' argument applies to himself after all, but anyway we should recognize that in McDowell's picture, the social elements plays constitutive roles in social initiation into the space of reasons; conceptually speaking, his invocation of 'Bildung' and 'second nature' does not come into the picture 'only belatedly,' as Brandom and many others mistakenly suppose. In this episode, I in McDowell manages to ease the tension without canceling the sui generis character of 55 'Perception and Rational Constraint,' in Enrique Villanueva (ed.), Perception (Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1996), pp. 241-59, at p.256, my italics. 56 Ibid., p.258. I argue against this line of thought in my 'Openness and the Social Initiation into the Space of Reasons,' co-authored with Lin. 57 Mind and World, p.186, my italics. 58 'Three Varieties of Knowledge,' in A. Phillips Griffiths (ed.) A. J. Ayer Memorial Essays: Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 30 (Cambridge University Press, 1991), reprinted in Davidson's Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2001), pp.205-20, at p.220. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 22 the space of reasons. To be sure, I do not offer a wholesale defense of second nature and other related notions. My main theme in this essay, as I said in my introduction, is the applications of second nature – how a creature with second nature can be a perceiver, knower, thinker, speaker, agent, person, and (self-) conscious subject – as opposed to second nature per se. There are a lot more to be said about this Aristotelian notion, but I would like to leave it to some other occasions. E P I S O D E II Perceiver and Knower That the objective world would exist even if there existed no knowing being at all, naturally seems at the first onset to be sure and certain, because it can be thought in the abstract...But if we try to realize this abstract thought...and if accordingly we attempt to imagine an objective world without a knowing subject, then we become aware that what we are imagining at that moment is in truth the opposite of what we intended...that is to say, precisely that which we had sought to exclude. – Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol.II. This phenomenologically necessary concept of receptivity is in no way exclusively opposed to that of the activity of the ego, under which all acts proceeding in a specific way from the ego-pole are to be included. On the contrary, receptivity must be regarded as the lowest level of activity. – Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment Primeness 1. In my previous episode, I concentrate on how McDowell responds to the difficult question: how can we be both rational and natural? His proposal is 'a naturalism of second nature,' or 'naturalized platonism.' The take home message is that we can legitimately regard the space of reasons as part of nature. Now, an ensuing question concerns how the operations of the space of reasons enable our minds directly contact with the world. This big question can be divided into some more specific ones. The W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 24 present episode takes up the following one: how does our second nature enable us to have perceptual, or more general, epistemic contact with the world? Let me introduce two notions before starting the exposition. They are 'broadness' and 'primeness.' A mental state is broad if and only if its individuation condition involves external factors; a mental state is prime if and only if it cannot be analyzed by more primitive states. 1 I shall begin with broadness. Its opposite notion is 'narrowness,' which says that the individuation condition of a mental state only involve internal factors; here 'internal' can be glossed by 'in the skull' or at least 'in the body.' To insist on the narrowness of mental states is to commit one 'internalism' about the mental.2 By contrast, to think that mental states are generally broad is to hold 'externalism.' Now, there are generally two versions of externalism, weak and strong. Weak externalism holds that the mental state in question can be de-composed into internal and external factors; that is, the identity of the internal / external factors can be independently specified. By contrast, strong externalism maintains that the internal and external factors are interdependent in a strong sense; theoretically or conceptually we can talk about internal or external factors, but empirically there is no such distinction. This strong externalism commits broadness as well as primeness: the latter entails the former, but not vise versa. So we can understand weak externalism as subscribing broadness without primeness; the independently-specified internal factor is often called 'narrow content.' The motivations for committing narrow content include considerations about self-knowledge and mental causation, among others, but for my purpose we do not need to go through the details here. So much has been said for the terminological matter. As we shall see, McDowell commits both primeness and broadness; that is, he is a strong externalist. The main theme of the present episode is primeness; I will leave broadness for episode four. In this section I shall first identify the relevant target and the basic shape of McDowell's criticisms, and more about his positive thinking will be discussed in the next section. 2. McDowell introduces his target in the context of Bertrand Russell's Theory of Descriptions. 3 He discerns a Cartesian strand in Russell's overall thinking and characterizes it as follows: 1 I notice the relevance of these notions to the present discussion by reading Timothy Williamson's Knowledge and Its Limits (Oxford University Press, 2000). I do not make explicit reference to his work because his context is slightly different from mine, and it takes unnecessary effort to appropriate his wordings. I discuss the relation between his invocation of the notions of broadness / primeness and his anti-skepticism in my 'Evaluating Williamson's Anti-Skepticism,' Sorites 21 (2008). 2 Here I bypass the distinction between state and content, for it does not make significant difference in the present discussion. 3 'Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space,' in Philip Pettit and John McDowell (eds.), Subject, Thought, and Context (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1986), pp. 137-68; reprinted in his Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, 1998), pp.228-59. I refer to the later version. Episode II. Perceiver and Knower 25 In a fully Cartesian picture, the inner life takes place in an autonomous realm, transparent to the introspective awareness of its subject; the access of subjectivity to the rest of the world becomes correspondingly problematic, in a way that has familiar manifestations in the mainstream of post-Cartesian epistemology...[this inner space is] a locus of configurations that are self-standing, not beholden to external conditions...4 Here McDowell does not refer to Descartes' texts, but we can reasonably conjecture that what he has in mind here is the 'Method of Doubt': in order to ensure the certainty or purity of our analyses, we should first only consider factors internal to the subject.5 The gist of McDowell's negative point here is that there is a harmful metaphysical assumption lurking in this seemingly innocent methodological consideration. The assumption is that there is an autonomous inner space metaphysically speaking. This metaphysics implies a disastrous epistemic loss of the world. McDowell first mentions Barry Stroud's argument against this epistemic disaster6: Barry Stroud, for instance, plausibly traces the Cartesian threat of losing the world to this principle: one can acquire worldly knowledge by using one's senses only if one can know, at the time of the supposed acquisition of knowledge, that one is not dreaming. This sets a requirement that Stroud argues cannot be met; no proposed test or procedure for establishing that one is not dreaming would do the trick, since by a parallel principle one would need to know that one was not dreaming that one was applying the test or procedure and obtaining a satisfactory result. So Stroud suggests that if we accept the requirement we cannot escape losing the world.7 What Stroud identifies is the so-called 'KK principle' in traditional internalist epistemology: in order to know something, I need to know that I know that thing; that is, I need to know that I am not dreaming. If one subscribes the Method of Doubt and the Dreaming argument, one thereby commits certain variety of the KK principle. But it should be clear that the principle invites a vicious infinite regress, as described in the quotation. Now McDowell thinks that this diagnosis is plausible but not the end of 4 Ibid., pp.236-7. As before, the term 'Cartesian' is not invoked to make explicit reference to the philosopher Descartes (McDowell might disagrees with this). 'The inner space model' may be a more neutral label. Also see my third footnote in the introduction. 5 'Reductionism and the First Person,' in Jonathan Dancy (ed.) Reading Parfit (Blackwell, Oxford, 1997), pp.230-50; reprinted in his Mind, Value, and Reality, pp.359-82. Recall my remarks about how methodologies can infect ontology in my introduction. 6 The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1984), chap. 1. 7 'Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space,' p.238. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 26 the story.8 As we shall see, though lots of contemporary philosophers reject, at least implicitly, the KK principle, many of them still accept the inner space model. One of McDowell's main tasks is to show that this model is responsible for our philosophical anxiety concerning perception, knowledge, thought, language, action, personal identity, and self-consciousness. McDowell then proposes two sources for the distinctiveness of the inner space model. The first is that the inner space theorist 'extends the range of truth and knowability to the appearances on the basis of which we naively think we know about the ordinary world.' The motivation of this is that '[this] permits a novel response to arguments that conclude that we know nothing from the fact that we are fallible about the external world.' 9 Recall that the inner space theorist's skepticism is only methodological; his ultimate concern is to bring knowledge back to us. Therefore he adopts the above maneuver so that 'we can retreat to the newly recognized inner reality, and refute the claim that we know nothing...'10 But this cannot be the whole story. The above move allows the truth predicates to apply to our subjective states, but this looks like a piece of commonsense; we do this all the time when we say something like 'it appears to me that such and such is the case.' Of course we can apply the truth predicates to this kind of talk: it is true whenever the subject reports sincerely. So there must be something more contentious that explains the distinctiveness of the inner space model. The explanation is 'a picture of subjectivity as a region of reality whose layout is transparent accessible through and through to the capacity for knowledge that is newly recognized when appearances are brought within the range of truth and knowability.'11 The infallibility here implies 'not world-involving.' Combined with what has been said above, the inner space model amounts to this: items in the inner space are autonomous, self-standing, which is to say that their relations to the external world are extrinsic. It follows that a given subject has immediate and unproblematic grasps of his mental items. Even in the case of deceptive experiences, the subject can readily grasp his own 'seeming' states. But isn't this just an outmoded straw man? McDowell does not cite specific passages from Descartes, and nowadays many philosophers admit that there are limits 8 In these paragraphs McDowell, following M. F. Burnyeat, ventures an interpretation concerning the crucial difference between ancient skepticism and Descartes' more radical version. Since I have distanced myself from exegesis here (see footnote 4), in what follows I will characterize McDowell's understanding of the Cartesian inner space without evaluating it. What interests me here is how the inner space model renders the idea of direct contact with the world unintelligible, and how we manage to avoid this unpalatable result. I am interested in the real history too, but that will take us too far. From now on I will simply call the target 'the inner space model.' I am indebted to Professor Christian Wenzel about this. 9 Ibid., p.238. 10 Ibid., p.239. 11 Ibid., p.240. Episode II. Perceiver and Knower 7 2 of self-knowledge. Who on earth will fall into the category characterized in this way? As I said above, McDowell aims to show that this model functions in many domains. Concerning the issues of perception and knowledge, the model appears in the guise of the so-called 'highest common factor' theory.12 According to this line of thought, veridical and deceptive experiences are fundamentally of the same kind; because items in the inner space only have extrinsic relations to the external world, we can have complete grasp of them regardless the experience is veridical or not. As for knowledge, true empirical beliefs and deceptive ones (consider the evil demon or the brain-in-a-vat case) are fundamentally of the same kind; for similar reasons in the case of perception, the inner items have the justificatory power they do regardless the empirical belief is true or not. This line of thought can be elaborated further. Let me start with perception. Normally we can gain correct information through perception, but things do not always go well. In illusion or hallucination, it seems that we still perceive something: some non-existent properties or objects. Now a natural question is that what instantiates the non-existent properties or objects perceived in deceptive cases? Here we have many complications: some philosophers think that what instantiates those perceived properties or objects are non-intentional sense-data; some denies this and think that those properties or objects are represented by our experiences. There are many entangling puzzles here, and the relevant literature goes very wild.13 For our purpose here, we only need to notice that both sense-datum theory and representationalism (or intentionalism), no matter how the details go in different versions, regard veridical experiences and deceptive ones as fundamentally of the same kind.14 The argument most frequently cited for this view is the one from phenomenal indistinguishability: since subjectively indistinguishable illusion / hallucination are possible, and 'experience' is essentially a subjective notion, there is a common factor shared by illusion, hallucination, and veridical experience. A veridical experience is constituted by this inner common factor plus external conditions; metaphysically speaking, the inner component is individuated without any reference to external situations, for it is something shared by veridical experiences and deceptive ones. We can call this the 'conjunctive' view of perception.15 12 'Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge,' Proceedings of British Academy 68 (1982), pp.455-79; reprinted in his Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality (Harvard University Press, 1998), pp.369-94, at p.386. 13 I have a lot to say about relevant matters in my fifth episode. 14 In the fifth episode, I shall argue that we should not use 'intentionalism' and 'representationalism' interchangeably, and the former should be used in the context of perception; besides, the common kind assumption introduced here is not built in the very idea of intentionalism. But we do not need all these qualifications now. 15 The terminology here is suggested by the introductory episode of Tamar Szabó Gendler and John Hawthorne (eds.) Perceptual Experience (Clarendon Press, Oxford), pp.1-30. In my fifth episode I will W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 28 Simon Blackburn is one of those who find the above argument compelling. He writes that in the thought experiment involving phenomenal indistinguishability, everything is the same from the subject's point of view. This is a legitimate thought-experiment. Hence there is a legitimate category of things that are the same in these cases; notably experience and awareness.16 Although other philosophers in this camp may have different formulations, the general shape of the argumentation is the same. I will come back to this later. Here goes the epistemological version. Traditionally, the notion of 'knowledge' is analyzed into 'belief,' 'truth,' and 'justification.' Edmund Gettier's short classics crashed our faith in this simply analysis, but most of us believe that either we can supplement the original analysis with a fourth condition, or we can revise the 'justification' element in one way or another, to accommodate those putative counterexamples. On a widespread understanding, the 'truth' element is undoubtedly external, and both the 'belief' and the 'justification' elements are internal. After the rise of externalism in both philosophy of mind and epistemology, the claim about belief and justification has long been shaky. In the case of justification, however, the internalist intuition stands firm. Consider the brain-in-a-vat case (BIV for short). If I were a brain envatted in a scientist's lab, presumably I would have perceptual phenomenology indistinguishable from the phenomenology owned by normal subjects. Now I form a belief that I am in a noisy café, based on my auditory phenomenology. Obviously this belief does not constitute knowledge, for actually I (if any) am in a scientist's lab. But it seems unfair to say that I am not justified in believing that I am in a noisy café because I am not in a position to know that I am in a bad case. Recall the KK principle. It requires a meta-knowledge for every bits of knowledge, which is unreasonably strong. Now even for those who subscribe this principle, to demand that I have knowledge about my overall situation before I can have justification about the café belief is far too strong. Why think that I, as a brain in a vat, am not justified in believing that I am in a noisy café, given that I do have the relevant phenomenology cause by the electronic device? If this line of thought is accepted, the justification element is internal after all, for a brain in a vat or a subject deceived by the evil demon can have justification about empirical beliefs. This is also a 'conjunctive' view, for knowledge is (at least) composed by internal justification element and external truth element. The conjunctive view about perception and knowledge is in effect the inner space argue that this way of carving the battle field is defective because it leaves out weak externalism, which accepts broadness but rejects primeness. This does not matter in the present theme. 16 Spreading the Word (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1983), p.324. Episode II. Perceiver and Knower 29 model: on this view, there is a common factor shared by subjects in the good case and in the bad case.17 This implies that the common factor is 'self-standing, not beholden to external conditions,' for if it were not, it cannot present in the bad case, where external condition is absent. With this picture at hand, nonetheless, we juxtapose our direct contact with world: if the inner element is present anyway, regardless our real situations, doesn't it constitute a veil that blocks our access to the world? In the case of perception, McDowell responses to this predicament this way: Of facts to the effect that things seems thus and so to one, we might say, some are cases of things being thus and so within the reach of one's subjective access to the external world, whereas others are mere appearances. In a given case the answer to the question 'Which?' would state a further fact about the disposition of things in the inner realm...since this further fact is not independent of the outer realm, we are compelled to picture the inner and outer realms as interpenetrating, not separated from one another by the characteristically Cartesian divide.18 In the picture McDowell recommends, the 'conjunction' presents in the inner space picture is replace by a 'disjunction.' There is no inner common factor shared by veridical experiences and deceptive ones, so there is no inner factor to be conjunctive with external conditions. In the good case, by contrast, perceptual experiences involve external situations essentially, which means that the relation between perception and deception is disjunctive: either a perceptible aspect of the world, or a mere appearance, is presented. Now a possible objection is that on this picture, we have no idea about whether we are in the good case or not. Given our refusal of the KK principle, this objection is irrelevant. We can shrug our shoulder and reply to the skeptic: why do I have to know about whether I am in the good case in order for me to be in genuine perceptual contact with the world? Now we are in a position to evaluate Blackburn's remarks quoted above. McDowell says: '[t]he uncontentiously legitimate category of things that are the same across the different cases is the category of how things seem to the subject.'19 Phenomenal indistinguishability does imply there is something in common, but this 'something' is only seeming; after all, what guarantees it is phenomenal indistinguishability. And we have seen that for McDowell, this seeming should be taken disjunctively. 3. The problem of perceptual contact is in an important sense more fundamental than any problem in epistemology, for: 17 The good / bad case talk is appropriate from Knowledge and Its Limits. 18 'Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space,' p.241. 19 Ibid., p.248, my italics. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 30 [o]nce we are gripped by the idea of self-contained subjective realm, in which things are as they are independently of external reality (if any), it is too late...[O]ur problem is not now that our contact with the external world seems too shaky to count as knowledgeable, but that our picture seems to represent us as out of touch with the world altogether.20 The inner space model insulates us from the external world, so the deepest problem is that we do not have any contact with the world at all if we are locked in the inner space. A reaction to the dreaming argument is to retreat from the outer realm to the inner, as the inner space theorist does, but the price it pays is obviously too high; in order to meet the challenge posed by the unreasonable KK principle, the inner space theorist loses the world altogether. McDowell's disjunctive conception of experience leaves the plausible part of the inner space model intact: I approached this fully Cartesian picture of subjectivity by way of the thought, innocent in itself, that how things seem to one can be a fact, and is knowable in a way that is immune to familiar skeptical challenges. Short of the fully Cartesian picture, the infallibly knowable fact its seeming to one that things are thus and so – can be taken disjunctively, as constituted either by the fact that things are manifestly thus and so or by the fact that that merely seems to be the case.21 But if we insulate ourselves in the inner space, then the innocent part is spoiled too, for if we never enjoy perceptual contact with the world, it soon becomes 'quite unclear that the fully Cartesian picture in entitled to characterize its inner facts in content-involving terms in terms of its seeming to one that things are thus and so – at all.'22 On this miserable picture, subjectivity is 'blank or blind,'23 which does not deserve to be called 'subjectivity' indeed. Apart from the considerations about the dreaming argument, the inner space model might well be motivated by the rise of modern science, for '[i]t seems scarcely more than common sense that a science of the way organisms relate to their environment should look for states of the organisms whose intrinsic nature can be described independently of the environment.'24 Worse still, 20 Ibid., p.242. 21 Ibid., p.242. I will say more about this 'disjunctivism' in my fifth lecture, when I discuss how McDowell conceives the conscious aspect of our human lives. 22 Ibid., pp.242-3, my italics. 23 Ibid., p243. 24 Ibid., p.243. Episode II. Perceiver and Knower 31 this intellectual impulse is gratified also in a modern way of purportedly bringing the mind within the scope of theory, in which the interiority of the inner realm is literally spatial; the autonomous explanatory states are in ultimate fact states of the nervous system, although, in order to protect the claim that the explanations they figure in are psychological, they are envisaged as conceptualized by theories of mind in something like functionalist terms. This conception of mind shares what I have suggested we should regard as the fundamental motivation of the classically Cartesian conception; and I think this is much more significant than the difference between them.25 McDowell does not render his reply to this argument from science explicit, but what he would say is clear: we have good reasons for thinking that the mind as such should not be incorporated by any branch of natural science, for it lives in the space of reason, a domain cannot be reduced by natural sciences. If this is so, this motivation for the inner space model should be discarded from the very beginning. Sciences can help us to understand the enabling conditions of various mental capacities, to be sure, but this should be distinguished from the constitutive questions of the mind. Another possible motivation of the inner space model is to secure our first-person authority. In general cases, we know ourselves better than an outsider. The inner space model is sometimes thought to be a good explanation of this, for according to it the subject' introspection 'becomes the idea of an inner vision, scanning a region of reality that is wholly available to its gaze...'26 But notice that what first-person authority says is that generally we ourselves have better knowledge; it does not say that we ourselves always know everything. However, what the inner space model delivers is the latter, which is blatantly too strong.27 Moreover, the model 'puts in question the possibility of access to the inner realm from outside.'28 If all of us are 'beetles in the box,' how can we have any knowledge about other subjects' mental state? As McDowell asks, how can we 'perceive, in another person's facial expression or his behaviour, that he is...in pain[?]'29 This motivation for the inner space model is 25 Ibid., p.244. 26 Ibid., p.245. 27 M. G. F. Martin seems to develop this line of thought in a more detailed way. See his 'The Limits of Self-Awareness,' Philosophical Studies 120 (2004), pp.37-89, especially pp.47-51. 28 Ibid., p.245. 29 'On "The Reality of the Past",' in Christopher Hookway and Philip Pettit (eds.), Action and Interpretation: Studies in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1978), pp.127-44; reprinted in his Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality, pp.295-313, at p.305. The topic of the epistemology of other mind is the main theme of his 'Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge.' W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 32 ill-grounded, either.30 A possible rejoinder runs like this. The inner space theorist might concede that the argument from self-knowledge does not work, and somehow render the picture and moderate (as opposed to omniscient) self-knowledge compatible. Now, 'subjectivity' may be taken as the next candidate for argument: 'the internal component of the composite picture...irresistibly attracts the attributes that intuitively characterize the domain of subjectivity.' And here goes the alleged Fregean: It is in the internal component that we have to locate the difference Frege's constraint requires us to mark between pairs of (say) beliefs that in the full composite story would be described as involving the attribution of the same property to the same object, but that have to be distinguished because someone may without irrationality have one and not the other...Frege's notion of a mode of presentation is supposed to have its use in characterizing the configurations of the interior...31 This argument has some initial plausibility. Frege famously distinguishes between sense and reference, and presumably 'reference' should be located in the external world. Therefore, it is natural to identify 'sense' with the internal component. This line of thought is strengthened by the fact that sense is often seen as the constituent of the cognitive realm. Unfortunately, the 'difficulty is palpable': how can we be expected to acknowledge that our subjective way of being in the world is properly captured by this picture, when it portrays the domain of our subjectivity – our cognitive world – in such a way that, considered from its own point of view, that world has to be conceived as letting in no light from outside? The representational content apparently present in the composite story comes too late to meet the point.32 So the argument from subjectivity fails either. If we regard subjectivity as something 'inner,' we cannot make sense of the fact that we are beings in the world: not only our bodies, but ourselves, are objective presences in the world. I shall come back to this in my episode four and five. 4. Let's turn to McDowell's parallel story concerning knowledge, or more 30 McDowell discusses self-knowledge and related issues in his diagnosis of Cartesian immaterialism He attempts to argue that immaterialism is not the deepest problem with the Cartesian way of thinking. I appropriate his remarks there for my own purpose, namely to show the weakness of the inner space model. 31 'Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space,' p.251. 32 Ibid., p.251. Episode II. Perceiver and Knower 33 specifically, justification. Here McDowell begins with Sellars's thought that 'knowledge – at least as enjoyed by rational animals – is a certain sort of standing in the space of reasons.'33 McDowell aims to disabuse a particular 'deformation' of the Sellarsian idea, namely 'an interiorization of the space of the reasons, a withdrawal of it from the external world.'34 This putative 'deformation' is natural enough: 'reason' is often, if not always, treated as something 'subjective' and therefore 'internal.' But as we have seen in the above discussion, this seemingly natural thought is not really natural when thought through: if subjectivity belongs to the allegedly internal factor, the very idea of subjectivity as the cognitive space becomes unintelligible. Since the general lesson in the case in epistemology is the same with that of perception, I shall concentrate on issues concerning justification specifically. To begin with, consider a traditional notion concerning knowledge – 'epistemic luck.' It is commonsensical that for something to be knowledge, it must at least be a true belief, and it is also commonsensical that this is not enough.35 Not enough, because the two conditions do not rule out the possibility that a subject happens to have a true belief. This should be ruled out because we think that to have a piece of knowledge is to be in a normative status, and a true belief by luck does not give us this. The notion of 'justification' serves to bridge the normative gap: a subject has a piece of knowledge if and only if she holds the true belief in question with good reasons. Justification is thought to be a truth-conducive property; it is supposed to be something that excludes epistemic luck. The Gettier-style counterexamples end the good old days. The moral of those cases is that epistemic luck is unavoidable; the subjects in the examples have fairly good reasons to hold the beliefs in question, but those beliefs fail to be knowledge. The literatures in epistemology became a mess during the following few decades. It is not that there was no insightful proposal; the trouble is that it seems to become a dead issue before damping the relevant misgivings: if some notion of 'justification' or some other conditions cannot preclude epistemic luck, then how is knowledge possible? Now, a typical McDowellian move is to consider why a given question looks so urgent. Why, we should ask ourselves, do we think that knowledge requires the possessors of it manage to rule out epistemic luck completely? To answer this, imagine that somehow we do accomplish that flawless epistemic standing. It soon becomes clear that the picture is a version of the inner space model: the mental items are transparent through and through for the subject, for those items are self-standing, 33 'Knowledge and the Internal,' in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 55 (1995), pp.877-93; reprinted in his Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality, pp.395-413, at p.395. 34 Ibid., p.395. 35 The vague term 'something' is supposed to leave open various questions concerning the notion of 'knowledge.' W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 34 not beholden to any external conditions. Again, the fear about epistemic luck can be traced back to the argument from illusion, broadly construed. Consider the crucial step of it: If things are indeed thus and so when they seem to be, the world is doing me a favour. So if I want to restrict myself to standings in the space of reasons whose flawlessness I can ensure with external help, I must go no further than taking it that it looks to me as if things are thus and so.36 The metaphor 'the world's favor' denotes epistemic luck. No one, including those who are faithful to traditional epistemology, can sensibly deny that they exist. The crucial question is that what follows from this. The inner space model theorist thinks that we should 'restrict ourselves' to the inner space, for he assumes that epistemic luck are something to be avoided in order for us to have knowledge. This is the assumption McDowell disputes. McDowell first lays out the desideratum – human subjects' critical reason. 'If it turns out to be an effect of interiorizing the space of reasons that we become unable to make sense of this critical function of reason, we ought to conclude that the very idea of the space of reasons has become unrecognizable.'37 The strategy is to assume the inner space model for the sake of argument, and to see whether we can still make good sense of the very idea of the space of reasons. An obvious response is skepticism, which holds that in order to fulfill the demand of 'risk-free,' we have to stay in the inner realm. But this means, at the same time, that we will never break the inner circle, hence skepticism. McDowell does not regard skepticism as the main opponent in the paper now I am concentrating on, but we have seen above how he responds to it: if we never have perceptual contact with the world, there is no reason to think that we can characterize the inner space with content-involving terms. Another response is to insist 'that there must be policies or habits of basing belief on appearance that are utterly risk-free.'38 As McDowell points out, this looks attractive 'in the context of the threat of scepticism,' but it is clear that it only 'express a rather touching a priori faith in the power of human reason to devise fully effective protections against the deceptive capacities of appearance.'39 This response is ad hoc, for it clings on the original three-fold analysis of knowledge, and insists that they must be jointly sufficient for knowledge. Without any substantial argument for this position, we do not need to take it seriously. 36 Ibid., p.396. 37 Ibid., p.398. 38 Ibid., p.399. 39 Ibid., p.399-400. Episode II. Perceiver and Knower 35 The response McDowell considers in details is again the composite, or conjunctive, conception. In the context of knowledge, it goes like this: At least for rational animals, a satisfactory standing in the space of reasons is a necessary condition for knowledge. But since the positions one can reach by blameless moves in the space of reasons are not factive, as epistemically satisfactory positions are, a satisfactory standing in the space of reasons cannot be what knowledge is.40 What does knowledge require in addition to a satisfactory standing in the space of reasons, according to the traditional picture? It is 'the familiar truth requirement for knowledge...[conceived] as a necessary extra condition for knowledge, over and above the best one can have in the way of reliability in a policy or habit of basing belief on appearance.'41 The notion of 'reliability' figures in the picture as the internal component, as opposed to its role in 'full-blown externalism,' which 'reject[s] the Sellarsian idea'42 shared by all parties considered above. Thus the composite picture can be seen as combining internal reliability (blamelessness) with external truth. To separate reliability and truth is the source of the problem, McDowell argues. On the one hand, the inner space theorist interiorizes the space of reason, which means 'standings in the space [cannot] consist in a cognitive purchase on an objective fact...' But if that is so, then 'how can reason have the resources it would need in order to evaluate the reliability of belief-forming policies or habits?'43 The 'interiorized Fregean sense' is unintelligible, as we have seen in the case of perception. The epistemological version of the inner space model faces an additional challenge. Consider the reason why 'justification' is introduced in the first place. A true belief held by a subject accidentally does not count as knowledge, for knowledge requires reasons. Now we have a subject in the good case, the other in the subjectively indistinguishable bad case; one has knowledge, the other does not. McDowell then asks: 'if its being so is external to her operations in the space of reasons, how can it not be outside the reach of her rational powers?' 44 Epistemologists introduce 'justification' in order to account for the rational element of knowledge, but when we consider the good case and the bad case with the inner space model, we realize that it is epistemic luck that make the difference. The subject in the good case had knowledge not because he has a better standing in the space of reasons, but because 40 Ibid., p.400. 41 Ibid., p.400. 42 Ibid., p.401. 43 Ibid., pp.402-3. 44 Ibid., p.403. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 36 he is lucky. This is where the Gettier-style counterexamples come in. Epistemic luck do exist, but '[t]he hybrid view's concession to luck, tagged on to a picture of reason as self-sufficient within its own proper province, comes too late.' 45 What the existence of epistemic luck shows is not that we should confine ourselves in the flawless inner space and try to work out our ways to knowledge, but that our rational power has its limits. As a result, justification is closer to the external world than we originally envisage. The space of reasons incorporates the worldly facts as its constituents: When someone enjoys such a position [of knowing], that involves, if you like, a stroke of good fortune, a kindness from the world; even so, the position is, in its own right, a satisfactory standing in the space of reasons, not a composite in which such a standing is combined with a condition external to the space of reasons. Whether we like it or not, we have to rely on favours from the world: not just that it presents us with appearances...but that on occasion it actually is the way it appears to be.46 In sum, we need to 'learn to live with'47 the fact that we are subject to epistemic luck, that is, our rational power has its limits. The inner space model strives to preserve the fantasy of human reason, but the resulting picture is quite implausible. Why is it so tempting to lapse into that picture then? Again, consider the good case and the bad case. Intuitively, the BIV or the victim of the evil demon seems to have the same epistemic standing with normal subjects, for subjectively there is no difference. 'How can we blame the BIV for not having knowledge?' One might ask. But consider a parallel case in action. Someone may unintentionally kill others in a car accident. Now it maybe true that he shouldn't be blamed, but is what he has done thereby justified? It seems clear that the answer is negative. By the same token, the BIV is not to be blamed epistemically, but he is not justified in holding those empirical beliefs either. To be in a satisfying standing in the space of reasons, blamelessness is not enough. Justification is indeed an epistemically positive notion, while 'exculpation' is only negative.48 I open this section with the notion of 'primeness.' It says that both perception and knowledge cannot be factorized into simpler elements; both of them involve external conditions essentially. Against the mainstream epistemology, primeness says that what 45 Ibid., p.405. 46 Ibid., p.406 47 Ibid., p.408. 48 The distinction between exculpation and justification is used by McDowell to criticize the Myth of the Given (Mind and World, p.8), which will be discussed presently. Although the context is different right now, the distinction nicely uncovers the central motivation of the interiorization of the space of reasons. Episode II. Perceiver and Knower 7 3 the Gettier-style counterexamples show is not that we should engage further analyses for knowledge, but that knowledge is unanalyzable. I shall do some reprise before closing this section. In both the case of perception and knowledge, the (Cartesian) inner space model is motivated by phenomenal indistinguishability. From this indistinguishability, it is argued that there is a common internal factor – 'experience' for perception and 'justification' for knowledge – shared by the good case and the bad case. Since the factor is also present in the bad case, its relations to the external world must be extrinsic. They are free-floating items in the self-sustaining inner space. There are many problems with this picture, but the deepest one is that it makes cognition and rationality unintelligible: in order to account for subjectivity, the inner space theorist renders it as purely inner, but this makes the very idea of subjectivity unrecognizable: as our commonsense tells us, subjectivity is 'a vantage point on the external world.'49 Openness 1. We have seen how McDowell establishes the primeness claim. According to this view, the external world is incorporated in the space of reasons; the space of reasons has no outer boundary. This naturally brings us to the further stage of the argumentation: our 'openness' to the world. The openness claim is the main theme of McDowell's Locke Lecture. His overall topic there, as himself makes clear, 'is the way concepts mediate the relation between minds and the world.'50 As the previous section shows, the world is embraced by the space of reasons; now McDowell's further claim is that the space of reasons is the space of concepts. It follows that the world is in the space of concept, hence the title of his second lecture, 'The Unboundedness of the Conceptual.'51 McDowell situates his discussion in the Kantian-Davidsonian background. Kant famously remarks that 'Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.'52 He glosses this with Davidson's attack on scheme-content dualism.53 'Scheme' means 'conceptual scheme'; the opposite means 'nonconceptual 49 'Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space,' p.241. 50 Mind and World, p.3. 51 Ibid., p.24. 52 Critique of Pure Reason, Trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge University Press, 1998), A51/B75. 53 'On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,' in Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 47 (1974); reprinted in his Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2001), pp.183-198. Following McDowell, I shall not go into the details of Davidson's criticisms and his disagreements with Davidson in the present context. The details and disagreements are important, but for my purpose all these issues will be postponed towards the end of the whole thesis. The reason for postponing those matters is that in Mind and World McDowell emphasizes his agreements with Davidson, while in other contexts, he insists on his own distinct way W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 38 content' or 'given.' When one uses the term nonconceptual 'content,' she probably concerns the issues generated by the 'fineness-of-grained' argument and the argument from human infant and mere animals; this is the main theme of McDowell's third lecture. For our purpose, the term nonconceptual 'given' is better. What 'given' signifies is passivity, as opposed to scheme's active operations. From now on I will use 'dualism of scheme and Given'54 to denote McDowell's target. McDowell mentions that in the Kantian framework, 'the space of reasons is the realm of freedom.'55 However, '[t]he more we play up the connection between reason and freedom, the more we risk losing our grip on how exercises of concepts can constitute warranted judgements about the world.'56 The point is that we need 'external constraint on our freedom,' otherwise our mentality will collapse into a 'self-contained game.'57 The idea of the Given is supposed to undertake this external constraint. On this view, nonconceptual given can nevertheless serve as reasons, as McDowell describes, 'the space of reasons is made out to be more extensive than the space of concepts.'58 Notice that the dialectics is primarily semantic; '[e]mpirical judgements in general...had better have content of a sort that admits of empirical justification...'59 This is shown by the fact that McDowell never uses the label 'foundationalism' to identify his target. Start with the recognition that there are close relations between reason and freedom, one is prone to accept coherentism, and if one also recognizes the need of external constraint, one tends to embrace the idea of the Given: the thought is that there must be something given from outside, in order for our thoughts to have directedness. In what I just said above, there is nothing directly concerns epistemological foundationalism.60 McDowell adumbrates the debate between coherentism and the Given as follows: It can be difficult to accept that the Myth of Given is a myth. It can seem that if we reject the Given, we merely reopen ourselves to the threat to which the idea of the Given is a response, the threat that our picture does not accommodate any external constraint on our activity in empirical thought and judgement...If our activity in empirical thought and judgement is to be recognizable as bearing on reality at all, there must be external constraint....Realizing this, we come under pressure to recoil back into the Given, only to see all over again that it cannot help. There is a danger of understanding the dualism. This deserves a separate section. 54 Mind and World, p.4. 55 Ibid., p.5. 56 Ibid., p.5. 57 Ibid., p.6, p.5 respectively. 58 Ibid., p.6. 59 Ibid., p.6, my italics. 60 This will prove to be important when we consider Dreyfus's objections in he fourth episode. Episode II. Perceiver and Knower 39 of falling into an interminable oscillation.61 McDowell's metaphor for the situation is an oscillating 'seesaw.'62 We can appreciate this more by comparing another position, 'bald naturalism.' As we have seen in my introductory episode, bald naturalism denies 'that the spontaneity of the understanding is sui generis in the way suggested by the link to the idea of freedom'; it 'opt[s] out of this area of philosophy altogether.'63 The way bald naturalism dismounts from the seesaw is to reduce the space of reasons, to erase what is distinctively human. Coherentism and the Given are on the seesaw precisely because both of them recognize the sui generis character of the space of reasons. In addition, they (and bald naturalism) share the assumption that 'experience' is to be put on the Given side, as dualistically opposed to the scheme side, on the ground that experience is 'passive.'64 For coherentism, since experiences are passive and hence confined in the realm of law, it cannot have rational relations with beliefs and judgments, which are denizens in the space of reasons. For the Given, though experiences are passive and hence confined in the realm of law, there must be rational relations between beliefs and judgments on the one hand, and experiences on the other, on pain of 'a frictionless spinning in a void.'65 For bald naturalism, though experiences are passive and hence confined in the realm of law, there can be rational relations between beliefs / judgments and experiences, for beliefs and judgments are in the realm of law either. Thus, we get a clearer sense of the dialectical situations surrounding the seesaw metaphor. Now we are in a position to understand McDowell's Kantian solution. We have seen that coherentism, the Given, and bald naturalism all assume that because experiences are passive, they are inhabitants of the realm of law. McDowell's key move is to argue that the inference here is a non sequitur: 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.) We can dismount from the seesaw if we can achieve a firm grip on this thought: receptivity does not make an even notionally separable contribution to the co-operation. The relevant conceptual capacities are drawn on in receptivity...It is not that they are exercised on an extra-conceptual deliverance of receptivity...In experience one takes in, for instance sees, that things are thus and so. That is the sort of thing one 61 Ibid., p.8-9. 62 Ibid., p.9. 63 Ibid., p.67. 64 Ibid., p.10. 65 Ibid., p.11. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 40 can also, for instance, judge.66 The passivity of experiences is a plain fact; indeed, this passivity is what distinguishes experiences from judgments. 'In experience one finds oneself saddled with content,'67 McDowell admits. It doesn't follow, however, that experiences are not inhabitants of the space of reasons: experiences can be at the same time conceptual and passive. In judgments, we exercise conceptual capacities; in experiences, conceptual capacities are operative.68 2. An immediate doubt is that if conceptual capacities are operative only passively in experiences, how can we ensure that they are conceptual? After all, conceptual capacities are often seen as constituents of judgments, and judgments are active if anything is. McDowell agrees that '[the putative conceptual capacities] would not be recognizable as conceptual capacities at all unless they could also be exercised in active thinking...'69 Judgments are indeed the paradigmatic locus for conceptual capacities, but it doesn't mean that they cannot be operative in other cases. Recall how McDowell reaches his Kantian conclusion: if we think experiences are not in the space of reasons, we will face quandary illustrated by the stalemate between coherentism, the Myth of the Given, and bald naturalism. The quandary is that all of the three positions make intentionality unintelligible. So we should uncover and reject the ungrounded assumption shared by them. The assumption in question is the thought that experiences are in the realm of law because they are passive. McDowell's conclusion that experiences are participants of the space of reasons follows from the rejection of that assumption. This is a transcendental argument: intentionality in general requires that the space of reasons incorporate experiences, and intentionality does present in human activities, therefore experiences are in the space of reasons. To say that it is hard to conceive passively operative conceptual capacities does not touch the transcendental argument at all. But there is still a gap between the conclusion of the transcendental argument and McDowell's actual conclusion, namely that conceptual capacities are operative all the way out in experiences, for one might hold that the space of reasons are not exhausted by conceptual capacities. Many philosophers think that there are nonconceptual content in play in our experiences, but this doesn't relegate experiences out of the 66 Ibid., p.9. 67 Ibid., p.10. 68 For more on this, see 'Conceptual Capacities in Perception,' in Günter Abel (ed.), Kreativität: 2005 Congress of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Philosophie, pp. 1065-79. Elsewhere, McDowell also uses 'actualization' in 'The Woodbridge Lecture 1997: Having the World in View: Sellars, Kant, and Intentionality,' Journal of Philosophy 95 (1998), pp.431-91. Dreyfus disagrees with McDowell at this point; I shall come back to this in my fourth episode. 69 Mind and World, p.11. Episode II. Perceiver and Knower 41 space of reasons. They maintain this position for many different reasons, notably the fineness-of-grained / richness argument, the argument from human infant and mere animals, and the argument from concept-formation, among others. This is the main theme of McDowell's third lecture, but for our purpose we can bypass this for the moment: what concerns us in this essay is how McDowell identifies a model of subjectivity that responsible for various puzzlements concerning human subject as perceiver, knower, thinker, speaker, agent, person, and (self-) conscious animal, and further, how he manages to develop a positive account that makes our direct contact with the world intelligible. For this purpose, the discursivity of experience is relevant, but by far not in the main thread.70 So let's cling on the main thread. The primeness claim, as discussed in my previous section, has it that the space of reasons incorporates the external world: in the case of knowledge and veridical experience, the worldly facts themselves are unfactorizable part of the states. This repels the composite picture, which regards the worldly facts as only extrinsically related to the states in question even in the case of knowledge and veridical perception, which means that there is a common inner factor shared by the good case and the bad case. The primeness claim goes with the disjunctive conception and the composite / conjunctive claim goes with the common factor conception. Now McDowell takes up this aspect of his thought again in Mind and World: I insist...that when we acknowledge the possibility of being misled, we do not deprive ourselves of 'taking in how things are' as a description of what happens when one is not misled...That things are thus and so is the content of the [veridical] experience, and it can also be the content of a judgment...So it is conceptual content. But that things are thus and so is also, if one is not misled, as aspect of the layout of the world: it is how things are. Thus the idea of conceptually structured operations of receptivity puts us in a position to speak of experience as openness to the layout of reality. Experience enables the layout of reality itself to exert a rational influence on what a subject thinks.71 In this passage, McDowell combines the primeness claim and the conceptuality thesis: the worldly facts that figure in the content of experience are characterized by 'that things are thus and so.' 'That things are thus and so' is both the conceptual content of veridical experiences and an aspect of the layout of reality. This radically changes the traditional picture: on the traditional, composite picture, the conceptual content of experiences is 'in the head,' or at least 'in the subject,' and that inner conceptual 70 I will nevertheless say more about this in my later episode on agent and person. 71 Ibid., p.26. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 42 content 'represents' outer, worldly facts. On McDowell's openness view, by contrast, the conceptual content of experience is identical with an aspect of the world. The following passage is another expression of the same line of thought: [T]here is no ontological gap between the sort of thing one can mean, or generally the sort of thing one can think, and the sort of thing that can be the case. When one thinks truly, what one thinks is what is the case. So since the world is everything that is the case...there is no gap between thought, as such, and the world.72 As McDowell himself notices, nevertheless, an obvious and strong objection to this 'unboundedness of the conceptual' is the charge of 'idealism.'73 The line of thought is quite simple: concepts are mental, so if the conceptual has no outer boundary, then the 'external' world becomes mental. How does McDowell respond to this fairly straightforward argument? McDowell invokes the act / content distinction in reply: 'Thought' can mean the act of thinking; but it can also mean the content of a piece of thinking: what someone thinks. Now if we are to give due acknowledgement to the independence of reality, what we need is a constraint from outside thinking and judging, our exercises of spontaneity. The constraint does not need to be from outside thinkable contents.74 The identity McDowell commits is between thinkable contents, i.e. what one thinks, and worldly facts. Read like this, it becomes a tautology. As Wittgenstein says, the openness claim 'has the form of a truism,' quoted by McDowell.75 But if it is indeed a truism, what's the point of insisting it? The answer should be clear when we consider the inner space model. On this view, there are self-standing items populated in the mental inner space, and these items somehow 'represent' outer states of affairs. The items function as inner representations that are distinct from aspects of the outer world. Since this inner space model is very popular in contemporary philosophy, as I will try to show in this essay, McDowell's insistence on that truism has a real point. 72 Ibid., p.27. 73 Ibid., p.25.-6 74 Ibid., p.28. Recall my quotation of A. D. Smith at the early stage of the introduction. He thinks 'Realism' and 'Idealism' constitutes a dichotomy, and notices that in formulating this he uses terms like 'cognized' and 'states,' which belong to the 'act' side in the act / content distinction. Smith's formulation leaves open the possibility that we can have a reasonable idealism formulated in terms of 'content.' I will say more about this in the fourth episode, where I explain that McDowell does propose certain version of idealism. 75 Ibid., p.27. Episode II. Perceiver and Knower 43 3. I almost finish my exposition of McDowell's conception of perceiver and knower. Before closing this episode, however, I would like to consider a larger objection to McDowell's overall position. In arguing for primeness cum openness, the notion of 'experience' plays a crucial role for McDowell. This reflects his 'minimal empiricism: the idea that experience must constitute a tribunal, mediating the way our thinking is answerable to how things are...'76 But not everyone accepts this claim. Recall that coherentism, in recognizing that the Given is a myth, only acknowledges experiences' causal role. In repudiating scheme-content dualism, the third dogma of empiricism, Davidson asserts that 'if we give it up it is not clear that there is anything distinctive left to call empiricism.'77 Robert Brandom follows this and writes: [W]hen we are properly wired up and trained, and favorable circumstances, the perceptible facts wring from us perceptual judgments. In order to explain how this is possible – quite a different enterprise from justifying the resulting judgments – we postulate the existence of something like sense impressions, whose properties systematically covary with the contents of the judgments they causally elicit from us. But these sense impressions are features of the physiology of perception. They are not something we are aware of, and they do not themselves have conceptual content.78 Similar line of thought can also be found in other authors who take experience more seriously, for example Charles Travis and Anil Gupta.79 I shall confine myself to the criticisms raised by Brandom, for his principal argument is from the social, public character of intentionality, which is very important throughout my essay.80 In his positive project, Brandom elaborates '[a] social, linguistic account of intentionality.' 81 He complains that '[t]he social nature of spontaneity...is acknowledged [by McDowell], but only belatedly, in the discussion of the need for knowers and agents to be properly brought up in order to be sensitive to various sorts of norms.'82 In short, Brandom argues that McDowell's emphasis on experience betrays a 'residual individualism.'83 In what follows I shall argue the otherwise. No one will deny that experiences in some way mediate the relations between mind 76 Ibid., xii, my italics. 77 'On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,' pp.189-90. 78 'Perception and Rational Constraint,' p.253-4. 79 For the Former, see 'The Silence of Senses,' Mind 113 (2004), pp.57-94; for the latter, see Empiricism and Experience (Oxford University Press, USA, 2006). 80 Some of the materials below are drawn from 'Openness and the Social Initiation into the Space of Reasons,' which I co-author with Professor Lin. 81 Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Harvard University Press, 1994), p.xv, my italics. 82 'Perception and Rational Constraint,' p.256. 83 Ibid., p.258. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 44 and world, but McDowell and Brandom have very different view about the way in question. For McDowell, experiences have both semantic and causal roles to play; for Brandom, experiences are like sense impressions in old empiricism's sense. Before evaluating these two views, it would be helpful to know more about their conceptions of the world and the mind-world relation generally. Brandom urges, in a Fregean vein, that 'facts are just true claims.' 84 'Fact' presumably refers to a constituent of 'world.' He further distinguishes 'what is claimed' and 'the claiming of it.'85 'To say that facts are just true claims does not commit one to treating the facts as somehow dependent on our claimings; it does not, for instance, have the consequence that had there never been any claimers, there would have been no facts...Talk of facts as what makes claims true is confused if it is thought of as relating two distinct things – a true claim and the fact in virtue of which it is true...'86 For Brandom, facts are true contents, not truth-makers. In other words, Brandom also accepts the openness thesis that the world is in the realm of the conceptual.87 The only discernable difference between him and McDowell in this context is that where Brandom uses 'claimings,' McDowell uses 'experience.'88 As I have said, Brandom avoids 'experience' because he thinks that implies individualism, which has it that social elements are not essential to the constitution of intentionality in general. In principle, a normal individual will do, so to speak. Does McDowell unwittingly commit this implausible picture? Brandom quotes McDowell: 'The world itself must exert a rational constraint on our thinking,'89 and goes on to argue that 'in his positive suggestions, McDowell looks to rational constraint, not by the facts, but by experience of the facts.'90 Brandom then makes two claims: first, what McDowell really has in mind here is 'experience,' but his insistence on 'the need for conceptually structured pre-judgmental experiences that warrant our perceptual judgment is a non sequitur.'91 Second, as we just briefly described, 'the aetiology of [McDowell's] blindness to alternatives should be traced to a residual individualism...[which is] a systematic underestimation of the significance of the fact that talk of the space of reasons is an abstraction from concrete, essential social practices of giving and asking for licit, p.327. PI for short; trans. G.E.M. king It Explicit, p.333 and Mind and World, p.27. d Rational Constraint,' p.253. 84 Making It Exp 85 Ibid., p.327 86 Ibid., p.328. 87 And both of them express their faithfulness to Wittgenstein's remark: '[w]hen we say, and mean, that such-and-such is the case, we – and our meaning – do not stop anywhere short of the facts; but we mean: this-is-so' (Philosophical Investigations, Blackwell Publishing, 2001, Anscombe, §195). See Ma 88 Mind and World, p.26. 89 'Perception an 90 Ibid., p.253. 91 Ibid., p.255. Episode II. Perceiver and Knower 45 reasons.92 Against this, I shall argue that actually McDowell never slide from world to experience, and his talk of experience by no means commits him individualism. Brandom is not alone in noticing McDowell's putative oscillation between experience and world. Hannah Ginsborg, for example, questions: If the streets are wet and, recognizing that fact, I come to believe that it has rained, is my reason for believing that it has rained my belief that the streets are wet or the fact that the streets are wet? If, as some philosophers hold, the right answer in these cases is that it is the fact rather than the belief which serves as a reason, then Davidson [and McDowell are] mistaken about something more fundamental...93 Their worry seems to be this: McDowell is not determinate (or worse, consistent) about the ultimate step in his picture; sometimes he thinks it is the world that fits the bill, but in other occasions he retreats that claim and let experience play the role. Brandom, in particular, provides a diagnosis for this oscillation: he thinks in regarding experience as the final step for both intentionality and justification, McDowell betrays his residual individualism, which is inherited from his 'predecessor' C. I. Lewis.94 The correctness of this diagnosis aside, Brandom's move shows that he thinks individualism and the emphasis on the role of experience goes hand in hand. To be sure, he does not claim that there is any implicative connection between the two, but at least he takes the emphasis on experience as a symptom of individualism. Granting this point for the sake of argument, I would like to suggest that the above doubt cast by Brandom, Ginsborg, and Ayers (see footnote 87) presupposes a gap firmly and reasonably rejected by McDowell: the gap between experiences and the facts they take in. 'Experience enables the layout of reality itself to exert a rational influence on what a subject thinks,'95 McDowell remarks; he makes clear that it is the layout of reality itself, rather than our experiences of it, that serves the rational constraint required. 'But if that is so,' one might ask, 'why does McDowell sometimes talk as if it is experiences that do the trick?' Recall the act / content distinction discussed above. The distinction is invoked to explicate the openness of thought, but for McDowell, this can 92 Ibid., p.258. 93 'Reasons for Belief,' Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 72 (2006), pp.286-318, at p.287. The quotation is appropriated for encompassing both Davidson and McDowell. According to Ginsborg, this debate between the two is in some sense only a family quarrel, for there is a more fundamental issue concerning the status of psychological states as reasons in general. Michael Ayers raises a similar consideration in 'Sense Experience, Concepts, and Content – Objections to Davidson and McDowell,' in Ralph Schumacher (ed.), Perception and Reality: From Descartes to the Present (Paderborn, 2004), pp.239-62. 94 'Perception and Rational Constraint,' p.256. 95 Mind and World, p.26, my italics. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 46 uld be exempt from the kind of charge made by des the fact it takes in. d Donald Davidson, both of whom stress the social aspects of language painstakingly. be naturally generalized to the openness of experience. The 'act' of experience is what makes facts available to us; the 'content' of experience is the fact itself when we are not misled. There is no extra item for McDowell to 'lapse into': the act is not a 'thing' that can exert the rational constraint; it is a way to make the true content available to us and therefore able to exert constraint on us; the content, when veridical, is the fact itself, which exerts rational constraint. Individualism won't strike back in McDowell's picture, for he does not commit the existence of a thing called 'experience' whose individuation condition excludes the world. Brandom's worry applies only to the picture McDowell objects to: if one postulates mental representations representing the world, he does need to make a choice between 'experience' and the world. McDowell, in repudiating this picture, sho Brandom, Ginsborg, and Ayers. In defense of Davidson's claim that 'nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief'96 against Ayers' charge, McDowell writes: 'Davidson's claim is obviously not that one bases a belief on one's believing something else...It is what one believes, not one's believing it, that is one's reason in the sense Davidson is concerned with.'97 There is no problem for Davidson and McDowell here; what justifies our beliefs is a given fact, not its 'psychological surrogate.'98 But we need some way to make the fact available to us, hence the crucial role of experience, conceived as an act: '[i]t is not...that the fact itself, as opposed to the fact that one experiences its obtaining, is one's reason for believing what one believes.'99 This looks like a 'narrow content' theory only on the assumption that experience is something internal and whose individuation condition exclu This is in no way McDowell's conception of 'experience.'100 This is not the end of the story between McDowell and Brandom, to be sure, but for my purpose this should be enough. Brandom's argument from social elements against McDowell's use of experience fails. But one might still tend to think that McDowell does not take social elements or publicity seriously enough. In the next episode I will spell out this aspect of McDowell's philosophy by considering his view of thinker and speaker. The main interlocutors are Saul Kripke an 96 'A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge,' in Kant oder Hegel? (1983); reprinted in his Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2001), pp.137-153, at p.141. 97 'Conceptual Capacities in Perception,' p.1073. 98 'Reply to Dancy,' in Cynthia MacDonald and Graham MacDonald (eds.), McDowell and His Critics (Blackwell Publishing, 2006), pp.134-41, at p.135. 99 Ibid., p.135. 100 I discuss more about the differences between McDowell and Brandom in 'Openness and the Social Initiation into the Space of Reasons.' McDowell further argues that Brandom commits the composite picture in his account of knowledge; I bypass this for that will take us too far. See his 'Knowledge and the Internal Revisited,' Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64 (2002), pp.97-105. E P I S O D E III Thinker and Speaker In interpretation, understanding does not become something different. It becomes itself. Such interpretation is grounded existentially in understanding; the latter does not arise from the former. – Martin Heidegger, Being and Time ...language maintains a kind of independent life vis-à-vis the individual member of a linguistic community; and as he grows into it, it introduces him into a particular orientation and relationship to the world as well. – Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method Custom 1. In his preface of the celebrated Word and Object, Quine says, 'Language is a social art.'1 Most, if not all, contemporary analytic philosophers regard the publicity of meaning as basically uncontroversial. Even Searle, as a dedicated 'internalist,' says that '[l]anguage is indeed public...'2 Other key players like Davidson, Putnam, Burge, among others, have their own ways to conceive the crucial social elements. The idea often traces back to Wittgenstein, in particular his notion of 'custom.'3 How this notion is relevant to McDowell's conception of thinker and speaker will become clear later on. 1 Word and Object (MIT Press, 1960), p.ix. 2 'Indeterminacy, Empiricism, and the First Person,' Journal of Philosophy 84 (1987), pp.123-46; reprinted in his Consciousness and Language (Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp.226-50, at p.250. 3 Philosophical Investigations, §198. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 48 The guiding question in the present episode is this: how does McDowell conceive the social / public elements of intentionality, and how does this conception connect to his diagnosis and treatment of the inner space model, as discussed in the previous episode? I answer this question by considering McDowell's criticisms against Saul Kripke's reading of Wittgenstein.4 As we shall see, in formulating the 'skeptical paradox' of meaning, Kripke tacitly presupposes the inner space model. This may be somewhat surprising, for Kripke is often read as a critic of our residual Cartesianism about meaning, as we shall see. One of McDowell's main tasks here is to persuade us that Kripke's anti-Cartesianism does not go to the root. So here goes Kripke's Wittgenstein, or 'Kripkenstein.'5 Kripke attempts to shed light on the issue about meaning by discussing and elaborating Ludwig Wittgenstein's 'rule-following considerations.' We normally think that our linguistic behaviors are rule-governed: a concept is a rule; when we use it we need to follow the rule given by its content. This is where normativity comes in. The rule determines correct and incorrect uses of the concept in question. The Kripkenstein paradox challenges this conception of language. Kripke summarizes the paradox as follows: The Skeptic doubts whether any instructions I gave myself in the past compel (or justify) the answer '125' rather than 5.' He puts the challenge in terms of a skeptical hypothesis about a change in my usage. Perhaps when I used the term 'plus' in the past, I always mean quus: by hypothesis I never gave myself any explicit directions that were incompatible with such a hypothesis.6 The problem is this: one's past performances are finite, and we can always fit them into more than one rule, however deviant they might be. But if that is so, then the normativity vanishes, for it goes with rules. Given a set of past behaviors or intentions, including linguistic ones, the skeptic claims that we can always interpret them as confirming infinitely different rules. There is no principle to prevent him from doing so. Kripke goes on to envisage a reply to the skeptic: [S]uppose we wish to add x and y. Take a huge bunch of marbles. First count out x marbles in one hip. Then count out y marbles in another. Put the two heaps together and count out the number of marbles in the union thus formed. The result is x + y. This set of directions, I may suppose, I explicitly gave myself at some earlier time. It 4 Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Harvard University Press, 1982). 5 Part of the following paragraphs are drawn from my 'The Skeptical Paradox and the Nature of the Self,' which has been published by Aurora 2. 6 Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, p.13. Episode III. Thinker and Speaker 49 is engraved on my mind as on a slate. It is incompatible with the hypothesis that I mean quus. It is this set of directions, not the finite list of particular additions I performed in the past, that justifies and determines my present response.7 And Kripke launches a Wittgensteinian rejoinder to this reply: True, if 'count,' as I used the word in the past, referred to the act of counting..., then 'plus' must have stood for addition. But I applied 'count,' like 'plus,' to only finitely many past cases. Thus the Skeptic can question my present interpretation of my past usage of 'count' as he did with 'plus.' In particular, he can claim that by 'count' I formerly meant quount, where to 'quount' a heap is to count it in the ordinary sense, unless the heap was formed as the union of two heaps, one of which has 57 or more items, in which case one must automatically give the answer '5.'8 Here Kripke is applying again the infinite regress of interpreting rules. This time the regress is not within a single symbol, say '+,' but between different symbols. The basic insight, if any, is the same: a rule is never self-interpreting; we can always assign infinite interpretations to it, and if we attempt to interpret it with other rules, the series of interpretation are also infinite. Hence the paradox.9 Let me now briefly introduce Kripke's 'skeptical solution.' He says this kind of solution 'begins on the contrary by conceding that the sceptic's negative assertions are unanswerable. Nevertheless our ordinary practice or belief is justified because...it need not require the justification the sceptic has shown to be untenable.'10 He goes on to say that 'Wittgenstein proposes a picture of language based, not on truth conditions, but on assertability conditions or justification conditions: under what circumstances are we allowed to make a given assertion?'11 He then concludes by saying that '[t]he success of the practices...depends on the brute empirical fact that we agree with each other in our responses.'12 This is the general guise of Kripke's skeptical solution.13 7 Ibid., p.15-6. 8 Ibid., p.16. 9 David McCarty reminds me that 'infinity' is not always a problem, especially when we notice examples form mathematics. I think the infinity in the present context is indeed a problem because it violates the normativity of meaning; it prevents us from deciding non-arbitrarily which interpretation is correct. 10 Ibid., p.66. 11 Ibid., p.74. 12 Ibid., p.109, my italics. 13 Some readers might have noticed that I do not have any surprising interpretation of Kripke. One thing to be noted, however, is that I do not accept George Wilson's reductio interpretation of the paradox, which is supposed to cast doubt on the standard interpretation I adopt. See his 'Kripke on Wittgenstein on Normativity,' in Peter A. French and Howard Wettstein (eds.) Midwest Studies in Philosophy 19 (1994), pp.366-90; reprinted in Alexander Miller and Crispin Wright (eds.), Rule-Following and Meaning (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002), pp.234-59. I side with Miller W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 50 2. As we have seen, the first principle of the Kripkenstein paradox is the infinite regress of interpreting rule. We can equally interpret the '+' sign to mean 'plus' or 'quus,' and if we attempt to determine the its meaning by invoking another notion, say 'count,' the skeptic can still interpret it as 'quount,' which again is a deviant interpretation. This infinite regress seems to be the hardstand of the paradox. But is it well-grounded? In the early stage of his argumentation, Kripke identifies the skeptical paradox with the first paragraph of Philosophical Investigations §201: This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule. The answer was: if everything can be made out to accord with the rule, then it can also be made out to conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here.14 But as McDowell notices, '§201 goes on with a passage for which Kripke's reading makes no room'15: It can be seen that there is a misunderstanding here from the mere fact that in the course of our argument we give one interpretation after another; as if each one contented us at least for a moment, until we thought of yet another standing behind it. What this shews is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call 'obeying the rule' and 'going against it' in actual cases.16 The problem identified in the first paragraph is the 'infinite regress of interpretations,' which is even clearer in PI §198: 'any interpretation still hangs in the air along with what it interprets, and cannot give it any support.'17 Now a natural way to respond to the regress is this: What one wants to say is: 'Every sign is capable of interpretation; but the meaning in thinking that Wilson's interpretation violates Kripke's distinction between the straight solution and the skeptical solution, which seems to me perfectly legitimate. See his introduction in the volume, pp.1-15. Obviously, this should not be regarded as a sweeping objection to Wilson, whose discussions are abundant and delicate. I temporarily ignore his interpretation because that will lead me too far away from my central concern. This remark applies to all other different interpretations to Kripke. 14 Philosophical Investigations, §201. Kripke quotes this in his p.7. 15 'Wittgenstein on Following a Rule,' Synthesis 58 (1984); reprinted in his Mind, Value, and Reality, pp.221-62, at p.229. 16 Philosophical Investigations, §201. 17 Ibid., §198. Episode III. Thinker and Speaker 51 mustn't be capable of interpretation. It is the last interpretation.'18 But it should be crystally clear that this won't work, for if we let the chain of interpretations get started, on what ground we are entitled to stop it at any point? To simply insist that there will be 'the last interpretation' is ad hoc and dogmatic. McDowell's metaphor for this is 'a super-rigid yet (or perhaps we should say 'hence') ethereal machine.'19 It is super-rigid because it sustains all other interpretations without being itself interpretable; it is therefore ('hence') ethereal because actually it cannot sustain anything: if every interpretation itself can be further interpreted but the supposed 'last' interpretation cannot, it is disqualified as 'interpretation' anyway. The way Wittgenstein confronts the paradox is not, pace Kripke, to be acquiesce to the 'paradox' introduced in the first paragraph of PI §201; on the contrary, he asserts that 'there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation...' Although so far we have no idea about the general shape of solution, we can be sure that for Wittgenstein, it won't be a Humean 'skeptical solution,' which 'begins...by conceding that the sceptic's negative assertions are unanswerable.'20 But does it follow that what Wittgenstein has in mind is a 'straight solution'? It depends on how we conceive the straightness. Kripke first introduces the notion of a straight solution like this: 'a straight solution...shows that on closer examination the scepticism proves to be unwarranted...'21, but he later adds that a straight solution 'point[s] out to the silly sceptic a hidden fact he overlooked, a condition in the world which constitutes my meaning addition by 'plus.'22 If we stick to the earlier formulation, Wittgenstein's solution is indeed a straight one, for he attempts to show that 'the scepticism proves to be unwarranted' by elaborating how there can be 'a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation.' If we adopt the later qualification, however, it is not clear that Wittgenstein would admit that he is providing a straight solution, for the second formulation presupposes certain reductionism about meaning and understanding: as Jerry Fodor famously declares, '[i]f aboutness is real, it must be really something else.'23 Maybe we can accept the supervenience thesis about meaning, but to ask us 'cite the fact' is asking something more than that. 'Supervenience' is an ontological thesis; it does not further require that we are able to cite the very fact. I cannot go into the reductionism debate here, but it seems plausible to reply to the skeptic that the requirement of 'citing the fact' commits reductionism, and we have no reason to accept it without further arguments from the skeptic. What's important for our present 18 The Blue and Brown Books (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1958), p.34. 19 'Wittgenstein on Following a Rule,' p.230. 20 Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, p.66. 21 Ibid., p.66. 22 Ibid., p.69. 23 Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind (MIT Press, 1989), p.97. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 52 purpose is to recognize that though Wittgenstein is not offering a skeptical solution here, he is not offering a straight solution either, understood in the second formulation. As we shall see, he does not cite a fact and identify it with meaning; his talks about 'customs' and other related notion are not like that.24 Before going into the positive account, McDowell further quotes Wittgenstein for his denial of the thought that understanding is always a matter of interpretation: How can the word 'Slab' indicate what I have to do, when after all I can bring any action into accord with any interpretation? How can I follow a rule, when after all whatever I do can be interpreted as following it?25 If we accept McDowell's suggestion to read Wittgenstein as arguing against the thought that understanding is always interpretation, the question '[h]ow can there be a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation?' becomes urgent.26 McDowell submits that we should turn to Wittgenstein's notion of 'practice' for the answer: And hence also 'obeying a rule' is a practice. And to think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule. Hence it not possible to obey a rule 'privately': otherwise thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying it.27 The ground for regarding the notion of practice as the answer is the 'hence also' in the first line of the above quotation: 'we have to realize that obeying a rule is a practice if we are to find it intelligible that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation.'28 The same line of thought goes further: 'Then can whatever I do be brought into accord with the rule?' – Let me ask this: what has the expression of a rule – say a sign-post – got to do with my actions? What sort of connexion is there here? – Well, perhaps this one: I have been trained to react this sign in a particular way, and now I do so react to it. 'But that is only to give a causal connexion: to tell how it has come about that we go by the sign-post; not what this going-by-the sign really consists in.' – On the contrary; I have further indicated that a person goes by a sign-post only in so far as 24 Here I am indebted to Scott Soames; we discussed this when I presented a version of 'The Skeptical Paradox and the Nature of the Self' at 2007 Soochow International Conference on Analytic Philosophy. 25 Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1978), VI-38. McDowell goes on to cite many other passages from PI; I am not going to repeat all of them here. 26 'Wittgenstein on Following a Rule,' p.238. 27 Philosophical Investigations, §202, my italics. 28 'Wittgenstein on Following a Rule,' p.238, my italics. Episode III. Thinker and Speaker 53 there exists a regular use of sign-posts, a custom.29 When one goes by a sign-post in normal cases, what guides her is not an interpretation of the sign; she just does it in the way the relevant customs dictate. Consider PI §506: '[t]he absent-minded man who at the order "Right turn!" turns left, and then, clutching his forehead, says "Oh! Right turn" and does a right turn. What has struck him? An interpretation?'30 It seems clear that there is no interpretation in play here. True, we do from time to time interpret man-made or natural signs, but that's not the general case.31 Normally, we just do it in the way we trained. A natural objection, anticipated by Wittgenstein, is that this answer is also a 'causal explanation'32; or worse, a behavioristic explanation. In response, McDowell reminds us that for Wittgenstein, 'the training in question is initiation into a custom.'33 If the subject being trained is not a human being, but instead a mere animal, we would not say that in the training it has been initiated into a custom. The crucial difference is whether one has a language or not; I shall come back to this later. Let's consider some of Kripke's remarks in details. The skeptics asks, '[h]ow do I know that '68 + 57,' as I meant 'plus' in the past, should denote 125?'34 He goes on to ask that 'why I now believe that by 'plus' in the past, I meant addition rather than quaddition?'35 A page later he asks, '[b]ut I can doubt that my past usage of 'plus' denoted plus.'36 An assumption underlying all these queries is that we need to offer justifications here, but why should we think so? 'That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life,'37 Wittgenstein writes. If what in play here are opinions, it might be reasonable to ask for justifications, but 'what is at issue here is below that level – the "bedrock" where "I have exhausted the justifications" and "my spade is turned" (PI §217).'38 Also see this passage: Giving grounds, however, justifying the evidence, comes to an end; – but the end is not certain proposition' striking us immediately as true, i.e. it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game.39 29 Philosophical Investigations, §198, my italics. 30 Ibid., §506. 31 Wittgenstein and McDowell never make this qualification, but I think we should we them as saying that in general cases, understanding is not interpretation. To read them as holding the universal claim is uncharitable. 32 'Wittgenstein on Following a Rule,' p.239. 33 Ibid., p.239. 34 Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, p.12. 35 Ibid., p.12. 36 Ibid., p.13. Also, 'no matter what is in my mind at a given time, I am free in the future to interpret it in different ways,' p.107. 37 Philosophical Investigations, §241. 38 'Wittgenstein on Following a Rule,' p.240. 39 On Certainty (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1969), §204. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 54 We can appreciate this move by comparing this with the debate about the structure of empirical knowledge. Foundationalism is one of the responses to the infinite regress of justification; it attempts to stop the regress by postulating so-called 'basic beliefs,' beliefs with certain special status. Now many have cast doubt on the cogency of this response, for after all, basic beliefs are beliefs. If they are beliefs, it is hard to see how they can be exempted from being in need of justification in one way or another. Now in our context, if what sustain all the understandings are themselves opinions or propositions, there seems to be little reason for thinking that they are not themselves in need of justifications. So the notion of customs and the like are not to be conceived as explicitly codified articles; instead, they are our forms of life pertaining to our language-games. At the level of 'bedrock,'40 we just carry out actions without a justification, but 'without a justification does not mean...without right.'41 In introducing the notion of 'bedrock,' Wittgenstein is not embracing one horn of the dilemma, i.e. 'the last interpretation.' Rather, he is trying 'to steer a course between a Scylla and a Charybdis. Scylla is the idea that understanding is always interpretation,' but if we avoid this by insisting that at the 'bedrock' level, no justification is needed, 'then we risk steering on to Charybdis – the picture of a basic level at which there are no norms.'42 But as McDowell warns, '[u]ntil more is said about how exactly the appeal to communal practice makes the middle course available, this is only a programme for a solution to Wittgenstein's problem.'43 3. One might wonder why the practices in question have to be communal ones. Can't an individual form her own form of life so as to sustain linguistic abilities?44 To this McDowell replies that 'one must search one's conscience to be sure that what one has in mind is not really, after all, the picture of a private interpretation...[one is] resigning oneself to Scylla...'45 McDowell's remarks here are not very clear; I understand him as say this: how can an individual carry out actions with normativity, all by one's own? It appears that all one can do here is to launch one interpretation after another; as Kripke points out to us, this does not work. But if McDowell's Wittgenstein invokes communal practice to the rescue, what distinguishes this picture from Kripkenstein's one? Recall that at the outset of this episode, I said that almost all analytic philosophers nowadays regard the social 40 Philosophical Investigations, §217. 41 Ibid., §289. 42 'Wittgenstein on Following a Rule,' p.242. 43 Ibid., p.242. 44 This line of thinking is pursued by Simon Blackburn, 'The Individual Strikes Back,' Synthesis 58 (1984), pp.281-301. 45 'Wittgenstein on Following a Rule,' p.246. Episode III. Thinker and Speaker 55 elements as essential to or at least important for intentionality. 'But it makes a difference how we conceive the requirement of publicity to emerge.'46 McDowell argues that Kripke (and Crispin Wright) Picture a community as a collection of individuals presenting to one another exteriors that match in certain respects. They hope to humanize this bleak picture by claiming that what meaning consists in lies on those exteriors as they conceive them. But...if regularities in the verbal behaviour of an isolated individual, described in norm-free terms, do not add up to meaning, it is quite obscure how it could somehow make all the difference if there are several individuals with matching regularities. The picture of a linguistic community degenerates...into a picture of a mere aggregate of individuals whom we have no convincing reason not to conceive as opaque to one another.47 The picture McDowell recommends, by contrast, is that shared membership in a linguistic community is not just a matter of matching in aspects of an exterior that we present to anyone whatever, but equips us to make our minds available to one another, by confronting one another with a different exterior from that which we present to outsiders...[S]hared command of a language equips us to know one another's meaning without needing to arrive at that knowledge by interpretation, because it equips us to hear someone else's meaning in his words...[A] linguistic community is conceived as bound together, not by a match in mere externals (facts accessible to just anyone), but by a capacity for a meeting of minds.48 The above two passages convey one and the same thought from opposite angles. The negative part says that community in the relevant sense is not just aggregations of individual: there is no reason why quantity can explain the emergence of meaning. The positive part invokes the notion of membership, means that individuals need to be initiated into customs. The second line mentions 'anyone.' If we don't consider the 'membership' of the individuals, then meaning is available to 'anyone.' This collapses into behaviorism, or to use Simon Blackburn's phrase, 'a wooden picture of the use of language.'49 Without the constraint of membership, anyone can access the meaning 46 Ibid., p.243. 47 Ibid., pp.252-3. 48 Ibid., p.253. 49 'Rule-Following and Moral Realism,' in Steven Holtzman and Christopher Leich (eds.) Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1981), pp.163-87, at p.183. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 56 fact, but what is available to anyone regardless their customs? Answer: behaviors. But this is obvious not what Wittgenstein has in mind, and not a good picture to have anyway. Recall that in my previous episode, I discussed Brandom's accusation of residual individualism in McDowell's picture. Now it is interesting to learn that McDowell's counterargument against Brandom echoes his criticisms to Kripke and Wright: Within the putative observer's perspective, as opposed to the interpreter's, the fact is not in view as calling for a rational response. It is not in view as something to be taken into account in building a picture of the world. But that seems indistinguishable from saying it is not in view as the fact that it is...How could multiplying what are, considered by themselves, blind responses, to include blind responses to how the blind responses of one's fellows are related to the circumstances to which they are blind responses, somehow bring it about that the responses are after all not blind?50 McDowell's thought here is connected to his view about the other-mind problem. He argues that we can 'literally perceive, in another person's facial expression or his behaviour, that he is...in pain...'51 We are mind-readers, but in knowing others' minds, we are not conducting interpretations in normal cases; rather, we just see that they are in pain or other mental states. A general tendency of analytic philosophy is to start with meaningless noises and behaviors, and try to regain meaningfulness from those dead building blocks. The gist of McDowell's interpretation of Wittgenstein is that we need to start in the midst of meaning, or what we get is only aggregate of individuals.52 Those who read Wittgenstein as a reductionist ignore the following remark from him: '[h]earing a word in a particular sense. How queer that there should be such a thing!'53 I suppose that the cogency of McDowell case against the assimilation of understanding to interpretation has been generally established. But even my readers agree with this, one might still wonder what the relation between this reflection from rule-following considerations and the inner space model is. McDowell provides the connection in another work on Wittgenstein: 50 'Reply to Commentators,' Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 (1998), pp.403-31, at pp.408-9, my italics. 51 'On "The Reality of the Past",' at p.305. 52 McDowell says more in the following two articles. 'Anti-Realism and the Epistemology of Understanding,' in Herman Parret and Jacques Bouveresse (eds.) Meaning and Understanding (Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, 1981), pp.225-48; reprinted in his Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality, pp.314-43. And 'Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge.' I would like to leave this related issue for my readers. 53 Philosophical Investigations, §534. Episode III. Thinker and Speaker 7 5 The conception is one according to which such regions of reality are populated exclusively with items that, considered in themselves, do not sort things out side the mind, including specifically bits of behaviour, into those that are correct or incorrect in the light of those items. According to this conception, the contents of minds are items that, considered in themselves, just 'stand there like a sign-post,' as Wittgenstein puts it (PI §85). Consider in itself, a sign-post is just a board or something similar, perhaps bearing an inscription, on a post...What does sort behaviour into what counts as following the sign-post and what does not is not an inscribed board affixed to a post, considered in itself, but such an object under a certain interpretation...54 The first half of the passage is a characterization of the inner space, which is populated by inert, self-standing items that only extrinsically relate to external states of affairs. The second half is to connect the assimilation of understanding to interpretation (the 'master thesis'55) to the inner space model: self-standing items need to be interpreted to be about something else; considered in themselves, they are 'normatively inert.'56 In constructing the skeptical paradox, Kripke seldom talks about the mind directly, but his assimilation of understanding to interpretation betrays that he implicitly commits the inner space model. But if we abandon that way of conceiving ourselves, the regress of interpretations cannot get off the ground, and we can thereby shrug our shoulders to the meaning skeptics.57 Kripke does talk about the mind at the early stage of his discussions. He says that a set of directions 'is engraved on my mind as on a slate.'58 Not many people think there is anything crucial around, but I think Kripke's metaphor here is indeed disastrous: to conceive our minds as slates is to distance ourselves to our mental items, treat them as objects, so as to make room for deviant interpretations. The picture Kripke offers suggests that when someone entertains a thought, she need to consult her own past intentions in using that symbol. The falsity of this way of thinking is that this makes ownership (or 'first-person character') of thoughts a myth. If one needs to consult her mental history whenever she entertains relevant thoughts, the difference 54 'Meaning and Intentionality in Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy,' Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., and Howard K. Wettstein (eds.) Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 17: The Wittgenstein Legacy (University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, 1993), pp.40-52; reprinted in his Mind, Value, and Reality, pp.263-78, at pp.264-5. I encourage readers who are new to McDowell's philosophy to start with this later paper; it is much more user-friendly than the dense 'Wittgenstein on Following a Rule.' In what follows I won't say much about this later paper, for most of the contents relevant to my purpose have been discussed when I concentrated on the earlier, denser paper. 55 Ibid., p.270. 56 Ibid., p.265. 57 In 'The Skeptical Paradox and the Nature of the Self,' I further connect the inner space model to the homunculus fallacy in philosophy of mind. This will burden Kripke's skeptic as well. 58 Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, p.15. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 58 between spontaneously entertaining one's own thoughts and attributing thoughts to our fellow speakers vanishes. This doesn't seem right.59 And again we can see the rebuttal of this in Wittgenstein: We are tempted to think that the action of language consists of two parts; an inorganic part, the handling of signs, and an organic part, which we may call understanding these signs, meaning them, interpreting them, thinking.60 It is helpful to think this in John Searle's terms. Sometimes interpretations do constitute meanings, but that kind of intentionality is merely 'derivative,' i.e. 'observer-relative.' I am not here defending Searle's distinction between original and derivative intentionality, but it is quite clear that to think that human intentionality is universally derivative is straightforwardly wrong.61 4. I shall turn to some objections to McDowell's position.62 Actually Kripke himself anticipates and comments on this kind of position: Perhaps we may try to recoup, by arguing that meaning addition by 'plus' is a state even more sui generic than we have argued before. Perhaps it is simply a primitive state, not to be assimilated to sensations or headaches or any 'qualitative' states, nor 59 Barry Stroud reminds me of this way of putting the matter. This paragraph is drawn from 'The Skeptical Paradox and the Nature of the Self.' I talk about 'ownership' here; what I mean is the asymmetry between first-person and third-person knowledge. To invoke the asymmetry is sometimes thought to be a Cartesian move, but I don't think there is anything Cartesian in the present case. See 'The Skeptical Paradox and the Nature of the Self,' where I evaluate the relevant debate between Colin McGinn and Crispin Wright. 60 The Blue and Brown Books, p.3, my italics. Crispin Wright, in his 'Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy of Mind: Sensation, Privacy, and Intention' (presented at an American Philosophical Association symposium on Wittgenstein on December 30, 1989), also notices and criticizes the Cartesian 'walled garden.' Although this sounds congenial to McDowell's attack on the inner space, actually their views are quite different. Wright finds fault in the notion of 'inner observation,' but McDowell insists that what's at fault should be the 'sign-post' conception of mental items, not 'observation' per se. McDowell is 'not defending the model of inner observation,' but only 'insist[ing] that the observational model of self-knowledge is not in play here.' We should recognize that '[observational] model is merely a natural form for the epistemology of self-knowledge to take if the [inner space] framework is in place': if mental items are self-standing, normatively inert objects before the mind, we do need to observe and interpret them. See McDowell's 'Intentionality and Interiority in Wittgenstein,' Klaus Puhl (ed.) Meaning Scepticism (De Gruyter, Berlin and New York, 1991), pp.148-69; reprinted in his Mind, Value, and Reality, pp.297-321; at p.315, 319, 321, respectively. Also see his 'Response to Crispin Wright,' in Crispin Wright, Barry C. Smith, and Cynthia Macdonald (eds.) Knowing Our Own Minds (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1998), pp. 47-62. 61 Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge University Press, 1983). I do not refer to specific passages of it, for I do not want to get into the details of the distinction per se. McDowell offers an interesting example to illustrate the point; see 'Meaning and Intentionality in Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy,' pp.270-1. In my 'On Meaning Skeptics' Cartesian Model,' I compare Kripke's position with Quine's. Quine presses his indeterminacy of translation even to the first-person case, and I suspect that the inner space model is also in play in his thinking. 62 Some of the following paragraphs are drawn from my 'An Initial Defense of Semantic Primitivism.' Episode III. Thinker and Speaker 59 to be assimilated to dispositions, but a state of a unique kind of its own.63 And he goes on to criticize this unclear approach right away: Such a move may in a sense be irrefutable, and if it is taken in an appropriate way Wittgenstein may even accept it. But it seems desperate: it leaves the nature of this postulated primitive state...completely mysterious. It is not supposed to be an introspectible state, yet we supposedly are aware of it with some fair degree of certainty whenever it occurs.64 Kripke does not spell out in what sense it is irrefutable, and the word 'irrefutable' is ambiguous. Sometimes it is taken to be a positive word, but in philosophy and science most of the time it is a dirty word. Since Kripke leaves the meaning of the word totally undetermined, I will simply bypass this remark. The same problem plagues the following sentence. What does he mean by 'appropriate'? This is especially important because if we spell it out, the opponent here may succeed in answering the paradox. Disappointedly enough, Kripke does not say anything specific here. I think we can think of McDowell's view as an attempt to find this appropriate way. Kripke then says that this approach is 'desperate,' for it leaves the nature of this kind of state 'mysterious.' Indeed, given the characterizations in the above quotation, the nature of the state is mysterious so the proponents of it do make a desperate move. But notice that Kripke does not even try to give a fair construal to this position, as I argued above. What is really mysterious is why Kripke picks an empty opponent to belabor. Thus there are some latitudes for anti-skeptics to freely envisage varieties of possibility here. Kripke thinks this sort of state is not supposed to be introspectible, but this description is unmotivated. Maybe he thinks only experiential states which he previously considered are introspectible, but this is not true. I can introspect to my beliefs, though most of my beliefs do not give me any qualitative feels. Kripke has another line of objection. He thinks there is a logical difficulty inherited in primitivism, and again he attributes this view to Wittgenstein: Even more important is the logical difficulty implicit in Wittgenstein's sceptical argument...Such a state would have to be a finite object, contains in our finite minds...Can we conceive of a finite state which could not be interpreted in a quus-like way?65 63 Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, p.51. 64 Ibid., p.51. 65 Ibid., p.51-2. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 60 The problem of infinite deviant interpretations strikes back, but since we have rejected the model generating the regress, it should be seen as an innocuous remark now. Another thing to be said is that the infinity can be explained by compositionality. The 'plus' sigh is a piece of language, so it can be used in infinite different way thanks to compositionality. I cannot see why there is any puzzle about it. Besides, the infinity objection is not particular for the present proposal anyway: anti-skeptics are finding certain fact to sustain meaning, and supposedly all most facts are finite – maybe dispositions are not, if they turn out to be relevant facts. So even if this is indeed a problem, this is not a particular problem for primitivism. The logical difficulty amounts to nothing. Kripke's own objections to primitivism are not very impressive; in what follows I shall consider objections raised by one of his major followers, Martin Kusch, who recently published a systematic defense of Kripke's Wittgenstein.66 Kusch is skeptical about McDowell's starting point, that is, Kripke's skeptical case utterly relies on the infinite regress of interpretation. He argues: In all these cases, the meaning sceptic counters the proposal with the observation that the proposed items (past behaviours, formulae, qualia, intentions and Fregean ideas) can be interpreted in many different ways. In all these cases Kripke does indeed work with the regress of interpretations. Note, however, that the same is not true in the case of reductive dispositionalism. It seems as though the dispositionalist is, in a way, doing precisely what McDowell's Wittgenstein urges us to do: get rid of any mental items that just 'stand there like sign-post.' Moreover, the arguments that Kripke marshals against dispositionalism on Wittgenstein's behalf – the normativity considerations, the finitude objection, the mistake objection – do not make use of the regress of interpretations. Given the central place of dispositionalism in Episode 2 of WRPL this should make us cautious about McDowell's reading of the book.67 Kusch attempts to show that Kripke's objections to dispositionalism do not rely on the infinite regress of interpretation. However, McDowell's criticisms against Kripke presuppose that the regress is the backbone of Kripke's whole argumentations. It follows that McDowell's reading of Kripke is biased. Furthermore, this shows that McDowell's view is more like dispositionalism. Even if Kusch is right about Kripke's objections against dispositionalism – which I will later show that it is not – it is not clear why this should be a reason for 66 A Sceptical Guide to Meaning and Rules: Defending Kripke's Wittgenstein (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006). 67 Ibid., p.225-6. Episode III. Thinker and Speaker 61 assimilating McDowell's position to dispositionalism. Given Kusch's interpretation, maybe they are coextensive – both of them have no regress problem – but that does not mean they are in any significant sense similar to each other. Whether dispositionalism succeeds in preserving normativity, it does not incorporate this property in its starting point; it starts rather with the finitude problem. McDowell, on the contrary, starts with normativity. We can see this in his insistence on membership. Dispositionalism and McDowell's position are just different. And Kripke's objections to dispositionalism include the infinite regress of interpretation anyway. The regress problem implicitly resides in the finitude objection. Kripke gives a rejoinder to dispositionalist's attempt to overcome the finitude problem: The dispositional theory attempts to avoid the problem of finiteness of my actual past performance by appealing to a disposition. But in doing so, it ignores an obvious fact: not only my actual performance, but also the totality of my dispositions, is finite...Let 'quaddition' be redefined so as to be a function which agrees with addition thereafter (say, it is 5). Then, just as the sceptic previously proposed the hypothesis that I meant quaddition in the old sense, now he proposes the hypothesis that I meant quaddition in the new sense. A dispositional account will be impotent to refute him. As before, there are infinitely many candidates the sceptic can propose for the role of quaddition.68 Now we should ask why finitude would be a problem at the very beginning. We non-skeptics want some way to get a determined rule from past behaviors, but we fail if we let the infinite regress of interpretation get going. No matter how many past intentions or behaviors we have, since they are finite, the skeptic can always find some ways to give deviant interpretations. Finitude is a problem precisely because it generates vicious infinite regress. The regress nightmare is with dispositionalism anyway, at least according to Kripke. Kusch then says actually Kripke can accommodate McDowell's concern: [T]here is also reason to doubt McDowell's claim according to which Kripke's fails to recognize Wittgenstein's crucial third position: a primitivism about meaning and rules that is centred around the ideas of training, acting blindly, agreement, custom, practice and institution.69 68 Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, p.26-7. 69 A Sceptical Guide to Meaning and Rules, p.226. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 62 He then goes on to give plenty of textual evidence from Kripke to support his complaint here. First thing to be noted is that Kusch seems to contradict himself here, for he formerly says that McDowell's position is rather like dispositionalism. Now he commits himself the thought that Kripke's skeptical solution is similar to dispositionalism. I don't think he will buy this, but let's turn to Kusch's concern here, that Kripke's solution can accommodate what McDowell is driving at. We can resist this assimilation by the distinction between the 'insulated-individuals conception' and the 'intimate-individuals conception'; the former refers to the position shared by Kripke, Wright, and Brandom; the later refers to McDowell and McDowell's Wittgenstein. There is no denying that Kripke's solution does have some Wittgensteinian flavor. This is recognized by McDowell in the very paper Kusch is considering: Wittgenstein's point is that we have to situate our conception of meaning and understanding within a framework of communal practice. Kripke's reading credits Wittgenstein with the thesis that the notion of meaning something by one's word is 'inapplicable to a single person considered in isolation (p.79). The upshot is similar, then; and it cannot be denied that the insistence on publicity in Kripke's reading corresponds broadly with a Wittgensteinian thought. But it makes a difference how we conceive the requirement of publicity to emerge.70 Indeed, who can sensibly deny that Kripke's picture is in a sense social, and it incorporates Wittgenstein's insistence on the importance of practice and custom? The problem is, to repeat, his conception of a community is only an aggregation of individuals, regardless their memberships. The fact that Kripke also underscores the importance of practice and custom does not justify Kusch's attempted assimilation. Another attempt to assimilate McDowell with Kripke can be found in another passage from Kusch: McDowell's Wittgenstein's opposition to 'constructive philosophical accounts' is really an opposition to, and 'diagnostic deconstruction' of, all forms of reductivism. Kripke's Wittgenstein would obviously sympathize. His only proviso would be that reductionism is not the only candidate for 'diagnostic deconstruction.' Semantic and intentional reductivism is a natural upshot of meaning determinism, and unless we cure ourselves of the latter, we can never be sure that we are free of the inclination to be tempted by the former.71 70 'Wittgenstein on Following a Rule,' p.243. 71 A Sceptical Guide to Meaning and Rules, p.227. Episode III. Thinker and Speaker 63 This passage is striking for me. I cannot see why Kripke's Wittgenstein would oppose to reductionism, let alone 'obviously' does so. Kusch does not give any justification as far as I can tell. Moreover, it is not true that there is a close relation between meaning determinism and reductionism. When Kripke demands us to find some fact to sustain meaning, he constrains us with a reductive requirement. Quine is another prominent example of reductionism about meaning, but he is the last one who will accept meaning determinism.72 The above quotation is really confusing. The last objection from Kusch is not very clear. He seems to say that McDowell's position is not a stable one: Can we read McDowell differently? Can we perhaps read him as proposing an improved version of meaning determinism: meaning determinism without the master thesis? I doubt that this reading can be squared with McDowell's commitments. McDowell's position questions or rejects almost all meaning-determinist assumptions...This rules out immediate knowledge, privacy, and the individualistic contractual of semantic normativity...As far as objectivity goes, McDowell seeks to find a middle way between 'platonistic autonomy' and 'ratification dependence'...This is weaker than the meaning determinist's objectivity, which seems to be precisely a form of the autonomy thesis. Finally, McDowell does not advocate full-blown classical realism with its inflationary factualism.73 McDowell is obviously not an indeterminist, and he rejects Kripke's master thesis, that understanding is a species of interpretation. Therefore, to read him as proposing a version of meaning determinism without the master thesis is definitely a natural reading. Kusch nevertheless thinks this is a 'different' reading of McDowell, which shows that he misunderstands McDowell from the very beginning, though I am not sure at what point. What's more, all the above descriptions of McDowell's position just show that his determinism is quite unique, without traditional determinisms' assumptions. McDowell's overall philosophical concern is to make meaning and understanding unproblematic, so he is no doubt a determinist, though with various delicate provisos. 5. Why do Kripke and Wright (probably not Brandom) want a picture that starts 72 Quine elaborates his indeterminacy thesis in various places, but see his Word and Object for a classic presentation. My supervisor Lin Chung I reminds me that there are issues about whether Quine is a reductionist, as opposed to an eliminativist. I understand this concern, but I need to bypass it in order to keep my main line. 73 A Sceptical Guide to Meaning and Rules, p.227-8. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 64 from meaningless noises and behaviors? To answer this diagnostic question, I shall turn to the well-known dichotomy between psychologism and behaviorism, between the Cartesian and the Rylean.74 Kripke starts with a Cartesian model in formulating the paradox, and that makes mental states idle with respect to meaning. This leads him to end up with a Rylean conception of meaning and understanding. His solution is Rylean in the sense that he does not have a place for membership in his picture. The insulated-individuals conception of community does not allow people make contact with one another's meaning. The source of the paradox, then, is that he cannot get rid of the dichotomy between psychologism and behaviorism. The dichotomy is deeply-rooted in the analytic tradition. Traditional empiricisms and rationalisms share the psychologistic conception of language, and from early 20th century the behavioristic atmosphere took over. Philosophers struggle between the two seemingly mutually exhaustive options. Kripke is not alone in the framework between the Cartesian and the Rylean. In Word and Object, Quine notices this dichotomy and happily endorses behaviorism. Quine writes: One may accept the Brentano thesis either as showing the indispensability of intentional idioms and the importance of an autonomous science of intention, or as showing the baselessness of intentional idioms and the emptiness of a science of intention. My attitude, unlike Brentano's, is the second.75 I am not here attacking behaviorism; I just want to stress that the dichotomy is often seen in important philosophers' thinking. Many of them never question the dichotomy, however. Now Kripke's case is more complicated. On the one hand, one of his main points is to challenge a version of Cartesianism: he argues that one's confidence about one's own meaning – one's self-knowledge – is an illusion. On the other, he explicitly distances himself from behaviorism.76 He seems to be aware of the predicament followed from the dichotomy, but nevertheless end up with a Rylean picture unintentionally. Now Michael Dummett also wants to find a middle course between the two extremes. McDowell argues that Dummett commits similar mistake in the sense that he is also too close to behaviorism. This debate between Dummett and McDowell is not in the context of rule-following, so I shall briefly describe it and relate it to the present discussion.77 74 As usual, I am not using these adjectives of philosophers' names in a very strict way. 75 Word and Object, p.221. Daniel Dennett follows him in The Intentional Stance (MIT Press, 1987), p.175. 76 See Kripke's attitude toward Quine in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, pp.14-5, 55-8. 77 The reason I bring this debate in is that it is about what a theory of meaning should be like, e.g. should we accept reductionism? McDowell's thought is that the puzzle about meaning that makes Episode III. Thinker and Speaker 65 The locus of their disagreement is Davidson's truth-theoretic view of meaning. Details aside, the main question here is about what we should expect in our theory of meaning. Dummett thinks that our meaning theory should be 'full-blooded': intensional notions are 'of no use in giving an account of the language as from the outside.'78 McDowell, by contrast, thinks that our theory of meaning should be modest. This is a debate between reductionism and non-reductionism, which is highly relevant to the main topic of the present episode. Kripke imposes reductionist's requirement when he demands anti-skeptics to cite facts that does not themselves involve meaning, and primitivism is a version of non-reductionism, for it insists on the sui generis character of meaning. Dummett thinks, following Quine, that modesty is inevitably psychologistic.79 McDowell summarizes this as follows: Now one strand in Dummett's objection to modesty is the view that modesty necessarily involves this conception of language as a code [that is, psychologism.]... [A modest theory] is intelligible only on the supposition that adherents of modesty imagine the task...delegated to a prior and independent theory of thought.80 And Dummett thinks psychologism is objectionable: [I]f communication is to be possible, that in which our understanding of the language we speak consists must 'lie open to view, as Frege maintained that it does, in our use of the language, in our participation in a common practice.'81 We should credit Dummett in insisting that meaning should not be considered as lying behind behaviors. But the question is how he can achieve this given his requirement of full-bloodedness. 'How, then can a description of the practice of speaking a language "as from outside" content succeed in registering the role of mind? How can it be more than a mere description of outward behaviour, with the mental (inner) aspect of language use left out of account?'82 philosophers oscillate back and forth between psychologism and behaviorism, and Kripke does not succeed in developing a stable position. In his objections to Dummett, McDowell explicitly discusses this oscillation, so I think it is helpful to relate it to the rule-following issue. For this reason, I will only discuss Dummett's oscillation and McDowell's way out. Issues surrounded Davidson will be omitted. 78 'Frege and Wittgenstein,' in Irving Block (ed.) Perspectives on the Philosophy of Wittgenstein (Blackwell, Oxford, 1981), at p.40. 79 See the quotation from Word and Object above. 80 'In Defense of Modesty,' in Barry Taylor (ed.) Michael Dummett: Contributions to Philosophy (Martinus Nijhoff, Dordrecht, 1987), pp.59-80; reprinted in his Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality, pp.87-107, at pp.93-4. 81 Ibid., p.94. 82 Ibid., p.94. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 66 Now one particular objection from McDowell is especially relevant. It is about Dummett's example of attribution of the concept square. McDowell argues: Can implicit knowledge that that is how square things are to be treated be manifested in behaviour, characterized 'as from outside' content? It may seem that nothing could be simpler: the manifestation would be someone's treating a square thing in whatever way is in question. But any such performance would be an equally good manifestation of any of an indefinite number of different pieces of such implicit knowledge...If we assume a stable propensity, guided by an unchanging piece of implicit knowledge, we can use further behaviour to rule out some of these competing candidates. But no finite set of performances would eliminate them all; and finite sets of performances are all we get.83 Under this construal, Dummett's position is strikingly similar to Quine's.84 Both of them think modesty – non-reductionism – goes hand in hand with psychologism. Both of them think somehow behaviors or dispositions of behavior can manifest meaning (if any.) Quine famously shows that meaning is underdetermined with respect to behaviors. If we combine this with reductive behaviorism, indeterminacy is home and dry. Now, Dummett rejects this and attempt to steer between psychologism and behaviorism. However, his insistence on full-bloodedness commits him the Quinean line of reasoning. It's not clear how he can block this route given the requirement of full-bloodedness. Now how does McDowell steer the middle course? Since psychologism is not desirable, our mindedness must somehow manifest in our behaviors. But if we insist that the characterization must be 'as from outside,' we fall in the trap of behaviorism, and thereby commit Quinean indeterminacy. The solution is to insist that meaning does manifest in behaviors, but characterizations of them must be modest: we should not expect we can characterize behaviors in meaning-free terms. McDowell writes: Steering that middle course requires the difficult idea that competence in a language is an ability to embody one's mind – the cast of one's thoughts – in words that one speaks, and to hear others' thoughts in their words... [W]e have to entitle ourselves to the idea that acquiring a first language is, not learning a behavioural outlet for antecedent states of mind, but becoming minded in ways that the language is anyway able to express. We have to equip ourselves to see how our ability to have dealings with content can be, not a mere natural endowment (something we can take for 83 Ibid., p.96. 84 I leave open whether McDowell's interpretation of Dummett is fair. This goes far beyond the purposes of mine. Episode III. Thinker and Speaker 7 6 granted), but an achievement, which an individual attains by acquiring membership in a linguistic community.85 The talk about 'membership' ensures that McDowell has the same thing in mind when he takes issue with Kripke and Dummett. To further confirm this, recall that in discussing rule-following, McDowell says that 'shared command of a language equips us to know one another's meaning without needing to arrive at that knowledge by interpretation, because it equips us to hear someone else's meaning in his words.'86 Thus, his debate with Dummett on modesty can be regarded as a suitable diagnosis of Kripke's skeptic. We have seen that in the picture McDowell recommends, the notion of 'custom' plays an indispensably crucial role: to be a genuine thinker, one has to be initiated into relevant customs. And to be initiated into customs is to acquire a language: Now it is not even clearly intelligible to suppose a creature might be born at home in the space of reasons. Human beings are not: they are born mere animals, and they are transformed into thinkers and intentional agents in the course of coming to maturity. This transformation risks looking mysterious. But we can take it in our stride if, in our conception of the Bildung that is a central element in the normal maturation of human beings, we give pride of place to the learning of language. In being initiated into a language, a human being is introduced into something that already embodies putatively rational linkages between concepts, putatively constitutive of the layout of the space of reasons, before she comes on the scene.87 So the notion of 'a language' is indeed vital for McDowell's overall picture. Given this, it is interested to learn that Donald Davidson famously remarks that 'there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed.'88 A more intimate relation can be found in Davidson's negative attitude towards Kripkenstein's ways of thinking: What would matter [for communication]...is that we should each provide the other with something understandable as a language. This is an intention speakers must have; but carrying out this intention...does not involve following shared rules or 85 Ibid., pp.104-5. 86 'Wittgenstein on Following a Rule,' p.253. 87 Mind and World, p.125, my italics. 88 'A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,' in Richard E. Grandy and Richard Warner (eds.) Philosophical Grounds of Rationality (Oxford University Press, 1986); reprinted in his Truth, Language, and History (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2005), pp.89-107, at p.107, my italics. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 68 conventions.89 If Davidson is right, then the whole discussion of rule-following is misguided. Is this also a knock-down objection to McDowell's proposal? I shall respond to this concern in my next section. Bildung 1. When he first tackles the relevant issues, Davidson formulates the question like this: 'could there be communication by language without convention?'90 His main opponent Dummett also regards 'communication' as one of the principal functions of language.91 Given this common ground, the debate is about the primary status of a shared language, as Davidson puts: '[w]hich is conceptually primary, the idiolect or the language?'92 His opts for the former: in learning a language, a person acquires the ability to operate in accord with a precise and specifiable set of syntactic and semantic rules; verbal communication depends on speaker and hearer sharing such an ability, and it requires no more than this. I argued that sharing such a previously mastered ability was neither necessary nor sufficient for successful linguistic communication.93 On the face of it, Davidson's main argument for his case is based on counterexamples, notably malapropism.94 A malapropism is a wrong use of one world instead of another because they sound similar to each other, and what's interesting is that the occurrences of malapropism often do not prevent successful communication. One of Davidson's examples is between 'a nice arrangement of epithets' and 'a nice derangement of 89 'The Second Person,' in Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, and Howard K. Wettstein (eds.) Midwest Studies in Philosophy 17: The Wittgenstein Legacy (Indianapolis: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992); reprinted in his Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2001), pp.107-21, at p.114, my italics. In a footnote in the next page Davidson reminds his readers that his point there is related to the point he argues in 'A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs' that 'communication does not demand that language be shared.' 90 'Communication and Convention,' Synthesis 59 (1984), pp.3-17; reprinted in his Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1984), pp.265-80, at p.265, my italics. Here Davidson invokes the notion of 'convention,' but it is interchangeable with 'rule' and 'regularities' in his context. 91 'Language and Communication,' in Alexander George (ed.) Reflections on Chomsky (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1989), pp.192-212. The other principal function is 'vehicle of thought.' 92 'The Social Aspect of Language,' in B. F. McGuinness and Gianluigi Oliveri (eds.) The Philosophy of Michael Dummett (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994), pp.1-16; reprinted in his Truth, Language, and History (Clarendon Press, Oxford,, 2005), pp.109-25, at p.109. 93 Ibid., p.110. 94 To be sure, Davidson's claim here is supported by his view about linguistic meaning as a whole. By 'the main argument' I mean the most direct argument. To investigate Davidson's entire argumentations will obviously take us too far. Episode III. Thinker and Speaker 69 epitaphs.'95 Davidson's thinks that in this kind of case, speaker and hearer can understand each other without sharing any common understanding of the contingent usages of the words involved. If this is right, to approach the issues of linguistic meaning with the rule-following considerations is wrongheaded, for linguistic behaviors are not essentially rule-governed practices; 'shared linguistic practice' has merely practical utility.'96 McDowell does not dispute this; as he says, '[m]alapropisms provide clear counterexamples – cases where understanding is not disrupted by mismatches between speaker and hearer in respect of anything we might see as rules to which they conform their linguistic behavior.'97 Where Davidson denies 'portable interpreting machine,'98 Gadamer contemns 'method.' What McDowell objects to is the following inference: Now to make a leap. There seems to me to be no reason, in theory at least, why speakers who understand each other ever need to speak, or to have spoken, as anyone else speaks, much less as each other speaks.99 This is indeed a 'leap,' for cases like malapropisms (or 'two monoglot survivors' scenario100) do not warrant a 'perfective' claim. Davidson of course knows this, so his ground for the further claim is not those examples, but the argument from 'absence of negative reason.' McDowell's response to this challenge is in effect providing a reason against that perfective claim. He writes, Davidson's claims commit him to denying that one needs to learn to speak as others do, in the ordinary sense, in order to become a human subject, a potential party to an encounter with another that leads to mutual understanding, at all.101 McDowell doubts that 'Davidson ever considers the thought that shared languages might matter for the constitution of subjects of understanding,' for '[h]is target is always the conception of a sharing that would suffice of itself for communication,'102 as we have seen at the beginning of this section. But if McDowell is right about the 95 'A nice Derangement of Epitaphs,' p.103. 96 'Gadamer and Davidson on Understanding and Relativism,' in Jeff Malpas, Ulrich Arnswald, and Jens Kertscher (eds.) Gadamer's Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer (MIT Press, 2002), pp.173-93, at p182. 97 'Gadamer and Davidson on Understanding and Relativism,' pp.181-2, my italics. 98 'A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,' p.107. 99 'The Social Aspect of Language,' p.115, my italics. 100 'Gadamer and Davidson on Understanding and Relativism,' p.183. 101 Ibid., p.183, my italics. 102 Ibid., p.184, my italics. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 70 rule-following discussions, as discussed in my previous section, then to be a thinker is to be initiated into relevant customs, and to start the initiation is to be a speaker. A shared language is indispensable not because linguistic practices are essentially rule-following behaviors – they are not, as shown by malapropisms and the like – but because it is responsible for the constitution of a genuine thinker. Davidson makes the unfortunate leap, for he overlooks the possibility McDowell argues for in the context of the rule-following considerations.103 McDowell agrees with Davidson that 'familiarity with a human way of life [is] surely not just aids to arriving at understanding,' but he adds that a form of life is 'conditions for being potential subjects of understanding at all.' 104 Relatedly, Davidson is hostile to the idea of 'non-linguistic institution,'105 and to this McDowell replies: A 'language-game' cannot be confined to bursts of speech. It is a whole in which verbal behavior is integrated into a form of life, including practices that if considered on their own would have to be counted as nonlinguistic.106 2. It is helpful to take stock before I close the present episode. The discussions of rule-following have been very heated for about twenty-five years, since the publication of Kripke's Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. Most participants don't accept Kripke's interpretation of Wittgenstein, including the 'paradox' part and the 'solution' part. Nevertheless, most (if not all) of them assume with Kripke that linguistic behaviors are essentially rule-following practices. Now as we have seen, Davidson is skeptical about this idea; he attempts to resolve the debate by arguing against the essentialist claim. Now McDowell concurs with Davidson at this point, but he refuses to accept Davidson's further 'leap,' namely the 'perfective' claim. So we can say that Davidson gestures the right direction but unfortunately goes too far. Therefore it is potentially misleading to regard McDowell as a player in the rule-following battlefield: though he rejects Davidson's excessive move, he nonetheless sides with Davidson in thinking that the 'rule-following considerations' generated by Kripke's interpretation of Wittgenstein is misguided, philosophically speaking. Communication per se does not, contra many philosophers' convictions, involve shared rules essentially, but being able to understanding does, pace Davidson. In my introductory episode, I said something about how McDowell's Locke 103 McDowell invokes Brandom's distinction between 'I-thou sociality' and 'I-we sociality' to conduct further discussions. See Making It Explicit, p.659, for citing Davidson with approval. Through this, we can see that McDowell's requirement of publicity is more demanding than Davidson and Brandom. 104 Ibid., p.184-5. 105 'The Social Aspect of Language,' p.119. 106 'Gadamer and Davidson on Understanding and Relativism,' p.185. Episode III. Thinker and Speaker 71 Lecture relies on Gadamer's thinking about Bildung. Now we see more intimate connections between this notion and a central issue in analytic philosophy. 'The idea of inheriting a tradition helps us to understand what is involved in possessing conceptual capacities...'107 Through a careful reading of Wittgenstein's notions of 'custom' and 'form of life,' McDowell shows us how the resources from continental thinkers can after all shed light on central concerns in the analytic tradition. I shall finally conclude this episode with the following passage: Human beings mature into being at home in the space of reasons or, what comes to the same thing, living their lives in the world; we can make sense of that by noticing that the language into which a human being is first initiated stands over against her as a prior embodiment of mindedness, of the possibility of an orientation to the world.108 107 Ibid., p.173, my italics. 108 Mind and World, p.125, my italics. E P I S O D E IV Agent and Person If habit is neither a form of knowledge nor an involuntary action, what then is it? It is knowledge in the hands, which is forthcoming only when bodily effort is made, and cannot be formulated in detachment from that effort. – Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception The environment can act on the subject only to the exact extent that he comprehends it; that is, transforms it into a situation. – Sean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness Embodiment 1. In the quotation at the end of my previous episode, McDowell uses the notion of 'mindedness' in passing. Presumably, this is to prevent the reification of our mental phenomena. Same consideration appears in the replacement of 'meaning' with 'meaningfulness' in the literatures of philosophy of language. For McDowell, mindedness is 'conceptual mindedness.'1 As I briefly mentioned in episode one, this claim is very controversial and there are many negative arguments from different considerations. In the present episode I take up this debate in the context of action and agency. In particular, the debate between McDowell and Hubert Dreyfus will be considered in details. But before that, let me say more about McDowell's conceptualism, especially its application to action. In talking about conceptual capacities, McDowell relates it to the idea of rationality. 1 'What Myth?' Inquiry 50 (2007), pp.338-51, at p.345, my italics. Episode IV. Agent and Person 73 He writes: The notion of rationality I mean to invoke here is the notion exploited in a traditional line of thought to make a special place in the animal kingdom for rational animals. It is a notion of responsiveness to reasons as such.2 As McDowell immediately says, this 'wording leaves room for responsiveness to reasons...on the other side of the division drawn by this notion of rationality between rational animals and animals that are not rational.'3 For example, when we observe a dog fleeing from potential dangerous, we are justified in saying that he is responsive to dangerous as a reason to flee, without attributing him a belief that he is in danger, i.e., the reason as such. Things are quite different in the case of human being. As McDowell says, we have the ability to 'step back from an inclination to flee, elicited from her by an apparent danger, and raise the question whether she should be so inclined – whether the apparent danger is, here and now, a sufficient reason for fleeing.'4 If she then decides to act on the reason, her action exhibit 'self-determining' subjectivity.5 Recall that when in experiences, conceptual capacities are 'operative,' rather than exercised, for we do not normally actively decide which concepts to apply, contrary to the case of judgments.6 Similarly, in the case of actions we do not usually pay attention to what we are doing or going to do, but if we can regard them as intentional actions, we need to connect it to the idea of rationality. McDowell reminds: Acting for a reason, which one is responding to as such, does not require that one reflects about whether some consideration is a sufficient rational warrant for something it seems to recommend. It is enough that one could.7 This is the way McDowell conceives the relation between conceptual capacities and rationality. This by the way responses to a usual query: how can McDowell put a 2 'Conceptual Capacities in Perception,' p.1066. I start my exposition of this episode from this piece because it is also what Dreyfus has in mind when he gave his presidential address and later responses. Unfortunately he never cites this paper from McDowell explicitly. 3 Ibid., p.1066. 4 Ibid., p.1066. 5 Ibid., p.1066. I think the distinction here can be understood together with McDowell's invocation of Gadamer's distinction between 'world' and 'environment,' discussed in my first episode. With this new distinction, McDowell reinforce the point the discriminatory capacities do not qualified as conceptual capacities in his sense; see p.1067. This point is very important when he debates with varieties of nonconceptualism. 6 I say 'normally,' because we do sometimes conduct top-down inferences in perceiving things. Consider the case in which an expert is in a better position to see something almost invisible from a vulgar's point of view. The same consideration applies to action. 7 Ibid., p.1066. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 74 heavy weight on the notion of 'conceptual capacities' without saying anything about the metaphysics of concept? To this McDowell would reply that his invocation of the notion of 'concept' is a matter of 'stipulation: conceptual capacities in the relevant sense belong essentially to their possessor's rationality in the sense I am working with, responsiveness to reasons as such.'8 He further works out this stipulation with his interpretation of Fregean sense.9 But in any case, he can leave open the nature of concept, as long as we do not regard it as normatively inert items populated in the inner space. There is another important point about the exercise / operative distinction. In the case of judgments, we exercise conceptual capacities through conducting inferences; in experiences it is not the case. As McDowell explains, '[t]he content that the explanation attributes to the experience is the same as the content of the belief explained, not a premise from which it would make sense to think of the subject as having reached the belief by an inferential step.'10 And something analogue can be said about action. After setting the stage, McDowell then offers his case for conceptualism: [I]f our notion of an experience is to be capable of playing the role it plays when we explain perceptually based beliefs as manifestations of rationality, we must understand having such an experience – being in possession of such an entitlement – as itself, already, an actualization of the conceptual capacities that would be exercised by someone who explicitly adopted a belief with that content.11 Again, something parallel can be said about actions. Simply put, the thought is that human experiences and actions are integral parts of human rationality, so given McDowell's stipulation of conceptual capacities, the 'pervasiveness of conceptual rationality' follows.12 Notice that in the above stipulation, McDowell says nothing about language. It is definitely McDowell's view that language is a crucial precondition of rationality, as he puts it, 'the ability to step back from considerations and raise the question whether they constitute reasons for action or belief...is coeval with command of a language,'13 but he never argues that conceptual capacities are linguistic or 'quasi-linguistic'14 in Michael Ayers's term – whatever that means. This makes room for the thought that 8 Ibid., p.1067. John Searle says something similar when he declares that what he is doing is 'logical analyses.' 9 See Mind and World, p.107. 10 'Conceptual Capacities in Perception,' p.1068, my italics. 11 Ibid., p.1068. 12 'What Myth?' p. 349, my italics. 13 'Conceptual Capacities in Perception,' p.1071. 14 'Sense Experience, Concepts, and Content – Objections to Davidson and McDowell,' at p.249. Episode IV. Agent and Person 75 'experience as actualization of conceptual capacities in sensory consciousness.'15 This damps a similar worry raised by Arthur Collins, that McDowell is 'committ[ing] to a picture in which our experience comes as it were with subtitles.'16 This is important in the present context, for if the sense of the conceptual is indeed 'quasi-linguistic,' the Ayers-Collins line of objection will appear again. To be sure, so far McDowell does not say anything positive about the sensory aspect of experience, but the objection was that McDowell cannot make room for that. It is enough for now to say that the room has been made, though the accommodation hasn't been prepared. As usual, McDowell has a diagnosis for the misfire. Here it goes: In disallowing my proposal that actualizations of conceptual capacities can present things in a sensory way, Ayers assumes a sharp separation between the sensory and the intellectual, as I shall put it to avoid that tendentious implication.17 The dualism of intellect and sensory is only assumed, without any argument. And McDowell's argument for conceptualism above provides some reason for not believing it. As acknowledged above, he does not have positive account about the way the conceptual and the sensory can merge together, but at least he depicts a way to understand the conceptual without precluding the sensory. Again, we can draw a parallel for actions. Experiences are of course sensory; actions are of course bodily. But without arguments, we should not simply assume that the sensory and the bodily are incompatible with the conceptual. Later we will see that Dreyfus is attempting to provide arguments for the dualism in question, but I shall complete my exposition of McDowell before evaluating Dreyfus's case. For McDowell, conceptual capacities, freedom, and self-determining subjectivity come in the same package.18 But we should not forget that we are not unconditionally free, both in experiences and in actions.19 As McDowell say, 'there is a sense in which perceptual experience can compel belief,'20 there is also a sense in which the world, together with affordances and solicitations, can compel actions.21 The passivity in perceptions and actions is of course acknowledged. The issue is how we should understand the relations between freedom and passivity. Again, this is the focal 15 'Conceptual Capacities in Perception,' p.1071. 16 Ibid., p.1071. See Arthur Collins, 'Beastly Experience,' Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 (1998), pp. 375-80. 17 'Conceptual Capacities in Perception,' p.1072. 18 I will say more about this in my epilogue. 19 See also Mind and World, p.96. 20 Ibid., p.1074. 21 The former concept is introduced by J. J. Gibson: '"affordance": all action possibilities latent in the environment, objectively measurable, and independent of the individual's ability to recognize these possibilities,' The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Houghton Mifflin, 1979). The latter concept will be characterized and discussed when I introduce Dreyfus's thoughts later. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 76 disagreement between McDowell and Dreyfus. Let me adumbrate what I have said before getting into the debate. McDowell first stipulates the sense in which rational animals possess conceptual capacities. This is the capacity to be responsive to reasons as such. He then rehearses a distinction between exercised and operative conceptual capacities. In experiences, the capacities are passively at work. The main argument for the conceptuality is that experiences are integrated into the larger framework of rationality, and this (together with other thoughts not presenting here) implies that experiences are conceptual through and through. This does not, contra many critics, mean that experiences are quasi-linguistic. To think otherwise is to embrace the dualism of intellect and sensory, without arguments. Experiences belong to the realm of self-determining subjectivity, but there is indeed a sense in which perceptions can compel beliefs, for it is in a significant sense passive. Now, everything said above has a place in the parallel story of actions. In actions, conceptual capacities are passively at work. They are conceptual because they are integral parts of the larger framework of rationality. They are passive because we are constrained by affordances, solicitations, and the world. We should not, however, conceive the conceptual and the passive aspects of action with the dualism of intellect and bodily.22 This is the general McDowellian picture.23 Like experiences, actions also mediate mind and world, though with different 'directions of fit.' 24 Perceptions reflect the world, actions change the world; perceptions sustain beliefs, actions carry out intentions. To expect a parallel story for actions is not unnatural at least. In his Locke Lecture, McDowell claims that 'intentions without overt activity are idle, and movements of limbs without concepts are mere happenings, not expressions of agency.25' And some philosophers start to envisage what McDowell would say, or should say, about action, Jonathan Dancy for example. 26 Some other philosophers go even further to criticize the envisaged McDowellian account of action; as mentioned, Hubert Dreyfus is one among them.27 In presenting his picture, as we have seen, McDowell invokes plenty of resources from the mighty deads, including Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, and Gadamer.28 A blatant feature of this list is that phenomenologists are absent: Husserl, 22 McDowell's own term for this is 'dualism of embodiment and mindedness.' 'Response to Dreyfus,' o touches the issue of y. onality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind, p.7. , McDowell and Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in Inquiry 50 (2007), pp.366-70, at p.369. 23 Most of the following materials are drawn from my 'Self, Action, and Passivity,' under review. I take issues with Dreyfus in great details because his debate with McDowell als conceptuality and the Myth of the Given, two of my main themes in this essa 24 See John Searle, Intenti 25 Mind and World, p.89. 26 'Acting in the Light of the Appearances,' in C. MacDonald and G. MacDonald (eds.) His Critics, pp. 121-34, and McDowell's reply to it, pp. 134-41 in the same anthology. 27 Dreyfus has a series of objections and modifications, so I will refer to specific pieces in due course. 28 However, McDowell opposes to his colleague Brandom's attitude towards those big names, indicated by the title of Brandom's historical anthology, Tales of the Episode IV. Agent and Person 7 7 Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty are not in the list. Dreyfus suggests that McDowell's position is defective exactly in this respect.29 2. In considering Dreyfus's objections, McDowell adumbrates his relevant thoughts I have urged that our perceptual relation to the world is conceptual all the way out to e will see that McDowell and Dreyfus have very different notions of the main Neither Davidson nor McDowell tries to describe perceptual objects as they are in as follows: the world's impacts on our receptive capacities. The idea of the conceptual that I mean to be invoking is to be understood in close connection with the idea of rationality, in the sense that is in play in the traditional separation of mature human beings, as rational animals, from the rest of the animal kingdom. Conceptual capacities are capacities that belong to their subject's rationality. So another way of putting my claim is to say that our perceptual experience is permeated with rationality. I have also suggested, in passing, that something parallel should be said about our agency.30 W concepts appeared in the above passage, such as 'perception,' 'concept,' 'receptive capacities,' 'rationality,' 'animals,' and 'agency.'31 But first let's go back to where the story began. In his editorial introduction to Samuel Todes's Body and World, Dreyfus briefly took issue with McDowell. He writes: themselves and how they become the objects of thought. By calling attention to the structure of nonconceptual, practical perception and showing how its judgments can be transformed into the judgments of detached thought, Todes is able to provide a framework in which to explain how the content of perception, while not itself the Metaphysics of Intentionality (Harvard University Press, 2002). 29 Husserl is an exception. Dreyfus is also hostile to Husserl's thoughts, so he regards his objections to McDowell as both Heideggerian and Merleau-Pontyan. Indeed, McDowell's notion of 'passive actualization of conceptual capacities in experiences' is very congenial to Husserl notion of 'passive synthesis,' as pointed out by Lilian Alweissl in 'The Myth of the Given,' in János Boros (ed.) Mind in World (Brambauer Pécs), pp.39-65. See also Husserl's Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic (Springer, 2001). 30 'What Myth?' pp.338-9. The familiar voice of this passage confirms that in this debate what Dreyfus and McDowell in minds is McDowell's earlier paper 'Conceptual Capacities in Perception.' This is important, because for some reasons unbeknownst to me, neither of them refers to that piece explicitly, but this is not good for readers. 31 McDowell himself, in his replies to Dreyfus, has attempted to clarify his relevant notions, and Dreyfus concedes that he misunderstood McDowell at some points. But his concessions are piecemeal, and there are still some significant misunderstandings lurking in Dreyfus's final response. What I will do here is to correct the misunderstandings in a systematic way, and through this I hope the lurking misunderstandings would thereby be dislodged. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 78 conceptual, can provide the basis for conception. Thus, Todes's Body and World can be read as a significant anticipatory response to McDowell's Mind and World.32 Here Dreyfus separates perception from conception. He thinks that there is something called 'perception as they are in themselves, independent of conception.' This seems to beg the question against McDowell, but I think Dreyfus is unblamable at this point, for what he did there is to introduce Todes's seminal work, situating it into certain philosophical contexts by contrasting it with McDowell's thoughts. Although it will be better if he provides substantive arguments for the claim, I think we can be more charitable here.33 What I mainly concern here is a series of debates where Dreyfus and McDowell engage with each other seriously. A few words about my strategy: the debate between McDowell and Dreyfus appears like continuous conversations: Dreyfus's Presidential Address was responding to McDowell's earlier works, and later on Inquiry they respond to each other for twice. In addition, Dreyfus does not reach his stable framework until the final response. Therefore, it would be onerous and ineffective for us to go through the discussions with the original sequence. Hence I shall offer a two-stage presentation of Dreyfus's objections. First it's general structure, and then its details. This means that sometimes I will fit Dreyfus's earlier points and examples into his later, stable framework. The motivation is to present Dreyfus at his best. In what follows I will discuss how Dreyfus reaches his stable framework first. Dreyfus seriously argues against McDowell in his 2005 APA Presidential Address. He starts his argumentation by posing this rhetoric question: '[c]an 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 animal?'34 The positive statement of the position goes like this: 'in assuming that all intelligibility, even perception and skillful coping, must be, at least implicitly, conceptual...Sellars and McDowell join Kant in endorsing what we might call the Myth of the Mental.'35 In supporting this claim, he brings in a distinction that is crucial to his argumentations: 32 'Todes's Account of Nonconceptual Perceptual Knowledge and Its Relation to Thought,' in Body and World (MIT Press, 2001), pp.xv-xxvii, at p.xvi, my italics. 33 For a detailed discussion concerning the relations between Todes, Dreyfus, and McDowell, see Joseph Rouse, 'Mind, Body, and World: Todes and McDowell on Bodies and Language,' Inquiry 48 (2005), pp.36-61. 34 'Overcoming the Myth of the Mental: How Philosophers can Profit from the Phenomenology of Everyday Expertise' (APA Pacific Division Presidential Address 2005, later published in Topoi 25 (2006), pp.43-49), p.1; my reference to the electronic version available here: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/pdf/Dreyfus%20APA%20Address%20%2010.22.05%20.pdf 35 Ibid., p.7, italics altered by me. Episode IV. Agent and Person 79 The actual phenomenon [i.e. expertise] suggests that to become experts we must switch from detached rule-following to a more involved and situation specific way of coping...Such emotional involvement seems to be necessary to facilitate the switchover from detached, analytical rule following to an entirely different engaged, holistic mode of experience...36 Dreyfus uses some other distinctions to supplement this one, including detached theoretical perspective / engaged situation in the world,37 calculate / involve,38 and knowing-that / knowing-how.39 I shall focus on the one appeared in the quotation. Dreyfus assumes that McDowell regards actions as detached rule-following, but he never tells us why he thinks that. Moreover, we have positive reasons to think otherwise. Recall that McDowell painstakingly disabuses this detached conception of rule-following in his critique of Kripke's Wittgenstein, as discussed in my previous episode. For example, he writes: [Kripke's] line of interpretation gets off on the wrong foot, when it credits Wittgenstein with acceptance of a 'skeptical paradox'... the reasoning that would lead to this 'skeptical paradox' starts with something Wittgenstein aims to show up as a mistake: the assumption, in this case, that the understanding on which I act when I obey an order must be an interpretation.40 To rehearse, Kripke conceives understanding as a species of interpretation, so whenever I use the 'plus' function, I can interpret my past usages of it so as to conform other deviant functions, hence the paradox. McDowell urges that the source of the paradox is the detached conception of rule-following: we need to do interpretation when our understanding is functioning. The problematic inner space model has it that there are some freestanding mental items that have no intrinsic normative relations with the external world, so we need interpretations to build up these relations. It is this detached picture, McDowell submits, that generates the skeptical paradox. He further connects his critique to Wittgenstein's notions of 'practice,' 'custom,' and 'form of life'; I shall not here repeat the discussions of my previous episode. It is not clear, then, why Dreyfus does not regard McDowell as an ally at least in this respect. The distinction between detached rule-following and involved skillful coping seems 36 Ibid., p.7-8, my italics. 37 Ibid., p.3. 38 Ibid., p.15. 39 Ibid., p.17. 40 'Wittgenstein on Following a Rule,' p.236. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 80 to be dubious; moreover, it is precisely what McDowell disagrees with when he writes that '[w]e find ourselves always already engaging with the world.'41 Dreyfus's distinction is actually congenial to McDowell. Dreyfus admits this misunderstanding in his reply: 'I did assume, accepting the traditional understanding, that McDowell understood rationality and conceptuality as general. I should have known better. I'm sorry that I attributed to McDowell the view of rationality he explicitly rejects in his papers on Aristotle.'42 Unfortunately, Dreyfus lapses again, ten pages later, when he contrasts 'detached conceptual intentionality' with 'involved motor intentionality.'43 I am puzzled by this: Dreyfus first claims, rightly, that he and McDowell agree that conceptuality is situation-dependent; that is, not general or detached. But after that he, in the very same paper, describes conceptual intentionality as detached. I don't know how to make of this. In his rejoinder, McDowell observes: Dreyfus acknowledges that he was wrong to think practical intelligence, as I conceive it, is situation-independent. But he still thinks my view of mindedness can be characterized in terms of 'detached conceptual intentionality.'44 Here McDowell writes as if Dreyfus only admits that practical intelligence is situation-dependent in McDowell's sense, but in fact, he confesses that he should not understand McDowell's notions of 'rationality,' 'conceptuality,' and related notions as situation-independent. Therefore, I cannot see any decisive progress in Dreyfus's first reply. I am not saying that there is no progress at all, but Dreyfus still preserves the general structure from his Presidential Address. It can be dubbed the 'detachment / involvement' distinction. Dreyfus replaces this structure with a new one in his second reply. Now the crucial distinction is constituted by 'subjectivity' and 'absorption': [There is] a deep issue dividing us – an issue that is obscured by my failure to distinguish explicitly absorption and involvement. I should have argued that subjectivity (not detachment) is the lingering ghost of 41 Mind and World, p.34, my italics. 42 'The Return of the Myth of the Mental," Inquiry 50 (2007), pp.352-65, at p.353. An earlier version of it is 'Detachment, Involvement, and Rationality: are We Essentially Rational Animals?' a talk given in Harvard. We can clearly see the disagreement between McDowell and Dreyfus in this title. Dreyfus mentions Aristotle because he and McDowell conduct the discussion by focusing on Aristotle's notion of 'phronesis,' which has been discussed in my first episode. Since they have reached agreement at this point, I shall not talk more about it here. I relate the discussion to Kripke and Wittgenstein instead, for the connection is relevant but missed in their exchanges. As to the relation between phronesis to demonstrative thoughts, see 'What Myth?' p.342. 43 Ibid., p.363, and notice my italics in the passage I just quoted. 44 'Response to Dreyfus,' p.366. Episode IV. Agent and Person 81 the mental...45 In this final response, Dreyfus realizes that it is inappropriate to saddle McDowell with the notion of 'detachment,' and he proposes that it is 'subjectivity,' which he means the operation of 'subject' or 'agent,' that is at fault. Besides, realizing that McDowell can accommodate the phenomena of 'involvement,' Dreyfus submits that it is 'absorption,' that is, 'involved coping at its best'46, that shows the falsity of conceptualism.47 This completes my characterization of Dreyfus's stable framework. Now I turn to the details of his objections. 3. The final version of the general framework is the 'subjectivity / absorption' distinction. By 'subjectivity' Dreyfus means 'agency,' which is 'the lingering ghost of the mental'48 according to him. As to 'absorption,' he writes that '[i]n fully absorbed coping, there is no immersed ego, not even an implicit one.'49 He further adds that 'in attentive, deliberate...action an ego is always involved.'50 Notice that before Dreyfus reaches this final version, the notion of 'attention' and the like has occupied a central place in his objections, including his favorite example from Chuck Knoblauch: As second baseman for the New York Yankees, Knoblauch was so successful he was voted best infielder of the year, but one day, rather than simply fielding a hit and throwing the ball to first base, it seems he stepped back and took up a 'free, distanced orientation' towards the ball and how he was throwing it – to the mechanics of it, as he put it. After that, he couldn't recover his former absorption and often – though not always – threw the ball to first base erratically – once into the face of a spectator. Interestingly, even after he seemed unable to resist stepping back and being mindful, Knoblauch could still play brilliant baseball in difficult situations – catching a hard-hit ground ball and throwing it to first faster than thought. What he couldn't do was field an easy routine grounder directly to second base, because that gave him time to think before throwing to first.51 The notion of 'attention' and the like play a heavy role in Dreyfus's objections 45 'Response to McDowell,' Inquiry 50 (2007), pp.371-77, p.373, my italics. 46 Ibid., p.373, my italics. 47 This remark suggests that what Dreyfus is describing here is a distinction, not a dichotomy: the differences between attentive, involved, and absorbed actions are a matter of degree. This will become important latter in my discussion. 48 Ibid., p.373. 49 Ibid., p.374, my italics. 50 Ibid., p.374, my italics. 51 'The Return of the Myth of the Mental,' p.354. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 82 through out the whole debate. Here is another example: [We] are only part-time rational animals. We can, when necessary, step back and put ourselves into a free-distanced relation to the world. We can also monitor our activity while performing it...But monitoring what we are doing as we are doing it...leads to performance which is at best competent.52 This line of argumentation, nevertheless, is both uncharitable as an interpretation and ungrounded as a thesis. Consider the passage McDowell first invokes the notion of 'stepping back': Consider someone following a marked trail, who at a crossing of paths goes to the right in response to a signpost pointing that way. It would be absurd to say that for going to the right to be a rational response to the signpost, it must issue from the subject's making an explicit determination that the way the signpost points gives her a reason for going to the right. What matters is just that she acts as she does because (this is a reason-introducing 'because') the signpost points to the right. (This explanation competes with, for instance, supposing she goes to the right at random, without noticing the signpost, or noticing it but not understanding it.) What shows that she goes to the right in rational response to the way the signpost points might be just that she can afterwards answer the question why she went to the right – a request for her reason for doing that – by saying 'There was a signpost pointing to the right.' She need not have adverted to that reason and decided on that basis to go to the right.53 First of all, notice that the subject in this scenario steps back and reflects on her reason for the action retrospectively, as opposed to Dreyfus's subject who steps back and reflects on his mechanics of the action when he is carrying out the action. So the fact that the stepping-back screws up the expertise is simply irrelevant. Secondly, it is clear that 'mindedness' never means 'attention' in McDowell's writings54: it would be insane to hold that our perceptual experiences (and actions) are attentive all the way out; if that were the claim, Mind and World would be easily refuted. Dreyfus's reading of McDowell strikes me as uncharitable. Dreyfus reminds us that absorbed coping is involved coping at its best. He should 52 Ibid., p.354-5, my italics. See also p.354-55, 363. 53 'Conceptual Capacities in Perception,' p.1066. I did not quote this example when I characterized McDowell's position, for I want to leave it here to compare with the Knoblauch example from Dreyfus. 54 And McDowell never uses the notion of 'mindful.' Although 'mindful' and 'minded' are almost interchangeable according to many dictionaries, 'minded' is supposed to capture the passivity of the mind. This thought is not available for Dreyfus for he always identifies mind with attention etc. Episode IV. Agent and Person 83 have acknowledged that, by similar considerations, attention, deliberation, and monitoring are mindedness at its best. This means that mindedness is not exhausted by attention and the like. To claim otherwise, Dreyfus needs to establish that attention is the mark of the mental. I see every reason to oppose to this proposition.55 McDowell never claims that there is an immersed or implicit self in actions, if we understand self with attention and the like. Self does accompany intentional actions in a weaker sense that actions are within the realm of the conceptual or the rational. But Dreyfus disagrees. He urges that cases like chess Grandmaster show that absorbed coping is in no sense rational.56 I suggest we compare that case with the case like alien hand or reflexive behaviors. Dreyfus is not willing to identify absorbed coping with mere reflexive behaviors57, so presumably it still has to do with our agency. Dreyfus is hostile to this idea, for he persistently confines mindedness to the realm of the attentive. But as I just said, McDowell never claims that, and the claim itself is simply wrong: when you are not paying attention to one of your beliefs, that doesn't disqualify that belief's status as a mental state. To concentrate on the notion of 'attention' is a red herring of the whole discussion. In identifying mindedness with the attentive, Dreyfus cannot make sense of McDowell's proposal: This pervasiveness claim, however, seems to be based on a category mistake. Capacities are exercised on occasion, but that does not allow one to conclude that, even when they are not exercised, they are, nonetheless, 'operative' and thus pervade all our activities.58 We are not allowed to make that conclusion, according to Dreyfus, for to claim that conceptuality is operative involves a category mistake. But that is not so. To say that conceptuality or mindedness is operative is to insist that conceptual capacities can be activated passively. This may sound strange for Dreyfus or some others, but they need to tell us why that's incoherent or at least problematic. McDowell offers reasons for this claim is his Locke Lecture, as we have seen above. Dreyfus acknowledges that 'mindedness' is a technical term on McDowell part59, but he doesn't really respect this point: he opens his response to McDowell by classifying 'conceptuality' and 'mindedness' as mentalist notions.60 'Mentalism' is a 55 It may be more plausible to view attention as the mark of the conscious, but even this is not settled. There is a symposium on this in ASSC 12; speakers include Ned Block and Kristof Koch. 56 'Response to McDowell,' p.374. 57 He mentions Homer at this point; see ibid., p.374. 58 Ibid., p.372, my italics. 59 Ibid., p.374. 60 Ibid., p.371. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 84 very vague term, to be sure, but to my knowledge none of its meanings fits McDowell's usage. If McDowell uses 'conceptuality' mentalistically, how can he manage to answer the charge that his position is idealistic in Berkeley's sense? Dreyfus would presumably press this question: 'if mindedness is not identical to a monitoring self, then what is it?' To this McDowell has an answer: It is a matter of an 'I do'...Conceiving action in terms of the 'I do' is a way of registering the essential first-person character of the realization of practical rational capacities that acting is.61 Dreyfus objects to this, but again on the false assumption that this first-person character is attention etc.62 What McDowell does mean, however, is that our absorbed coping, involved coping at its best, is not like cases like alien hands. By contrast, in repudiating this first-person character, it is unclear how Dreyfus can leave room for the crucial distinction between absorbed coping and mere reflexive behaviors. Dreyfus sets a dilemma between 'a meaninglessly bodily movement' and 'an action done by a subject for a reason' to McDowell.63 McDowell would escape this dilemma by insisting that (intentional) bodily movements are meaningful. Dreyfus would agree on this point, but it should be clear that this 'motor intentionality' can be appropriately understood only by those who respect the distinction between absorbed coping and mere reflexive behaviors. About this ownership consideration, Dreyfus says: Of course, the coping going on is mine in the sense that the coping can be interrupted at any moment by a transformation that results in an experience of stepping back from the flow of current coping. I then retrospectively attach an 'I think' to the coping and take responsibility for my actions.64 McDowell's explanation of this is the pervasiveness claim, but Dreyfus's is not convinced. His alternative explanation is, surprisingly enough, purely physiological.65 But this is problematic. For one thing, this physiological claim is compatible with all camps in this debate; for another, if it is the whole story for Dreyfus, then how can the notion of 'responsibility' mentioned in the quotation above be explained? Later Dreyfus seems to radicalize his answer. In describing McDowell's view he 61 'Response to Dreyfus,' p.367, my italics. 62 'Response to McDowell,' p.375. 63 Ibid., p.374. 64 'The Return of the Myth of the Mental,' p.356. Here he recognizes that the stepping back at issue is retrospective, but he lapsed earlier in discussing Knoblauch's case. 65 'Response to McDowell,' p.374. Episode IV. Agent and Person 85 disagrees with; he writes that: 'to the question "who act?" [McDowell] responds: "the answer is 'I do'".'66 But if this is an answer Dreyfus objects to, he seems to have no alternative but commit that the answer is 'this body does.' That's why McDowell argues that '[t]he real myth in this neighborhood is...the Myth of the Disembodied Intellect.'67 Dreyfus replies that this Myth is more like Gadamer's and McDowell's view, for '[i]t assumes that human beings are defined by their capacity to distance themselves from their involved coping.'68 This doesn't seem right to me. Even if one holds this definition of human beings, it does not follow immediately that our mindedness is disembodied. Dreyfus rejects this because he mistakenly identifies mindedness with attention or deliberation. And McDowell attributes that Myth to Dreyfus because '[i]f you distinguish me from my body, and give my body that person-like character, you have too many person-like things in the picture...'69 That is to say, if both the self and 'this body' are person-like things and the self is not this body, than it must be a disembodied person. Dreyfus does not address this objection at all. Dreyfus thinks our animal nature has no philosophically interesting differences from other animals. This is backed up by what McDowell identifies as the 'quick argument': from the premise that we share basic perceptual capacities and embodied coping skills to the conclusion that 'those capacities and skills, as we have them, cannot be permeated with rationality, since other animals are not rational.'70 'But the quick argument does not work.' McDowell continues, [t]he claim that the capacities and skills are shared comes to no more that this: there are descriptions of things we can do that apply also to things other animals can do...But the truth about a human being's exercise of competence in making her around, in a performance that can be described like that, need not be exhausted by the match with what can be said about, say, a cat's correspondingly describable response to a corresponding affordance. The human being's response is, if you like, indistinguishable from the cat's response qua response to an affordance describable in those terms. But it does not follow that the human being's response cannot be unlike the cat's response in being the human being's rationality at work.71 66 Ibid., p.373. 67 'What Myth?' p.349, my italics. Recall the dualism of intellect and sensory / bodily criticized at the earlier stage of this episode. 68 'The Return of the Myth of the Mental,' p.355. 69 'Response to Dreyfus,' p.369. 70 'What Myth?' p.343. 71 Ibid., p.343. If McDowell is right here, affordances can be 'data for [one's] rationality' (Ibid., p.344). Also see pp.343, 348-9 for the example of going through a hole. In this case, 'the fact that a hole in the wall if of a certain size will be a solicitation' ('Response to Dreyfus,' p.369, my italics). W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 86 This reflects a central thought of McDowell's thinking: when two phenomena share something, we are not forced to regard this 'something' as a discrete thing, 'a core' shared by these two phenomena. 'It is not compulsory,' as he likes to put it. And he further argues that 'if we do take this line, there is no satisfactory way to understand the role of the supposed core in our perceptual lives.'72 Here 'perceptual lives' is of course just an example. This central thought is two-staged: first, the factorizing way is not compulsory, and second, it will lead to in principle irresolvable quandary. In the case of passivity, the devastating problem is the infamous Myth of the Given. I have discussed this in my second episode, but since it is highly relevant to the present debate between McDowell and Dreyfus, I shall enter into this again, though with a different angle.73 4. 'The Myth of the Given,' to rehearse, was introduced and criticized by Wilfrid Sellars in his celebrated 'Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.' Most contemporary philosophers identify the myth with indubitability, but that's not Sellars's original formulation.74 Dreyfus is not aware of this: Given its structural similarity to empiricism, we need to make clear that existential phenomenology does not assume an indubitable Given on which to base empirical certainties. As with all forms of intentionality, solicitations can be misleading and in responding to such solicitations one can be misled.75 Notice that Dreyfus distances himself from the Myth of the Given by stressing that the foundations in his picture are not indubitable, but this does not respond to the mystical part of the Given identified by McDowell. Notice that when McDowell diagnoses the oscillating seesaw in modern philosophy, he never mentions 'foundationalism.' Foundationalism, at least in its stronger form, often implies indubitability, but that's not the problem McDowell (and Sellars) is identifying. The McDowellian problematic is constituted by coherentism and the Myth of the Given, not foundationalism. The worse thing is that later Dreyfus says something exactly fall prey to the Myth of the Given: 72 Mind and World, p.64. 73 In the context of the difference between human being and mere animals, McDowell invokes the distinction between 'being open to the world' and 'merely inhabiting an environment' ('What Myth?' p.343-4). What McDowell insists is that our coping with the environment and animals' case are different in kind. After entering the space of reasons, we cannot 'unlearn.' 74 Willem deVries and Timm Triplett make an admirable effort to gloss this formidable piece. In page xxii and xxiii, they point out that Sellars did not identify the myth with incorrigibility (indubitability). See Willem deVries and Timm Triplett, Knowledge, Mind, and the Given: Reading Wilfrid Sellars's 'Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2000). 75 'The Return of the Myth of the Mental,' p.362, my italics. Episode IV. Agent and Person 7 8 The world of solicitations, then, is not foundational in the sense that it is indubitable and grounds our empirical claims, but it is the self-sufficient, constant, and pervasive background that provides the base for our dependent, intermittent, activity of stepping back, subjecting our activity to rational scrutiny, and spelling out the objective world's rational structure.76 It is not clear that what the 'base-providing' claim amounts to, but obviously Dreyfus thinks solicitations have to do with our rational structures. Now how does he characterize solicitations as such? In the figure that he invokes to contrast McDowell's notion of 'world' with Merleau-Ponty's one, he writes that for phenomenologists the world is '[s]olicitations to act; [a] web of attractions and repulsions.'77 Later in contrasting with 'affordance,' he binds solicitations with the notion of 'drawing.'78 Now solicitations sound like something in the realm of law: in this realm there is no freedom; we are just drawn into these or those movements of limbs, or 'expertise' in Dreyfus sense. Freedom kicks in when we step back and reflect, so it does not belong to solicitations, in Dreyfus's sense. Dreyfus says that solicitations 'can be misled'79, and this makes Merleau-Pontyan world 'normative.'80 But solicitations in this sense are just attractions and repulsions constituted by relations between objects and our bodies, which subject to the realm of law, so 'being misled' can be only a metaphor. By contrast, McDowell's world deserves to be called 'normative,' for he argues that the world is encompassed by the realm of the conceptual, and conceptual relations are normative connectedness. In this way, Dreyfus unwittingly commits a version of the Myth of the Given: solicitations are inhabitants in the realm of law, but they are supposed to 'provide the base' for the space of reasons: '[t]hese solicitations have a systematic order that...works in the background to make rationality possible.'81 Given that Dreyfus is not a bald naturalist, who are willing to bite the bullet of reducing the space of reasons to the realm of law, his picture is ultimately fall prey to the Myth of the Given. I find Dreyfus's notion of the body peculiar. On the one hand, he attributes the body person-like characters; on the other, the body responds to only solicitations conceived as inhabitants in the realm of law. I see no way to reconcile these two elements in his picture. Dreyfus recognizes a problem similar to the one we are discussing: '[the existential 76 Ibid., p.363. 77 Ibid., p.357. 78 Ibid., p.361. 79 Ibid., p.362. 80 Ibid., p.357. 81 Ibid., p.358, my italics. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 88 phenomenologist] owes an account of how our absorbed, situated experience comes to be transformed so that we experience context-free, self-sufficient substances with detachable properties...'82 But the problem is much more serious than this. Given that Dreyfus presumably accepts the sui generis character of the space of reasons, and given that his understanding of solicitations commits him to putting them in the realm of law, the 'owing an account' acknowledgement does not touch the real and deep problem. He goes on to accuse that 'the conceptualists can't give an account of how we are absorbed in the world...'83 But this is not so. Given that McDowell never identify conceptuality and mindedness with a monitoring self, cases like Knoblauch and Grandmaster are simply irrelevant. Dreyfus prefers the phenomenological approach because it 'accepts the challenge of relating the preconceptual world to the conceptual world...'84, but what we should say is that the phenomenologist accepts the challenge before he really appreciates it. On the contrary, while the conceptualist also accepts the sui generis character of the space of reasons, he puts solicitations in the realm of the conceptual, and this avoids the Myth of the Given and intellectualism at the same time (since conceptuality is not in the realm of law, and is not identical to a monitoring self either). 5. If what I have said so far is correct in general outlines, I side with McDowell that many of Heidegger's, Merleau-Ponty's, and Dreyfus's thoughts should be regard as supplementations, as opposed to corrections, to the conceptualist picture.85 Although the cases of Knoblauch and Grandmaster are compatible with McDowell's view, more can be, and should be said on these or other interesting cases. I conclude that though Dreyfus's objections raise interesting questions for us to think, his case against McDowell nevertheless cuts no ice. Before closing this section, I want to remind my readers about the relation between Dreyfus's picture criticized by McDowell and the inner space model. According to McDowell, Dreyfus unwittingly commits the Myth of the Disembodied Intellect in depicting his picture of agency. This Myth, as I mentioned in passing, is parallel to the dualism of intellect and sensory lurking in Michael Ayers's thinking. Now we should further recognize that the Myth of the Disembodied Intellect is a special version of the inner space model. Originally, the inner space is defined by a self as an inner eye directing at self-standing mental items. Now in the context of bodily agency, the self-standing mental items are replaced by automaton-like bodily movements, independent of a detached self. There is a distance between the intellect and mindless 82 ibid., p.364, my italics. 83 Ibid., p.364. 84 Ibid., p.364. 85 'What Myth?' p.349. Episode IV. Agent and Person 89 bodily movements; with this picture at hand, 'it is too late to try to fix things by talking about the former merging into the latter.'86 Dreyfus fiercely argues against any detached conception of embodied agency, but his unconscious commitment of the inner space model makes the very idea of 'embodiment' unavailable to him. Consequently, McDowell's own position binds the subject and its bodily capacities together: The fact is that there is nothing for me to mean by 'I,' even though what I mean by 'I' is correctly specified as the thinking thing I am, except the very thing I would be reefing to (a bit strangely) if I said 'this body'...87 And McDowell identifies 'I' with 'person.'88 It seems to follow that person is identical with its living body. This raises important issues about personhood. In the next section I discuss how McDowell conceives personhood and the mind-body relation. Embedment 1. McDowell starts with John Locke's definition of personhood: a person is 'a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and consider itself as itself, the same thinking being, in different time and places.'89 The crux here is a person's '"inner angle" on its own persistence.'90 Locke's sketchy characterization permits different ways of development. Derek Parfit thinks the only legitimate way to cash out this Lockean idea is to accept a version of 'reductionism.'91 According to McDowell, Parfit's line of thinking presupposes a dubious dualism between 'purely mental' and 'purely material,' the assumption 'that there is no alternative to reduce except to commit ourselves to continuants whose persistence through time would consist in nothing but the continuity of "consciousness" itself.'92 In another word, 'Locke's phenomenon must be understood in isolation.'93 McDowell introduces Gareth Evans's discussions of 'identification-freedom' at this point. McDowell comments: 86 Ibid., p.350. 87 Ibid., p.350. 88 'Response to Dreyfus,' p.369. 89 Tom L. Beauchamp (ed.), An Essay concerning Human Understanding (Oxford University Press, USA, 1999) , 3.27.9. 90 'Reductionism and the First Person,' p.359. 91 Reasons and Persons (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1984). 92 'Reductionism and the First Person,' p.360. From the context we can see that by 'consciousness' Locke means 'self-consciousness.' 93 Ibid., p.361. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 90 In continuity of 'consciousness,' there is what appears to be knowledge of an identity, the persistence of the same subject through time, without any need to take care that attention stays fixed on the same thing. Contrast keeping one's thought focused on an ordinary object of perception over a period; this requires a skill, the ability to keep track of something, whose exercise we can conceive as a practical substitute for the explicit allocation of a criterion of identity. Continuity of 'consciousness' involves no analogue to this – no keeping track of the persisting self that nevertheless seems to figure in its content.94 So far, the description is pretty innocent indeed. But there is a common Cartesian response to it.95 The response assumes that: the content of that awareness must be provided for completely within the flow of 'consciousness'; and to conclude, from the fact that no criteria for persistence through time are in play in the field to which that assumption restricts us, that what continuing to exist consists in for the continuant in question must be peculiarly simple, something that does not go beyond the flow of 'consciousness' itself. In particular, this line of thought rules out the idea that the continuant in question might be a human being.96 This condensed passage cries out for exposition. I think here the argument contains two premises; one is the 'narrow assumption' (within the flow of 'consciousness')97, and the other is the 'identification-freedom.' However, it is not at all obvious that they can jointly imply the conclusion that the constituent is 'simple,' in particular, not a human being. First of all, it is not clear that what 'simple' is supposed to mean, so I am going to focus on the notion of 'human being.' In the context of personal identity, 'human being' usually means human animal. So the conclusion is saying that the conception of the subject ('person' in this context) is at odd with a human animal. This partially explains McDowell's usage of 'simple': a human animal is constitutive 94 Ibid., pp.361-2. McDowell refers to Evans's The Varieties of Reference (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1982), in particular pp.326-7. 95 As usual, the term 'Cartesian' only signifies a way of thinking, but later I will justify of my (and McDowell's) usage of this label to some extent. 96 Ibid., p.362. 97 The term 'narrow assumption' is from Maximilian De Gaynesford's paper 'Kant and Strawson on the Firs Person,' in Hans-Johann Glock (ed.) Strawson and Kant (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2003), pp.155-67, at p.157. The notion of 'narrow' comes presumably from the notion of 'narrow content.' In this context, 'narrow' means 'irrelevant to external, wider conditions.' De Gaynesford criticizes McDowell's argument against Kant's thesis that the transcendental apperception is only a 'formal' condition; I will say something on McDowell's behalf in my next episode. Episode IV. Agent and Person 91 of divergent parts, so it is by no means simple.98 Now, what does the combination of the narrow assumption and the identification-freedom amount to? I begin with the later. If we can keep track with the persistence of a given object without any effort, it follows that the object does not have 'hidden aspect,' that is, simple. It seems to follow that we, as human animals, cannot have this power of identification-freedom. The role of the narrow assumption, however, is just to ensure this power: if all we are considering is 'within the flow of "consciousness",' which 'can hold [things] together in a single survey seem to figure within its purview,'99 then the trouble maker identification-freedom is forced on us. But this does not sit well with the fact that we are human beings. This is of course unacceptable from a naturalist point of view. According to McDowell, this motivates Parfit's reductionist response:100 this line of thought purports to force on us...to revise our view of the content of the flow of 'consciousness' in a Reductionist direction: to conclude that 'consciousness' does not, after all, present the temporally separated states and occurrences over which it plays as belonging to the career of a single continuant, but rather as linked by a conceptually simpler relation of serial co-consciousness, which might subsequently enter into the construction of a derivative notion of a persisting subject if such a notion seems called for.101 This reductionism preserves both the identification-freedom and the narrow assumption, but avoids the conclusion by deflating the notion of 'consciousness' involved in the narrow assumption. Since the two premises can deduce the Cartesian-flavor ego only on the assumption of the ego theory, Parfit purports to avoid the unpalatable conclusion by replacing the ego theory with the bundle theory.102 2. Rather than arguing against this reductionism immediately, McDowell proposes another line of thought in respond to the original argument. The alternative is to leave in place the idea that continuity of 'consciousness' constitutes awareness of an identity through time, but reject the assumption that that 98 This will be clearer when we see that McDowell applies the same argument to Kant; see my next episode. 99 'Reductionism and the First Person,' p.361. 100 We can see this in Reasons and Persons, pp.204-5. My emphasis is on the Evans-McDowell line of thought, however. 101 Ibid., p.363. 102 McDowell does not proceed with these terms, but I think this is a good way to understand the issue. The exact formulation of the ego / bundle theory distinction is a big topic on its own, but I think the characterization provided by McDowell is sufficient for our purpose. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 92 fact needs to be provided for within a self-contained conception of the continuity of 'consciousness.' On the contrary, we can say: continuous 'consciousness' is intelligible (even 'from within') only as a subjective angle on something that has more to it than the subjective angle reveals, namely the career of an objective continuant with which the subject of the continuous 'consciousness' identifies itself. The subjective angle does not contain within itself any analogue to keeping track of something...this is thanks to its being situated in a wider context, which provides for an understanding that the persisting referent is also a third person, something whose career is substantially traceable continuity in the objective world.103 Again, the remarks here are not crystally clear. I shall understand it with the above framework. The key point here is to situate the subjective angle in a wider context, to insist that the persisting referent is also a third person. This amounts to renounce the narrow assumption. Now how does this move discard the 'purely mental' stuff? Recall the identification-freedom condition. This condition implies that the object in question is simple, i.e. with no hidden aspects. But this is incompatible with the fact that we are human beings. We can avoid this, McDowell proposes, by recognizing that the freedom of identification in question is not freedom simplicier: a subject is embedded in a wider context, as a third person. With this recognition, the identification-freedom does not imply the purely mental stuff. Now we have two pictures competing with each other, and McDowell says that 'it should seem doubtful that Reductionism deserves respect on the ground of its opposition to Cartesian philosophy.'104 Notice that reductionism is in effect 'bald naturalism' in McDowell's phrase, and McDowell's stance towards it is always to dislodge its motivation and to provide a more satisfying alternative. What he tries to point out is that Parfit's reasoning is driven by the purely mental / purely material dichotomy. But as McDowell shows, there is a way to avoid Cartesian purely mental stuff without reducing 'consciousness': to recognize that the identification-freedom condition does not imply the unpalatable conclusion, for a subjective angle is also a third person, embedded in a wider context. One might wonder that in what respect McDowell's picture is a more satisfying one. Indeed, many people may prefer Parfit's solution, for reductionism seems to be a straightforward consequence of the scientific worldview. To see how McDowell promotes his position, recall that the main motivation of Parfit's position is its 'anti-Cartesian credentials.'105 So if it turns out that Parfit's anti-Cartesianism does not go to the root, its plausibility will thereby be debased. According to Parfit, and 103 Ibid., p.363. 104 Ibid., p.363. 105 Ibid., p.361. Episode IV. Agent and Person 93 indeed many others106, the ultimate goal here is to avoid Cartesian immaterialism. Now of course McDowell does not accept the immaterialism, but that doesn't mean that there is no deeper mistake to be avoided. As we have seen in the second episode, the deepest Cartesian mistake is the commitment to the inner space model. This is Cartesian because it asserts that our inner realms can be 'stripped of all objective context[s] by the Method of Doubt.' 107 This method presupposes the absolute metaphysical independence of the inner realm, and this presupposition generates all kinds of problems concerning human subject. If the immaterialism is the deeper problem, its renunciation should give us peace in philosophy. But it doesn't. Blackburn, Kripke, and Parfit reject immaterialism, but their pictures still make intentionality and other kinds of mentality unavailable to us. The deepest Cartesian mistake, to repeat, is the inner space model, which is intimately connected to the narrow assumption. We should notice that the narrow assumption is even stronger than the inner space model, for the former can be refuted by the broadness claim, which is weaker than primeness.108 In urging reductionism, Parfit retains the real root of Cartesianism, the narrow assumption. McDowell thinks Locke sometimes lapses into the Cartesian problem too, when he divides a human being 'into merely animal functions on the one hand and operations of "consciousness" on the other,'109 though he 'carefully distances himself from Descartes.'110 Against this, McDowell thinks that we should not '[disallow] any help in understanding personal identity from the continuity of human (or, if you like, dolphin or Martian) life.'111 The parenthesis is crucial. It means that here by 'human' McDowell means human animal. This classifies McDowell into the 'animalism' camp, but McDowell is obsessed about the label: My so-called 'animalism' in nothing but the Lockean conception of what a person is, freed from Locke's extra assumption so that the continuation of a certain individual life can emerge as a condition for a person to continue to exist.112 Normally, the label 'animalism' is for the thought that repudiates psychological continuity altogether; hence the sub-title Eric Olson's famous book.113 McDowell's 106 McDowell mentions G.E.M. Anscombe in this context, but this applies to everyone who rejects Cartesian immaterialism but nevertheless commit the inner space model. I will say more about this later. 107 Ibid., p.365. 108 See my opening of the second episode. 109 Ibid., p.367. See Locke's 3.27.27. 110 Ibid, p.369. See Locke's 3.27.10-14. 111 Ibid., p.369. 112 'Response to Carol Rovane,' in McDowell and His Critics, pp.114-20, at p.115. 113 The Human Animal: Personal Identity without Psychology (Oxford University Press, USA, 1999). W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 94 position, by contrast, regards Locke's basic thinking as central, with the proviso that the 'consciousness' can also be instantiated by a human animal. Therefore his position is also been called 'the hybrid view' or 'the compatibilist position.'114 When we get away from the narrow assumption, we find a way to see how a subjective angel with 'identification-freedom' can be a human being.115 'The capacity to think, considered as including the capacity to consider oneself as oneself, [is not separable] from the capacities whose actualization constitutes a human life.'116 McDowell deepens his diagnosis by focusing on 'memory,' 'the capacity to retain knowledge of one's own past.'117 Clearly, this is a notion reductionism cannot make use of, so their espousers need to construct a similar but 'more innocent' (from their point of view) notion. The most popular version of their Ersatz memory is called 'quasi-memory.'118 'The only difference,' between real memory and this Ersatz one, 'is that there is no requirement that the remembering subject is identical with the subject from whose point of view the past occurrences are recaptured.'119 Given this definition, it follows that 'ordinary memories are quasi-memories that satisfy that extra condition.'120 This appears to be innocuous, but we need to dig deeper. In science fictions, we see scenarios in which memory-copy is often. We need to notice that in those cases the copied memories are merely quasi-memories, for they do not 'constitute knowledge'; in effect, quasi-memories are 'illusions of ordinary memory.'121 Memories are knowledge, for they are factive. Quasi-memories have 'epistemic potential,' but 'using [them] as a basis for knowledge would require 'consciousness' to draw explicitly on information extraneous to its own contents.' In this sense, 'quasi-memory is intelligible only derivatively.'122 After these elaborations, the problem behind the notion of 'quasi-memory' should be clear: given that memory is a species of knowledge, quasi-memory is the corresponding species of illusion (or even hallucination). The basic spirit of Parfit's maneuver here is the same as that of 'the Argument from Illusion.'123 As McDowell 114 Harold W. Noonan, Personal Identity (Routledge, 2003, second edition), p.205, and Jens Johansson, 'What is Animalism?' Ratio 20 (2007), pp.194-205, respectively. 115 In McDowell's own word, 'to maintain a firm and integrated conception of ourselves as rational animals,' p.382. 116 'Response to Carol Rovane,' p.114. 117 'Reductionism and the First Person,' p.370. This characterization should be qualified, as McDowell says, memory 'of the appropriate sort.' 118 This is first devised by Sydney Shoemaker, in 'Persons and Their Past,' American Philosophical Quarterly 7 (1970), pp. 269-85. Also see Parfit's Reasons and Persons, pp.220.2. 119 'Reductionism and the First Person,' p.370. 120 Ibid., p.370. 121 Ibid., p.372, the later italics is mine. 122 Ibid., pp.372-3. 123 After recognizing this, we can compare situations here with my discussions in the second episode. Parfit's commitment to the narrow assumption brings in the inner space model, and thereby brings in the trouble discussed earlier. McDowell says more about this in p.381. Episode IV. Agent and Person 95 observes, 'we may be tempted to think, the concept with fewer requirements must be simpler and therefore independently graspable.'124 He continues, Well, there is no reason to assume that what is left when the requirement is dropped will stand on its own as an adequate explication of a concept. That need not be so, even though the result is admitted to be a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for the concept's application. It takes more than an arithmetic of subtracting necessary conditions to guarantee us an autonomously intelligible concept.125 Again, this is a warning against the temptation to factorize things into simpler components. In understanding a given phenomenon, analysis is a good, if not the only, method, but that doesn't follow that every component after breaking down can stand on its own, ontological speaking. To start with quasi-memory, reductionists need to face the challenge parallel to the one posed by the Gettier-style counterexamples. In a word, '[r]eductionism is wrong, not because personal identity is a further fact, but because there is no conceptually simpler substratum for personal identity to be further to.'126 McDowell illustrates this with an example: Not that a person should be identified with his brain and (the rest of) his body, anymore than a house should be identified with the bricks, and so forth, of which it is composed; but there is no commitment to some peculiar extra ingredient, which would ensure determinateness of identity, in a person's make-up.127 There are some delicacies here. I think McDowell is quite right in urging that personal identity, like house, is not a further entity, and this does not mean that it can be identified with its components. I am hesitant, however, to conclude with McDowell that there is no further fact. Consider the house example; is it wrong to say that being a house is a further fact, further than being composed by those bricks? This concerns our views on the nature of social reality, and I believe considerations in the case of house can shed light on our reflections of personhood. But I shall stop myself at this point.128 The investigations on personal identity help us give a more satisfying answer to Dreyfus's challenge. I am this living body, but the 'am' here does not stand for strict identity. 'I' is not a further entity, like Cartesian soul, but it is not a disembodied 124 Ibid., P.373. 125 Ibid., p.374. 126 Ibid., p.378. 127 Ibid., pp.378-9. 128 I will say more about this in my concluding episode. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 96 intellect either. The satisfying picture should deliver the consequence that we are human animals, not, as Dreyfus's one does, that our bodies are intentional automata. 3. The above discussions bring us into 'the midst of the philosophy of mind.'129 One might wonder where McDowell's place in the mind-body problem is. He never devotes to this issue in full length, but I shall connect those suggestive remarks to the present context.130 A natural impression is that McDowell's position here is pretty close to Davidson's anomalous monism. McDowell admires Davidson's insistence on the 'constitutive ideal of rationality,' which implies the anomalism of the mental. And this is also congenial to McDowell's insistence on the distinction between the space of reasons and the realm of law. Nevertheless, it should be clear that McDowell would not agree on everything in Davidson's picture, for anomalous monism is a version of mind-brain token identity theory. As the above discussions show, McDowell opposes to strict identity between mind and brain. But now the problem arises: Davidson's version of the identity theory is already a relaxed naturalism. How can McDowell further relax it without lapsing into bad versions of dualism? The question is reminiscent of the leading question dealt with in my first episode. Here that deep question reappears in the context of the mind-body problem. To understand McDowell's own position, it is helpful to see how he distinguishes himself from Davidson. McDowell has three lines of objection to Davidson's monism; the first is to question the theoretical motivations, the second is to deny one of the premises of Davidson's principal argument, and the third is to point out the problem of the conclusion. McDowell first identifies two motivations, 'the ideal of the unity of science' and 'avoidance of Cartesian dualism.' 131 The first is not available to Davidson, for '[a]nomalism itself, or what sustains it, neutralizes' this putative motivation.'132 And Cartesian dualism is irrelevant: since it is not events but substances that are composed of stuff, one can refuse to accept that all the events there are can be described in 'physical' terms, without thereby committing oneself to a non-'physical' stuff, or compromising the thesis that persons are composed of nothing but matter.133 129 Mind, Value, and Reality, p.viii. 130 See Mind and World, pp.74-6, and also 'Functionalism and Anomalous Monism,' in Ernest Lepore and Brian McLaughlin (eds.) Actions and Events: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson (Blackwell, Oxford, 1985), pp.387-98; reprinted in his Mind, Value, and Reality, pp.325-40. 131 Ibid., p.339. 132 Ibid., p.339. 133 Ibid., p.339. McDowell acknowledges his indebtedness to Jennifer Hornsby's 'Which Physical Events are Mental Events?' Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 81 (1980-1), pp.73-92; reprinted in her Simple Mindedness: in Defense of Naïve Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind (Harvard University Press, 1997), pp.63-97. Episode IV. Agent and Person 97 Now to the argument itself. For our purpose, we can focus solely on the premise McDowell aims to dispute, namely 'the Principle of the Nomological Character of Causality.'134 It says that any causal relation is an instantiation of a strict law.135 This understanding of causality is distinctively Humean, and Hume's argument was that 'since singular causal relations are not given in experience, there is nothing for causation to consist in but a suitable kind of generality.'136 McDowell rejects this, for he has a much richer conception of experience. He concludes that the Principle of the Nomological Character of Causality is a 'fourth dogma of empiricism.'137 Without this dogma, Davidson's event monism does not follow. Finally, McDowell objects to the intelligibility of the conclusion itself. As I briefly say in my footnote 135, Davidson secures the psycho-physical interactions by locating the causal relations in the physical world. But if we take this idea seriously, we find that mental properties become epiphenomena, for according to the nomological view, they are not in the realm of causality. As McDowell alludes to, '[a]ccording to the ontological thesis, the items that instantiate the sui generis spontaneity-related concepts have a location in the realm of law. But the concepts are sui generis precisely in that it is not by virtue of their location in the realm of law that things instantiate those concepts.'138 That is, according to Davidson, mental properties, qua mental, are epiphenomena, for qua mental they are not in the realm of law. This is contrary to Davidson's own insistence on the psycho-physical interactions. In pointing out the irrelevance of the avoidance Cartesian dualism, together with the inadequacy of Davidson's event monism, as we have seen, McDowell seems to accept substance monism cum event dualism: mental events are causally effective, for they enjoys sui generis 'space of reasons causations.' It is not difficult to understand why he would say this, but I am not in a position to defend it in this essay.139 134 'Functionalism and Anomalous Monism,' p.340. 135 Although I do not go into the details of Davidson's argument, the basic shape is as follows: any causal relation is under a strict law, but given the anomalism of the mental, there is no psycho-physical strict law. It seems to follow that the mind-body interaction is impossible. To avoid this, Davidson says that physical events can sustain mental properties, and strict laws in the physical realm are not problematic. Hence his event monism cum property dualism. 136 Ibid., p.340. 137 Ibid., p.340. Also see the first chapter of Hornsby's book. McDowell's further reason to repudiate this conception of causality is that it commits a form of scheme-content dualism, which is under forceful attacks by Davidson himself. I shall postpone this to my next episode. 138 Mind and World, pp.75-6. 139 My inability to dig deeper here is due to the fact that the issues here involve a large-scale revolution in philosophy of science. It seems to me that Paul Pietroski defends a version of this view. See his Causing Actions (Oxford University Press, 2000), especially chapter 5, 'Personal Dualism.' E P I S O D E V Apperceiver and Homo sentiens Those who believe in the forms came to this belief because they became convinced of the truth of the Heracleitean view that all sense-perceptible things are always flowing. So that if there is to be explanatory knowledge and wisdom about anything, there must be certain other natures...the Platonists [thereby] make them separate, and such beings they called 'ideas.' – Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book XIII Self-Consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged.' – G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit Objectivity 1. Earlier in the previous episode, we have seen that how the embedment of subjectivity can set us straight about the very idea of 'the subjective angle.' Now we shall see another application of the same argument – the application on Kant's thinking about the relation between consciousness and self-consciousness. After this, I will introduce McDowell's criticisms against the dualism of scheme and content, connecting it to the present topic, and to many previous discussions in my previous episodes. McDowell begins by venturing an interpretation of the Transcendental Deduction. Following Strawson, he thinks that in the Deduction, Episode V. Apperceiver and Homo sentiens 99 Kant seems to offer a thesis on these lines: the possibility of understanding experiences, 'from within,' as glimpses of objective reality is interdependent with the subject's being able to ascribe experiences to herself; hence, with the subject's being self-conscious.1 McDowell is not aiming to argue for the legitimacy of the interpretation here; instead, he argues that other parts of Kant's thinking render the interdependence thesis not satisfying. Here it goes: When he introduces the self-consciousness that he argues to be correlative with awareness of objective reality, he writes of the 'I think' that must be able 'to accompany all my representations.' In the Paralogisms of Pure Reason, he claims that if we credit this 'I' with a persisting referent, the relevant idea of identity through time is only formal.2 Kant uses 'I think' and 'apperception' interchangeably. 'Apperception' is a term coined by Leibniz. 3 He defines apperception as 'consciousness or reflective knowledge of this inner state itself and which is not given to all souls or to any souls all of the time.'4 Although with complications, Kant's usage of this notion is basically the same. We can simply understand it as 'self-consciousness' for our purpose. I shall illustrate this with an example. Suppose that I think that the present essay won't have a great success. Now I can hold this without consciously entertaining the thought all the time. But if I say to someone, or even myself, 'I think that the present essay won't have a great success,' I have a piece of 'reflective knowledge' concerning the thought. So Kant's 'I think' and Locke's 'consciousness' are generally the same notion; this is, of course, not to dent that they have extremely different theories behind their notions. According to McDowell, Kant supplements this with an unhappy thought that the 'I think' is only 'formal.' How does Kant arrive at this dim conclusion? The situations are somewhat complicated, for this involves how Kant conceives the reasoning of Descartes. I shall quote McDowell first and explain: Kant's point in the Paralogisms is that the flow of what Locke calls 'consciousness' does not involve applying, or otherwise ensuring conformity with, a criterion of identity...when a subject makes this application of the idea of persistence, she needs 1 Mind and World, p.99. 2 Ibid., p.99. Critique of Pure Reason, B131 and A363, respectively. 3 Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett (trans.) New Essays on Human Understanding (Cambridge University Press, 1981). 4 Nicholas Rescher (trans.) Monadology (London, Routledge, 1991), p.637. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 100 no effort to ensure that her attention stays fixed on the same thing. For a contrast, consider keeping one's thought focused on an ordinary object of perception over a period. That requires the ability to keep track of things, a skill whose exercise we can conceive as a practical substitute for the explicit application of a criterion of identity.5 This is essentially the same line of thought as the one applies to Parfit. But here the player is Descartes: If the topic of the thought is a substantial continuant, what its continuing to exist consists in must be peculiarly simple. The notion of persistence applies itself effortlessly; there is nothing to it except the flow of 'consciousness' itself. This looks like a recipe for arriving at the conception, or supposed conception, of the referent of 'I' that figures in Descartes.6 We have seen that Parfit avoids this reasoning by reducing 'consciousness' to a series of co-consciousness. This is a way to deflate the very idea of self-consciousness. Now Kant does not share the reductionist agenda, so he attempts to deflate 'consciousness' in another way, as McDowell observes, 'it can easily seem that we had better draw Kant's conclusion: the idea of persistence that figures in the flow of "consciousness" had better be only formal.'7 McDowell's response here, again, is virtually the same as his treatment to Parfit's problem: It is true that the continuity within the subjective take does not involve keeping track of a persisting thing, but this effortless does not require us to agree with Kant that the idea of identity here is only formal. Even 'from within,' the subjective take is understood as situated in a wider context; so there can be more content to the idea of persistence it embodies. The wider context makes it possible to understand that the first person, the continuing referent of the 'I' in the 'I think' that can 'accompany all my representations,' is also a third person, something whose career is a substantial continuity in the objective world: something such that other modes of continuing thought about it would indeed require keeping track of it.8 Although this argument has been explained in my previous episode, let me say something more in line with the present context. The 'identification-freedom' is the 5 Mind and World, p.100. 6 Ibid., p.101. 7 Ibid., p.101. 8 Ibid., pp.101-2, my italics. Episode V. Apperceiver and Homo sentiens 101 shared starting point of all camps. The Cartesian explains this by substance dualism: within this realm of mental substance, everything is transparent, so one does not need to keep track of her mental phenomena. Kant resists this reasoning by insisting that the 'I think,' apperception, is only formal: the fact that we enjoy effortless when it comes to our own mental phenomena implies that the 'I think' is only formal, that is, does not have any hidden aspect. But McDowell points out that this argument doesn't go through, for it involves two different senses of effortless. What the 'accompanying' idea implies is 'first-person effortless,' but what implies the 'formal' idea is 'effortless simplicier': if we get effortless all the way out, then the subject matter in question is indeed insubstantial. But we need to remember that from a third-person point of view, any 'I think' need to be kept track if the idea of persistence is to be applied. Every 'I think' is also a third person, embedded in the objective world. After pinpointing the faulty of Kant's argument, McDowell goes on to explain why Kant's picture is unsatisfying. First the characterization: The result of Kant's move is that the subjective continuity he appeals to, as part of what it is for experience to bear on objective reality, cannot be equated with the continuing life of a perceiving animal. It shrinks, as I said, to the continuity of a mere point of view: something that need not have anything to do with a body, so far as the claim of interdependence is concerned.9 And then the criticism: If we begin with a free-standing notion of an experiential route through objective reality, a temporally extended point of view that might be bodiless so far as the connection between subjectivity and objectivity goes, there seems to be no prospect of building up from there to the notion of a substantial presence in the world. If something starts out conceiving itself as a merely formal referent of 'I' (which is already a peculiar notion), how could it come to appropriate a body, so that it might identify itself with a particular living thing?10 The argument here is that it comes too late to do justice to the fact that every one of us, 'the subject of its experience, as a bodily element in objective reality – as a bodily presence in the world.'11 It is too late, because 9 Ibid., p.102. 10 Ibid., pp.102-3. 11 Ibid., p.103, my italics. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 102 it leaves us with what look like descendants of those problems [i.e. the familiar Cartesian problems about the relation between a peculiar substance and the rest of reality]. If we start from a putative sense of self as at most geometrically in the world, how can we work up from there to the sense of self we actually have, as a bodily presence in the world?12 The general thought is this. It is a fact that we are bodily presences in the objective world; we are subjects, to be sure, but we are also objects. It is not the case that only our bodies, our behaviors, are objects in the world, objects of other subjects' experiences. What we should say is that it is we, not our bodies and behaviors conceived in behavioristic terms, are objects in the objective world. We are not mere points of view in the geometrical realm. Any conception of subjectivity has to respect this, but obviously Kant's picture fails exactly at this point. The acceptance of the narrow assumption betrays Kant's residual Cartesianism. Kant is always hostile to the Cartesian philosophy, so officially he rejects the narrow assumption – 'I think is thus the sole text of rational psychology, from which it is to develop its entire wisdom.' 13 – pointing out that it is not warranted by 'first-person effortless'; however, his failure to distinguish between 'first-person effortless' and 'effortless simplicier' betrays his unwitting commitment to that very assumption, as in Parfit case. 2. The issue about 'identification-freedom' is itself a big topic, and here is not the place to get involved too much. However, since McDowell's argument is aiming at Kant, I must take care of this exegesis aspect to some extent. My way of doing this is to consider objections from Maximilian De Gaynesford, who thinks McDowell's, and indeed Strawson's, presentation of Kant's argument is unfair.14 De Gaynesford first reconstructs McDowell's argument as follows: (1) The I of the 'I think' refers. (2) There is no Cartesian ego (rational psychologism's immaterial substance) for the I of the 'I think' to refer to. (3) The narrow assumption holds for the 'I think.' 12 Ibid., p.104. 13 Critique of Pure Reason, A343 / B401. 14 There have been many objections against McDowell at this point, but de Gaynesford's objections are based on a thorough reconstruction and evaluations. For other dissent voices, see for example Graham Bird, 'McDowell's Kant: Mind and World,' Philosophy 71 (1996), pp.219-43; Truls Wyller, 'Kant on I, Apperception, and Imagination,' in Audun Fsti, Peter Ulrich, and Truls Wyller (eds.) Indexicality and Idealism (Mentis Publishing, 2000), pp.89-99. De Gaynesford has a paper exclusively on the plausibility of the 'identification-freedom' itself: 'On Referring to Oneself,' Theoria 70 (2004), pp.121-61. Episode V. Apperceiver and Homo sentiens 103 (4) Criterionless self-ascription holds for the 'I think.' (5) So the referent of the I of the 'I think' must be merely formal (if it were a substantial subject, then it could only be an immaterial one, pace (2); for only so could the idea of its persistence be provided for in accord with (3) and (4) – i.e. effortlessly and entirely from within the flow of self-consciousness).15 I disagree with many points in this reconstruction, but I shall present them in replying to De Gaynesford's particular objections. The only thing I want to say before going into the details is that in the above reconstruction De Gaynesford never refers to specific passages from McDowell, and this makes it hard to take issue with this detailed reconstruction. Even before the reconstruction, De Gaynesford refers to Mind and World only seldom. Generally, I think his reconstruction over-complicates the matter, but let me show this with De Gaynesford's framework. The first objection from him is about (1) and (5) that 'Kant is careful not to commit himself to the claim that the I of the 'I think' refers.'16 We can agree on this to some extent, but with a proviso: though Strawson, Evans and McDowell frame the issue with terms like 'reference,' we need to remember that Kant was not doing philosophy of language in the contemporary sense, and Strawson et al. certainly know this. I believe a charitable understanding of their interpretation of Kant should recognize this, and try to understand their interpretation without regarding those terms in philosophy of language as central. Now I think my way of reconstructing the argument is better in this respect; to rehearse: Kant points out that the 'I think' must be able to accompany all my representations, which implies the effortless in our own case, and this effortless in turn implies that the 'I think' must be a formal condition. Nothing in this line of reasoning, as far as I can tell, invokes notions like 'reference.' So I think this first objection can be answered by pointing out that notions from philosophy of language in the contemporary sense are not essential to interpretations offered by Strawson et al. The second objection is against (2). De Gaynesford argues that 'Kant does not reject the rational psychologist's conception of the ego as one of his premises in the Paralogisms.'17 As he reminds, the falsity of a given paralogism is due to its form 'whatever its content may otherwise be.'18 Indeed, everyone who is familiar to the First Critique to some extent knows that in Paralogisms Kant's aim is to expose bad reasoning, not bad theses. Now how could McDowell miss this? Or better, how could De Gaynesford think that McDowell misses this? Again, McDowell's reconstruction 15 'Kant and Strawson on the First Person,' p.158. 16 Ibid., p.158. 17 Ibid., p.159. 18 Critique of Pure Reason, A341 / B399. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 104 of Kant's argument is from the 'accompanying' idea to the 'effortless' and finally to the 'formal condition.' Nothing here involves a blank rejection of Cartesian substance dualism. That's why what McDowell says is that 'it can easily seem that we had better draw Kant's conclusion.'19 McDowell of course notices that Kant is pointing out that rational psychologist's inference is not compulsory. The third objection is also not difficult to answer. 'The narrow assumption is Kant's target in the Paralogisms, not his tenet,' 20pace (3). As I have said earlier, the residual Cartesianism accusation is that Kant tacitly assumes a central Cartesian assumption, not that he happily endorses that. In failing to distinguish first-person effortless and effortless simplicier, Kant's argument for his own position nevertheless involves the narrow assumption. De Gaynesford quotes Kant's declaration of the denial, but he does not notice that without the narrow assumption, Kant's original argument cannot go through. The following two objections from De Gaynesford are closely related, so I shall answer them together. Against (4), he argues that the 'criterionless self-ascription' may be correct, but 'Strawson fails to show that Kant held it,' and 'it would be oddly inconsistent for Kant to hold it.'21 De Gaynesford first points out that Strawson and McDowell are 'almost alone among Kant's commentators in even mentioning the thesis...in relation to Kant,' and they do 'not cite texts where the thesis is adopted by Kant, either explicitly or implicitly.'22 And he further presents how Kant himself conceives the situation. This raises important exegetic issues, but I tend to think that we can say Kant implicitly adopts that thesis in connecting his positive and negative thoughts: his claim that I of the apperception must be able to accompany all one's representations, and that rational psychologist's reasoning to the substantial Cogito is a non sequitur. To make sense of the relation between the Transcendental Deduction and Paralogisms, it seems reasonable to say that Kant commits the 'criterionless of self-ascription' tacitly. The thesis as such is harmless; the trouble lies rather in the narrow assumption. De Gaynesford's presentation of Kant's relevant texts is helpful, but it does not undermine the Strawson-McDowell diagnosis. The issue concerning McDowell's interpretation of Kant is enormous, and to give a satisfying defense is definitely transcend my ability. But I hope my discussions of the above objections from De Gaynesford can at least damp some initial worries about the exegetic aspect of McDowell's thinking. 19 Mind and World, p.101, my italics. 20 'Kant and Strawson on the First Person,' p.159. 21 Ibid., p.159, 160. I omit De Gaynesford's final objection, that 'Strawson's argument for it seems to be indebted not to Kant but to Wittgenstein,' especially his Blue Book, for here our main concern is not the latter. Notice that though De Gaynesford refers only to Strawson here, his arguments can be generated to McDowell also. 22 Ibid., pp.159-60. Episode V. Apperceiver and Homo sentiens 105 3. At this stage I would like to connect the present discussion to a larger concern of McDowell, that is, his attacks on the dualism of scheme and content. I want to do so because that larger concern also underlies most, if not all, of McDowell's thinking, which has been discussed throughout the essay. Let me start with the very idea of that dualism.23 'Scheme-content dualism' was first introduced by Donald Davidson as a critical target.24 In a later paper he comments that '[t]his picture of mind and its place in nature has defined many of the problems modern philosophy has thought it had to solve.'25 This theme was subsequently taken up by McDowell in various writings, as we shall see. Both of them are hostile to this dualism, but they also find each other's characterization of it problematic: both of them present the dualism as a conception of the relation between mind and world, but while Davidson construes it in evidential terms, McDowell thinks it does not go to the root of the problem and present his version in intentional terms. Let me start with Davidson. The opening paragraph of his 1974 paper goes like this: Philosophers of many persuasions are prone to talk of conceptual schemes. Conceptual schemes, we are told, are ways of organizing experience; they are systems of categories that give form to the data of sensation; they are points of view from which individuals, cultures or periods survey the passing scene. There may be no translation from one scheme to another, in which case the beliefs, desires, hopes, and bits of knowledge that characterize one person have no true counterparts for the subscriber to another scheme. Reality itself is relative to a scheme: what counts as real in one system may not in another.26 Here we can see that the dualism itself has many faces and to a large extent metaphorical, but we can see that in characterizing it, Davidson uses 'translation,' a semantic notion. So one would not be surprised when Davidson says this in response to McDowell: I was clear from the start that unconceptualized 'experience,' sense data, sensations, Hume's impressions and ideas, could not coherently serve as evidence for beliefs: 23 In what follows I draw materials from my 'Scheme-Content Dualism, Experience, and Self,' unpublished. 24 'On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.' 25 'The Myth of the Subjective,' in Michael Benedikt and Rudolf Berger (eds.) Bewusstein, Sprache und die Kunst (Edition S. Verlag der Österreichischen Staatsdruckerei, 1988) reprinted in his Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, pp.39-52, at p.41. 26 'On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,' p.183, my italics. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 106 only something with propositional content could do this.27 For Davidson, the target to be criticized is conceptual relativism, as he makes clear at the beginning of the 1974 paper. And for A to be relative to B, both of them must be contentful in the first place. Now, given that both of them are contentful, 'evidence' is the only thing that can determine whether they are commensurable or not. So it seems natural for Davidson to grant contents to the alleged conceptual schemes and to focus on the notion of 'evidence.' McDowell objects to this. He thinks Davidson grants too much to the opponent. He writes: The dualism, on my reading, generates a much more radical anxiety about whether we are in touch with reality. Within the dualism, it becomes unintelligible that we have a world view at all.28 McDowell further argues that on the one hand, his understanding and diagnosis of the dualism are more basic, since Davidson leaves the contentfulness of the conceptual scheme unquestioned; on the other hand, Davidson gives up too much when he renounces 'minimal empiricism,' the idea that experiences constitute the tribunal for human rationality. But I shall leave this aside and turn to McDowell's analysis of the dualism. McDowell's main thought is that since it is a kind of dualism, the two elements must be 'dualistically set over against' each other.29 Thus, the content side should be 'non-conceptual content,' and the scheme side 'non-contentful scheme.' But this generates a problem immediately: If abstracting it from content leave a scheme empty, what can be the point of identifying this side of the dualism as the conceptual? It is not a routine idea that concepts and their exercises, considered in themselves, are empty, and it is not obvious why it should seem that we can abstract them away from what makes the embracing of beliefs or theories non-empty, but still have concepts and their exercises – what they essentially are – in view.30 The problem is this: scheme-content dualism is supposed to be an extraordinarily tempting view, for it sets out the agenda of modern philosophy, both Davidson and 27 'Reply to John McDowell,' in Lewis Edwin Hahn (ed.) The Philosophy of Donald Davidson (Open Court, 1999), pp.105-08, at p.105. 28 'Scheme-Content Dualism and Empiricism,' in Philosophy of Donald Davidson, pp.87-104, at p.92. 29 Mind and World, p.3. 30 'Scheme-Content Dualism and Empiricism,' p.88. Episode V. Apperceiver and Homo sentiens 7 10 McDowell argue. But if the scheme side denotes 'non-contentful scheme,' or more annoyingly, 'non-contentful concept,' it is not clear that this dualism has any initial plausibility at all. McDowell damps this doubt in this way: First, that the linkage between concepts that constitute the shape, so to speak, of a conceptual scheme are linkages that pertain to what is a reason for what. Second, that if matter, in this application of the form-matter contrast, is supplied by the deliverances of the sense, then the structure of reason must lie on the other side of the matter-form contrast, and hence must be formal; reason is set over against the senses.31 As McDowell understands it, the scheme side should be understood as 'reason,' or more precisely, 'pure reason,' as opposed to 'empirical content.' It is our rational structure, as opposed to sense content. This, I believe, makes the dualism more plausible. And this looks like Kant's insistence that the I of apperception is only 'formal,' so as to be able to 'accompany all one's representations.' We have seen how McDowell criticizes Kant's argument for this position, and now I suggest that this can be further related to McDowell's denial of the dualism. As we shall see presently, McDowell applies his diagnosis of this dualism to many issues, and I will take care of them one by one. In the present case, we can see the dualism as an instantiation of the inner space model, constituted by the formal I and its representations. This model is a nonstarter, for it makes intentionality unavailable to us. And given Kant's thesis of the interdependence between self-consciousness and consciousness of the world, the model also makes apperception unavailable. We can also see the connection between scheme-content dualism and the inner space model in the context of knowledge. In my second episode, we have seen that McDowell thinks epistemology in twentieth century suffers the 'interiorization of the space of reasons.' After identifying the space of reasons with the space of concepts, he suggests that [W]e can see the interiorization of the space of reasons as a form of a familiar tendency in philosophy: the tendency to picture the objective world as set over against a 'conceptual scheme' that has withdrawn into a kind of self-sufficiency The fantasy of a sphere within which reason is in full autonomous control is one element in the complex aetiology of this dualism. The dualism yields a picture in which the realm of matter, which is, in so far as it impinges on us, the Given, confronts the realm of forms, which is the realm of thought, the realm in which subjectivity has its 31 Ibid., p.88. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 108 being.32 McDowell also calls this dualism the 'dualism of subjective and objective – or inner and outer.'33 Once we conceive our inner world as under full autonomous control, our reach to the external world becomes problematic. A related discussion can be found in the relation between German Idealism and the inner world conceived by Wittgenstein. German idealism gives up the 'in itself' talk, arguing that 'world and thought are constitutively made for one another.'34 In this context, one may want to rebut this by saying that 'in the inner life the "in itself," brutely alien to concepts, insistently makes its presence felt. The inner world is a lived refutation of idealism.'35 But as we have seen, the retreat from the external world makes the external world totally unavailable to us. Another prominent example is the conceptuality of experience. In the opening of his Locke Lecture, McDowell mentions Kant's famous slogan: 'Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.'36 This can be read with the dualism of scheme and content, that is, frictionless scheme and nonconceptual given. If one recognizes that nonconceptual given cannot bring us intentionality and justification, one in prone to accept coherentism; if by contrast, one insists on the crucial role of nonconceptual, experiential intake, one commits the Myth of the Given.37 We have seen the inadequacy of both positions in my second episode, and McDowell's alternative, as I discussed in my previous episode, is that experiences are conceptual all the way down; scheme and content do not dualistically opposed to each other. In this way, McDowell applies the diagnosis of scheme-content dualism to the topic of 'experience.' This can also be related to the inner space model: 'pure' empirical content, 'uncontaminated' by reasons, can serve to sustain intentionality. This does not work, for 'experiences' so conceived just 'stand there like a sign-post.'38 This normatively inert thing cannot do any work for intentionality. In addition, though we often concentrate on 'outer' experience, 'the dualism ought to be equally wrong about purely "inner" experiences: pains, tickles, and the like.'39 He xplains further: e 32 'Knowledge and the Internal,' p.408. 33 Ibid., p.409 34 'Intentionality and Interiority in Wittgenstein,' pp.306-7. 35 Ibid., p.307. 36 Critique of Pure Reason, A51 / B75. 37 According to McDowell, though Davidson is definitely hostile to this dualism, he nevertheless falls into coherentism, for his formulation of the dualism does not quite go to the root. 38 Philosophical Investigations, §85. Also see McDowell's discussions in 'Meaning and Intentionality in Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy.' 39 'One Strand in the Private Language Argument,' Grazer Philosophische Studien 33/34 (1989), pp.285-303; reprinted in his Mind, Value, and Reality, pp.279-96, at p.279. Episode V. Apperceiver and Homo sentiens 109 e in the cat's, or infant's, consciousness, barring only the ability to talk...40 se in this domain, we should hold firm to the lessons we have .' This is, nevertheless, accepted by Davison and most contemporary vidson's exact formulation of the dualism, he efinitely agrees with Davidson that the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinion true or false.42 enetration of the subjective and the objective,'43 contra most philosophical utlooks. What is essential is to avoid the temptation to suppose that when, say, a cat, or a human infant, is in pain, what constitutes the relevant kind of episode in our inner lives is all ther Here McDowell connects scheme-content dualism to the factorization approach: it is tempting to think of animals' or human infants' inner experiences in a factorized way, but that generates hopeless problems as we have seen in other cases. Although it is easiest for us to lap learned elsewhere. The final example I want to discuss is McDowell case against Hume's conception of causality, briefly discussed at the end of my previous episode. For Hume, 'singular causal relations are not given in experience,' and 'this recommendation seems inextricably bound up with a "dualism of scheme and content, of organizing system and something waiting to be organized..."'41 For Hume and his followers, experience is unorganized, but this falls into the guilty dualism. As mentioned earlier, this 'Nomological Character of Causality' is accused by McDowell as 'the fourth dogma of empiricism empiricists. Although McDowell disputes Da d In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but re-establish unmediated touch with And the recapitulation above shows how this repudiation of the dualism can be done in different regions of philosophy. If we want real objectivity, we must acknowledge the 'interp o Subjectivity 1. My title for the essay is World and Subject, and the title for the introductory 40 Ibid., p.294. 41 'Functionalism and Anomalous Monism,' p.340. 42 'On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,' p.198. 43 Recall my discussions of 'Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space' in the second episode. For interesting connections between scheme-content dualism, conceptual relativism, Davidson, and Gadamer, see 'Gadamer and Davidson on understanding and Relativism.' W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 110 episode is 'The Many Faces of Human Subject.' So far I have been exploring aspects of subject through discussing McDowell's philosophy, and my working hypothesis, as I said in the introduction, is that the best way to understand subjectivity is to understand various aspects of it. Now I come close to the core of this project, that is, subjectivity per se. By this I mean the narrow sense of subjectivity – the 'what it is like' aspect. Any conception of subjectivity should not content itself if it doesn't offer y something not directly about McDowell, but the digression will prove he I shall begin by an observation from Ned Block: goes beyond the intentional, the cognitive, and the functional believe in qualia.44 any account of consciousness. However, 'consciousness' is never a main theme of McDowell's thinking. He does talk about it from time to time, but always only in passing. The reason is that what he concerns is the direct contact between mind and world, and the problem of sentience is hardly central relative to this goal. Therefore, in this section I need to elaborate, as opposed to merely interpret and evaluate, McDowell's line of thought. This requires me to sa lpful. The greatest chasm in the philosophy of mind – maybe even all of philosophy – divides two perspectives on consciousness. The two perspectives differ on whether there is anything in the phenomenal character of conscious experience that goes beyond the intentional, the cognitive, and the functional...Those who think that the phenomenal character of conscious experience Let me explain. Almost everyone agrees that there are two main aspects of the mental, the phenomenal and the intentional. The former refers to the 'what it is like' aspect; the latter refers to 'what it is about.' Some mental states sustain both aspects, like perception, some others sustain only one of them, like pain (phenomenal) and belief (intentional).45 What's at issue is that whether the phenomenal 'goes beyond' the intentional, as Block puts. Those who hold the positive answer commit the existence of 'qualia.' 'Qualia' is the plural of 'quale,' which has been heavily theory-laden, but we can learn its essential traits by considering the positions that deny its existence. As Block succinctly summarizes above, qualia is non-intentional, non-functional, and non-cognitive qualities of experience. I slightly change Block's order, for we can understand 'non-intentional' and 'non-functional' with the notion of 'non-relational,' 44 'Mental Paint,' in his Consciousness, Function, and Representation (MIT Press, 2007), pp. 533-70, at p.533. Tim Crane disputes this observation in 'Is There a Perceptual Relation?' in Perceptual Experience, pp.126-46. I will discuss this later, and that will bring us back to McDowell's disjunctive conception of appearance. 45 All examples here are controversial, but for our purpose we do not need to go into them. Episode V. Apperceiver and Homo sentiens 111 e through and through. I tentionalism.49 Let me begin by McDowell's own words: t immediate judgements of experience as possible elements in a world-view.50 ards qualia, it is reasonable to conjecture that he holds a version of that is, 'intrinsic.' 46 Therefore, we can identify qualia as 'non-cognitive' and 'intrinsic' qualities of experience.47 Now those who think intentional properties exhaust phenomenal characters deny the existence of any 'non-cognitive,' 'intrinsic' quality of experience. This denial of qualia has been called the 'intentional theory of consciousness,' or simply 'intentionalism.'48 Intentionalism maintains that there is no intrinsic quality of experience, and experiences are cognitiv shall argue that McDowell holds a form of in I urge that we could not recognize capacities operative in experience as conceptual at all were it not for the way they are integrated into a rationally organized network of capacities for active adjustment of one's thinking to the deliverances of experience. That is what a repertoire of empirical concepts is. The integration serves to place even the mos He extends this claim even to 'concepts of secondary qualities,' though they are only 'minimally integrated into the active business of accommodating one's thinking to the continuing deliverances of experience...'51 The main reason for this, not surprisingly, is transcendental: intentionality and rational entitlement are possible only if every bit of mentality is integrated into a cognitive net. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that I am struck by a bunch of blue qualia. By definition, it follows that I am struck by a bunch of blue non-cognitive qualities of experience. Now how could these qualities, given that they are non-cognitive, have any intentional and rational bearings with my thoughts? How can I, for example, refer to my non-cognitive blue qualia to justify my experiential judgments? Philosophers who commit the existence of qualia seldom address, or even recognize, this puzzle. Although McDowell never makes clear about his attitude tow 46 Again, details are pretty complicated. The relation between intentionalism and functionalism is itself a big issue, but for our purpose, we only need to remember that the contrast between them and the qualia theory is that the later commits intrinsic qualities of experience. Block's version is rather a special case, for he thinks qualia are physically reducible, therefore not intrinsic. 47 Dennett identifies four characteristics of qualia; they are 'ineffability,' 'intrinsicality,' 'privacy,' and 'immediate apprehensibility'; see his 'Quining Qualia,' in A. Marcel and E. Bisiach, (eds.), Consciousness in Modern Science (Oxford University Press, 1988); most philosophers agree that 'intrinsicality' is essential to the notion of qualia. Although other properties are often regarded as characteristics of qualia as well, I will focus on only 'intrinsicality. Dennett's paper has been reprinted in many places; for a recent version, see David Chalmers (ed.) Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings (Oxford University Press, 2002), pp.226-46. 48 The situation here is parallel to that of the qualia theory. Here I will keep complication to minimal. 49 Although later I will argue that we should use the term 'representationalism' in the present context. 50 Mind and World, p.29, my italics. 51 Ibid., pp.29-30, my italics. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 112 intentionalism. A similar consideration is from his rebuttal of the dualism of scheme and content. The scheme side is constituted by rational connectedness; the content side is thereby populated by items that do not have any rational relations with each other. It seems esented above by McDowell, the two essential traits of qualia are ereby rejected. It should be clear, then, that McDowell is an intentionalist about nd the needed clarifications will be ngthy. I will explain why these two views seem to be incompatible at the first blush, ich contains the most recalcitrant problems of perception. The major theories of perception in contemporary analytic s not very significant at all...It may be that in other parts of philosophy of mind...the existence of qualia is a chasm-creating question. (Actually, clear that the qualia theory is a variant of scheme-content dualism, and we have also seen why we should resist it. So far I have concentrated on the 'non-cognitive' aspect, but the argument can be naturally extended to 'intrinsicality': the cognitive net in constituted by rational relations, so 'non-cognitive' and 'intrinsic' go hand in hand. If we accept the two lines of argument pr th consciousness. 2. Since the present essay is not primarily about consciousness, I have omitted lots of complications surrounding this heated topic. However, there is one issue that I must deal with: the issue about the compatibility between intentionalism and disjunctivism. I cannot ignore this concern because my goal in this essay is to present McDowell's philosophy, and consistency is arguably the minimal requirement. Readers shall find that the situation is extremely convoluted, a le but first consider this passage from Tim Crane: I [argue] that there is a large chasm in the philosophy of perception, but that is created by the dispute about whether experience is relational. It is this dispute – between 'intentionalists' and 'disjunctivists' – wh philosophy line up on either side of this dispute.52 In saying this, Crane has Block in mind as his main opponent: I [argue] that as far as the philosophy of perception is concerned, the dispute over the existence of qualia i I doubt this too...)53 In his footnote, Crane says that Chalmers and Block 'express the problem of 52 'Is There a Perceptual Relation?' p.128. 53 Ibid., p.127. Episode V. Apperceiver and Homo sentiens 113 ew sentences, but since here our consciousness in terms of the notion of qualia,' but 'their dispute is not over the existence of qualia, but over whether they can be physicalistically explained.'54 Crane's choice of example strikes me as gerrymandering, for often the debate between Block and Chalmers is seen as a family quarrel between qualia theories. A better example is the debate between Block and Dennett; see Dennett's paper referred above. I cannot of course defend Block's claim with these f topic is perception, I shall leave this to my readers, with a reminder that choosing a right pair of competitors is important in this context. Crane claims that the debate between intentionalism and disjunctivism creates the chasm in philosophy of perception. If this is so, my attribution of intentionalism to McDowell is problematic, for he is a self-deemed disjunctivist. I will argue, however, that Crane chasm-creating claim is based on a false conception of issues concerning perception, and that there is a much deeper problem concerning the notion of 'intentionalism' accepted by Crane and many others. Without these two failures, one can consistently hold intentionalism and disjunctivism at the same time. But before that, I need to say something more about disjunctivism, and McDowell's version of it. According to Adrian Haddock and Fiona Macpherson, disjunctivism about perception can be roughly divided into three versions. They are J. M. Hinton's and Paul Snowdon's 'experiential disjunctivism,' John McDowell's 'epistemological disjunctivism,' and M. G. F. Martin's 'phenomenal disjunctivism.'55 The experiential version is about 'the nature of experience,' 56 more precisely, about perceptual 'state.'57 Therefore I suggest that we call this version 'state disjunctivism,' in order to highlight its difference from the phenomenal version. The epistemological version is about 'the epistemic warrant'58 provided by experiences. The phenomenal version concerns 'experience's phenomenal character.'59 There might be another version of disjunctivism, which maintains that 'a veridical experience shares no content with its corresponding hallucination.'60 I shall call this 'content disjunctivism.' Haddock and Macpherson regard state (experiential) and phenomenal disjunctivism as 'two sub-varieties of metaphysical disjunctivism,' 61 as opposed to McDowell's epistemological version. I find this way of putting things potentially misleading: presumably, phenomenal disjunctivism can be seen as a kind of metaphysical 54 Ibid., p.127. 55 'Introduction: Varieties of Disjunctivism,' in Adrian Haddock and Fiona Macpherson (eds.) Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, and Knowledge (Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 1-24. They also discuss disjunctivism about action, but we do not need to enter that in the present context. 56 Ibid., p.1. 57 See Snowdon, 'Perception, Vision, and Causation,' Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 81 (1980-1), pp.175-92. 58 'Introduction: Varieties of Disjunctivism,' p.1. 59 Ibid., p.1. 60 Alex Byrne, 'Intentionalism Defended,' The Philosophical Review 110 (2001), pp.199-240, at p.202. 61 'Introduction: Varieties of Disjunctivism,' p.21, my italics. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 114 disjunctivism because it is about the nature, the metaphysics of phenomenal character. By the same token, state and content disjunctivism are metaphysical in the sense that they are about the nature, the metaphysics of state and content, respectively. But if so, the so called 'epistemological' disjunctivism is metaphysical in the same sense, for it is about the nature, the metaphysics, as opposed to the epistemology of reason. So I suggest that we replace the label 'epistemological disjunctivism' with 'reason disjunctivism': it is not the case that we have the same reason in subjectively indistinguishable veridical experience and its deceptive counterpart; instead, in the good case we have an indefeasible reason, which is absent in the bad case. So according to my way of labeling, we have four versions of disjunctivism about epistemology McDowell argues for the reason version of disjunctivism; it is perception: Hinton's and Snowdon's state version, McDowell's reason version, Martin's phenomenal version, and Byrne's content version.62 What version(s) of disjunctivism does Crane have in mind when he makes the chasm-creating claim? There he mentions most representatives, including Hinton, Snowdon, McDowell, Martin, Putnam, and Williamson, so we cannot find out the answer through the player list. Fortunately, later he says that disjunctivism '[denies] that the hallucination and the subjectively indistinguishable perception are states of the same fundamental psychological kind.'63 Therefore we can reasonably think that he locates the battlefield within the 'state' view. Now a quick argument on McDowell's behalf might be suggested: since McDowell's disjunctivism is the reason view, the putative inconsistency between state disjunctivism and intentionalism is simply irrelevant. This does not work, unfortunately, because according to my interpretation McDowell also holds state disjunctivism. Consider McDowell's main target in his overall thinking, the inner space model. This putative inner space is constituted by self-standing mental items. Items are things, and McDowell's alternative is that mental things – mental states – are prime, that is, inextricably involved external conditions.64 The inner space is a metaphysical position, and McDowell's anti-Cartesian alternative, i.e. disjunctivism, must have some metaphysical flavor too. In particular, the inner space theory is wrong about the nature of mental states, i.e. as free-floating items, so its opponent disjunctivism should be about mental states either.65 This is not to fly in the face to the obvious fact that in his papers on just that in responding to different challenges, he defends different versions of the 62 In his paper, Byrne does not explicitly commit this disjunctivism, but since here what I am doing is classification, I shall leave open whether he subscribes content disjunctivism. 63 'Is There a Perceptual Relation?' p.139, my italics. 64 To rehearse, the 'inextricability' stands for 'primeness,' which implies 'broadness,' signified by 'externality.' 65 Also consider McDowell's criticisms against Kripke's 'master thesis.' Kripke's 'common kind assumption' is definitely not about reason and justification. Episode V. Apperceiver and Homo sentiens 115 ms in the 'singular thought' paper, they would have realized that McDowell doctrine. What's the relation between the state and the reason version of disjunctivism? In their co-authored paper, Alex Byrne and Heather Logue argue that the former implies the latter, but not vise versa.66 I shall not take issue with this claim, but dispute their claim that McDowell denies state disjunctivism. They offer two textual evidences, from 'Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge' and 'The Disjunctive Conception of Experience as Material for a Transcendental Argument' respectively.67 First, '[i]t "look[s] to one exactly as if things [are] a certain way" (p.385) in the good case and the illusory cases, and there is the strong suggestion that this is a perfectly proper mental respect of similarity.'68 I do not understand. Here McDowell only says 'it looks to one exactly as if...,' but this is no more than a description of subjective indistinguishability. Maybe by this remark McDowell rejects strong phenomenal disjunctivism, as I shall explain presently, but that is irrelevant to state disjunctivism. Let's turn to the second quotation. There McDowell says that the 'difference in epistemic significance is of course consistent with all sorts of commonalities between the disjuncts. For instance, on both sides of the disjunction it appears to one that, say, there is a red cube in front of one.'69 Again, I do not see how the quoted remarks help establish their point. For one thing, 'it appears to one that...' is again phenomenal70; for another, to say that the difference in epistemic significance is consistent with all sorts of commonalities is not to say that other forms of disjunctivism are precluded. It is just that reason disjunctivism does not expel the common kind theory in other domains. Byrne and Logue's case for the claim that McDowell refuses to accept state disjunctivism fails. Indeed, if they noticed that McDowell argues against self-standing mental ite himself argues for state disjunctivism. They does cite the paper, but for some other purpose. So we need to respond to Crane's challenge after all, given that McDowell is a state disjunctivist. But again before this, I hope to say more about McDowell's relations to other two versions of disjunctivism. Sometimes McDowell writes as if he thinks a veridical experience and it deceptive counterpart can share the same content, for example he says that 'a kind of actualization of conceptual capacities [are operative in] cases of perceiving, or at least seeming to perceive, that things are thus and so'71 But I 66 'Either / Or,' in Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge, pp.57-94. Their terminologies are 'metaphysical / epistemological disjunctivism,' and I have said why I prefer my own way of labeling. 67 The later paper appears in Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge, pp.376-89. 68 'Either / Or,' p.67. 69 'The Disjunctive Conception of Experience as Material for a Transcendental Argument.' 70 Their failure here may also be reflected in the fact that they lump Martin with Hinton together under the label 'metaphysical disjunctivism.' 71 'Conceptual Capacities in Perception,' p.1068. In private occasions he also says perceivings and seemings can share the same content. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 116 think it is better to say that he also holds content disjunctivism, which says that in the good case and in the bad case there is no shared content in play. Let me explain. There is a sense in which there is one and the same content shared by a veridical experience and its deceptive counterpart: that both of them can be characterized by 'that things are thus and so.' I think this is what McDowell insists on. But in a more important sense, those episodes do not share the same content, for in the good case the contents of experience are facts, and facts do not present in the bad case. We can say that those episodes share the same content, 'that things are thus and so,' and in the good case the content is true, in the bad case the content is false. This is plain, but we need to remember that for McDowell, true contents are facts. When the content is true, the nature of this very content has been transformed from 'mere appearance'72 to 'fact.' For McDowell, we cannot factorize facts into truth value and contents. So I think it is better to say that McDowell is a content disjunctivist, with the proviso that he does respectively.75 Just how this can be done exactly is not clear. But I think it is safe to not deny that a veridical experience and its deceptive counterpart can have the same propositional structure, 'that things are thus and so.' How about phenomenal disjunctivism? This version of disjunctivism itself comes with two sub-versions. The weak one leaves subjective indistinguishability in place, but argues that the explanations of the phenomenal characters in veridical experiences and deceptive ones are different.73 The strong one challenges the indistinguishability itself.74 Now we have seen that McDowell always starts his argumentation against the inner space with the acknowledgement of subjective indistinguishability; maybe he does this for the sake of argument, but anyway there is no reason to saddle him with strong phenomenal disjunctivism. How about the weak version? This weaker one says that though a veridical experience and its deceptive counterpart can share the same phenomenal characters, we need to have different explanations for the good case and the bad case respectively. Since McDowell is an intentionalist, he would invoke the intentional part of experience to explain its phenomenology. And since for him in the good case and in the bad case we do not have the same content, we can have different explanations for phenomenal characters in the good case and in the bad case 72 'Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge,' p.386. 73 M. G. F. Martin, 'The Transparency of Experience,' Mind and Language 17 (2002), pp.376-425, at ce,' in Brian Leiter (ed.) The Future for Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. p.402. 74 M. G. F. Martin, 'On Being Alienated,' in Perceptual Experience, pp.354-410, at pp.366-72. 75 In recent terminology, McDowell holds 'weak intentionalism,' which claims that the phenomenal supervenes on the intentional, for the same phenomenology in different cases is explained by different contents. By contrast, 'strong intentionalism' holds that the relation between the phenomenal and the intentional is identity. I use 'intentional part' to stay neutral between so-called 'pure' and 'impure' versions of intentionalism. For details of these matters, see Crane's 'Intentionalism,' forthcoming in Ansgar Beckermann and Brian McLaughlin (eds.) Oxford Handbook to the Philosophy of Mind (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Also see David Chalmers, 'The Representational Character of Experien Episode V. Apperceiver and Homo sentiens 7 11 say that McDowell is a weak phenomenal disjunctivist: as a philosopher who abandons the Cartesian inner / outer divide by externalizing reasons, mental states, and mental contents, there seems to be no reason for him to stop in the case of phenomenology.76 However, I must admit that so far I see no clue to pursue this line. I shall leave this to other occasions, and back to Crane's challenge that the controversy between disjunctivism and intentionalism creates a large chasm in philosophy of erception. e problems.'79 To see this, we must consider the argument from Here I adopt A. D. Smith's formulation. Schematically, it runs as follows: tum Inference P4. The Generalizing Step p 3. Philosophy of perception, like other philosophical enterprises, consists in plenty of intertwined questions. But most if not all practitioners agree that arguably the most central question is our perceptual contact with the world, challenged by the argument from illusion and from hallucination, among others.77 Crane echoes this point by saying that '[w]ithout challenges like this [i.e. those which are raised by the argument from illusion and related arguments], it is somewhat hard to see why we would need a philosophical theory of perception at all.'78 I agree with this, but I disagree with Crane's claim that he has shown 'how the main theories of perception are best seen as responding to thes illusion as such.80 P1. The Possibility of Illusion P2. The Sense-Da P3. Leibniz Law P1 is true because 'any sense involves the functioning of sense receptors that can, in principle, malfunction.'81 And we are entitled to ask if illusions do occur, what do we perceive in those cases? This is a question concerning the object of experience. P2 says that 'whenever something perceptually appears to have a feature when it actually does not, we are aware of something that does actually possess that feature.'82 And we orld, pp.123-39. In his reply, McDowell says nothing against this; see the prehensive and profound discussion of these matters, see A. D. Smith, The Problem of rceptual Relation?' p.142. pose, we do not need to note the differences between this argument and the one from tion, p.25. 153-81. 76 Gregory McCulloch takes a similar line in his 'Phenomenological Externalism,' in Reading McDowell: on Mind and W same volume, pp.284-86. 77 For a com Perception. 78 'Is There a Pe 79 Ibid., p.142. 80 For our pur hallucination. 81 The Problem of Percep 82 Ibid., p.25, my italics. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 118 introduce 'sense-datum' as a name for these perceived objects.83 P3 is an application of Leibniz Law, saying that 'since the appearing physical object does not possess that feature which...we are immediately aware of in the illusory situation, it is not the physical object of which we are aware in such a situation.'84 Now one has established that sense-data are objects of perception in the illusory cases. P4 is served to extend this conclusion to normal perceptions. A usual reason for this is that 'being aware of a sense-datum is exactly like perceiving a normal object.'85 If we accept this, then the sense-datum theory follows. Here is not the place for me to peruse the details of this argument (Smith devotes more than two hundred and fifty pages for this), but I shall argue that Crane's way of conceiving extant theories of perception does not reflect the real structure of this argument. Furthermore, I will offer my alternative of conceiving those theories, arguing that with this right framework we can see that there is no inner tension between McDowell's intentionalism and disjunctivism, and that we can have a better understanding of complicated issues concerning perception only if we respect xperience is relational.'86 He then lassifies the 'three dominant theories' as follows: theory of perception in effect denies that perceptual experience is a relation at all.87 the agenda set by the argument from illusion. To repeat, Crane thinks that 'there is a large chasm in the philosophy of perception, [and] that is created by the dispute about whether e c [T]he sense-data theorist and the disjunctivist say that there is a perceptual relation, but while the sense-data theorist says that in cases of illusion and hallucination the relatum is not an ordinary mind-independent object, the disjunctivist says that genuine perception is a relation to ordinary mind-independent objects, but that there is no common fundamental kind of state – 'perceptual experience' – present in cases of genuine perception, which is a relation to a mind-independent object, and illusion and hallucination, which are not. The intentionalist According to Crane, the sense-datum theory and disjunctivism belong to the relational view, and intentionalism belongs to the non-relational view. Notice that among the relational view, disjunctivism further objects to the 'common kind assumption.' This is true, to be sure, but one should wonder why this important thesis is relegated to a sub-category within the relational view. And it becomes fishier if we notice that often 83 As an intentionalist, Smith thinks that P2 'is the heart of' the argument from illusion, and he devotes 'all of the Part I' of his book to 'consideration of this claim and to attempting to see a way around it.' See p.25. This will proved to be important in my objections to Crane. 84 Ibid., p.25. 85 Ibid. p.26. 86 'Is There a Perceptual Relation?' p.128. 87 Ibid., p.134-5, my italics. Episode V. Apperceiver and Homo sentiens 119 Crane agrees with most others that the onceiving the debate. We can see this by noting that the sense-datum theory is a version of the common kind theory: it is by virtue of this thesis that the generalizing step can be accepted. Besides, intentionalism characterized by Crane is also a common kind theory, for what defines disjunctivism is its rejection of the common kind assumption (it wears this on its sleeve), and intentionalism in Crane's sense is outright incompatible with disjunctivism. Whether the common kind assumption is true is crucial for the argument from illusion, for it determines one's attitude towards the generalizing step. On the contrary, relationality has no place in the argument from illusion. As we have seen, argument from illusion is our starting point, so he cannot propose a criterion that does not reflect the real structure of that argument. The argument from illusion consists in four steps: the possibility of illusion, the sense-datum inference, Leibniz Law, and the generalizing step. No one disputes the possibility of illusion and the application of Leibniz Law, so virtually we have two ways to carve the battlefield. On the one hand, we can anchor the discussion with the sense-datum inference, saying that the crucial divide is between those who admit this inference, like the sense-datum theory, and those who refuse it, like intentionalism and the adverbial theory.88 On the other hand, we can anchor the discussion with the generalizing step, saying that the crucial divide is between those who admit the step, like the sense-datum theory, and those who refuse it, like disjunctivism.89 Neither corresponds to Crane's way of c neither of them groups disjunctivism and the sense-datum theory together, pace the framework proposed by Crane. Now I prefer the latter framework, though in fact they are equally legitimate. At the early stage of this debate, philosophers were divided into the sense-datum theorists and those who objected to it. Therefore the former way of carving the battlefield – anchoring the debate through the sense-datum inference – may be preferable. But nowadays the core of the relevant debates has been shifted to whether any form of disjunctivism is true, and the defining feature of disjunctivism is the rejection of the generalizing step. In other words, now the central stage has been taken over by the debate between disjunctivism and the common kind theory. It is not that the older core issue has been solved; of course not: the question about whether we can introduce things like sense-data is still controversial. What I would like to stress is that the 88 I will say more about the adverbial theory presently. I do not mention disjunctivism here because it is not necessary to reject the sense-datum inference for being a disjunctivist. For example, Austinian disjunctivism accepts the inference but rejects the generalizing step. See Alex Byrne and Heather Logue, 'Either / Or,' pp.63-5. 89 I do not mention intentionalism and the adverbial theory here because the defining feature of them is the rejection of the sense-datum inference. They often do not object to the generalizing step, but we need to keep clear about what is essential for being a certain theory. Actually we should not mention the sense-datum theory either, for though it almost always accepts the generalizing step, this step is not part of its definition. Again, consider Austinian disjunctivism. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 120 relative importance of the two crucial moves has been changed: at the early stage, most people focused on the sense-datum inference (Austin seems to be an importance exception), but now more and more people are interested in whether there is a common kind – mental state, reason, phenomenology, or content – shared by veridical experiences and their deceptive counterparts. Therefore it is preferable to invoke this latter framework. Besides, our present purpose is to understand McDowell's intentionalism(s) and whether it is (they are) compatible with his disjunctivism(s), so the former framework based on the sense-datum inference is in effect of no use for us. Let me say something about the adverbial theory. It appeared in the mid-twentieth century, by C. J. Ducasse and Roderick Chisholm.90 The adverbial theorists hold that 'we should think of [the experienced] qualities as modifications of the experience itself.'91 'Experience' here is understood as an act, which is modified by an adverbial; 'perceiving brownly' for example. One of its defining features is its rejection of the sense-datum inference. This theory does not occupy a central place in the present and explaining the good case and the bad case with different intentional nature, for instance the distinction between context, but we should remember that there is nothing about the generalizing step in the very idea of the adverbial theory. We have reconceived the spirit of the argument from illusion, concentrating on the debate between disjunctivism and the common kind theory.92 Now it should be clear that as far as the argument from illusion is concerned, there is no inconsistency between disjunctivism and intentionalism, and indeed, between disjunctivism and the sense-datum theory / the adverbial theory, for there is nothing about the generalizing step in the very ideas of the sense-datum theory, the adverbial theory, and crucially, intentionalism: the controversies between these three theories are located by the first framework, which concerns the sense-datum inference. Although those three theories are almost always associated with the common kind theory, conceptually they need not be. In particular, intentionalism can be a common kind theory if it holds that one and the same representation can occur in a veridical experience and its deceptive counterpart, but this is a further claim. As a disjunctivist, McDowell can subscribe intentionalism by rejecting the sense-datum inference 'presentation' and 'representation,' as Crane notices.93 90 C. J. Ducasse, 'Moore's Refutation of Idealism, ' in Arthur Schilpp (ed.) The Philosophy of G. E. Moore (Northwestern University Press, Chicago, 1942), pp.225-51. Roderick Chisholm, Perceiving: A Philosophical Study (Cornell University Press). 91 Tim Crane, 'The Problem of Perception,' in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. See its section 3.2. 92 In 'On Being Alienated,' p.357, Martin also proposes this framework, but he doesn't find fault in Crane's chasm-creating claim. In addition, he places the sense-datum theory into the common kind theory, but in effect the existence of sense-datum is compatible with disjunctivism, as Austinian disjunctivism shows. 93 'Is There a Perceptual Relation?' p.140. There he mentions Searle's Intentionality, p.45-6, and Episode V. Apperceiver and Homo sentiens 121 Crane plays down the importance of externalism in the disagreement between disjunctivism and intentionalism, but I disagree.94 According to my framework, if one wants a version of intentionalism incompatible with disjunctivism, he needs to supplement intentionalism with the common kind thesis. The outcome is to hold that there is a common 'representation' in the good case and in the bad case, regardless the presence of the worldly objects. But this is a version of internalism, which holds that the nature of representation is irrelevant to the directed external objects. By contrast, disjunctivism is a version of externalism, saying that the presence of the directed objects changes the nature of (re)presentation. This amounts to the broadness claim discussed in my second episode. A disjunctivist can further commit the primeness claim, insisting that the way the directed objects change the nature of the mental states is constitution, as opposed to causation. McDowell holds this prime disjunctivism. This recognition of the relevance of the internalism / externalism debate helps us to see that the framework provided by Tamar Szabó Gendler and John Hawthorne is also in trouble.95 They claim that there are two opposing 'analytical projects,' 'factorizing accounts' and 'disjunctive accounts.'96 This is pretty close to truth, for the common kind theory does belongs to the factorizing camp: it factorizes the good case into a representation shared by the bad case and the representation's directed objects. But it flies in the face of the fact that the disjunctivism can be rendered compatible with the factoring approach, for it can claim that though the directed objects change the nature of the (re)presentation, the way they change it is one of causation, which means the directed objects themselves are not part of the mental states. The distinction between the factorizing / conjunctive view and the disjunctive view does not carve the issue at its joints either. Crane's insistence on the importance of relationality is not well-placed. He declares that his understanding of intentionalism is Brentano's one: intentionalism is 'the McDowell's comments on this in 'The Content of Perceptual Experience.' Frank Jackson, who converted into an intentionalist, draws a relevant distinction between 'instantiated properties' and 'intensional properties.' This distinction seems to be incompatible with the common kind thesis, for if ationary reading, suggested by Byrne and Logue, in : Perceptual Experience,' in Perceptual Experience, pp.1-30. there is a single 'representation' shared by a veridical experience and its deceptive counterparts, how can it be that in one case it (re)presents instantiated properties and in the other it represents intensional properties? See his 'Mind and Illusion,' in Peter Ludlow, Yujin Nagasawa, and Daniel Stoljar (eds.) There is Something about Mary: Essays on Phenomenal Consciousness and Frank Jackson's Knowledge Argument (MIT Press, 2004), pp.421-42, especially pp.427-30. Notice that he uses 'intensionalism-with-a-s' instead of 'intentionalism-with-a-t,' see pp.430-1. I think there are something important in this, but we do not need to go into this. Also notice that in his forthcoming 'Intentionalism,' Crane says that in illusion and hallucination what are represented are 'mere intentional objects,' and he leaves open the question how this should be explained. However, it is quite reasonable to assume that he prefers a deflationary reading of this. If this is so, we can combine this with McDowell's 'mere appearance,' also under a defl 'Either / Or,' p.66. But again this is another story. 94 See 'Is There a Perceptual Relation?' p.135 and p.137. 95 'Introduction 96 Ibid., p.21. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 122 non-relational, representational conception of experience...' 97 But this begs the question against another way of developing intentionalism, suggested by Terence Parsons, that intentional objects are in a significant sense real.98 If this inflationary construal of intentionalism turns out to be true, then perceptions are relations even in the bad case. In his forthcoming paper Crane says that he does 'not attempt to explain [the nature of intentional objects],' but he forgets this claim of neutrality when he claims that intentionalism is by definition a non-relational view. Relationality does matter, but it does not create a large chasm in philosophy of perception, but rather gures in one of the family quarrels within intentionalism.99 In fact, Brentano himself relational here, and not, rather, with something somewhat similar to something relational in a certain ut in the good case there is a relation between the mental tate and its directed external objects. Relationality just isn't one of the joints of the fi is not so determined about this: The terminus of the so-called relation does not need to exist in reality at all. For this reason, one could doubt whether we really are dealing with something respect, which might, therefore, better be called 'quasi-relational.'100 Here Brentano expresses skepticism about the prospect of developing intentionalism in the inflationary way, but he is extremely ambivalent. Relationality is not part of the definition of intentionalism, and even if it turns out that non-relational intentionalism is true, intentionalism is still compatible with disjunctivism, for a disjunctivist can hold that in the bad case there is no relation between representation and the relevant mere intentional objects, b s argument from illusion.101 4. To rehearse, disjunctivism and intentionalism are compatible because their defining characters lie at different levels: the former is at the level of the generalizing step, and the latter is at the sense-datum inference. This brings us to the further distinction between intentionalism in philosophy of mind and philosophy of perception. It is widely, if not universally, assumed that intentionalism in these two areas is one and the same theory. For example, Crane takes issue with Block's 97 'Is There a Perceptual Relation?' p.135, my italics. 98 Non-Existent Objects (Yale University Press, 1980). 99 If one holds non-relational intentionalism, relationality becomes a family quarrel within the common kind theory, for the sense-datum theory holds that perceptions are relations between a subject and her sense-data. See Martin, 'On Being Alienated,' p.357. 100 See his Appendix to the 1911 edition of Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1874/1911/1973). 101 A further trouble with relationality is that it is not clear that whether it is compatible with prime disjunctivism, for the notion of relation seems to imply that two relata are distinct. Fortunately, the framework constituted by disjunctivism and the common kind theory does not make use of the notion of relationality. Episode V. Apperceiver and Homo sentiens 123 ) in philosophy of mind. This view has a place in philosophy of ience, which will be chasm-creating claim in the context of philosophy of perception, but the claim is made in the context of qualia. This is wrong, for the core tenet of intentionalism in philosophy of mind is that 'all mental facts are representational facts;'102 its opponent, the qualia theory, says that there are some mental facts that are non-representational, that is, intrinsic. So intentionalism in philosophy of mind is about the scope of the intentional. However, intentionalism in philosophy of perception is defined by the denial of the sense-datum inference, and offering its explanation with the notion of 'intentional object.' It does not make any claim about the scope of the intentional at all. I suggest that we reserve the term 'representationalism' for philosophy of mind, for as Block notices, the debate between it and the qualia theory can be nicely captured by asking 'is experiencing just representing?' 103 And the term 'intentionalism' should be invoked in philosophy of perception, for the key claim of it is that in deceptive cases we perceive mere intentional objects, rather than sense-data. 'Representationalism' and 'Intentionalism' are often interchangeable in the literatures.104 This can be innocuous, but we need to remember that there is no single theory which is called 'intentionalism' or 'representationalism' occurs in philosophy of mind and philosophy of perception. Crane argues that the qualia theory is not central in philosophy of perception, and I agree with him (though I do not accept his argument for this based on relationality), but he should have noticed that if the qualia theory is not central for perception, so is its opponent representationalism (or intentionalism perception only because of its claim about intentional objects, not because its rejection of qualia.105 A few words about qualia. Crane tends to align the qualia theory with the adverbial theory, for the latter 'explains the phenomenal character of experience in terms of its intrinsic qualities.'106 But this doesn't seem right, for while the adverbial theory conceives experiences as acts, the qualia theory tends to treat experiences as things: while the former uses adverbials to characterize experiences, the latter uses adjectives. Moreover, the qualia theory is not a response to the argument from illusion, so we are not obliged to give it a central place in philosophy of perception. It has some place, to be sure, like in the discussions concerning transparency of exper 102 Dretske, Naturalizing the Mind (MIT Press, 1995), p.xiii, my italics. 103 'Is Experiencing Just Representing?' in Consciousness, Function, and Representation, pp.603-10, my italics. 104 Although philosophers have their own idiosyncratic preference, for example Michael Tye prefers 'representationalism,' Crane prefers 'intentionalism,' and Block uses 'representationism.' 105 Crane insists that the qualia theory 'is not simply the denial of representationalism...' in 'Is There a Perceptual Relation?' p.131. His reason for this is that there is room for the view that uses 'intentional mode' and other intentional factors to explain phenomenal characters (p.143); this is his 'impure intentionalism' (see his forthcoming paper). But this is useless, for impure intentionalism is representationalism after all; it holds that experiencing is just representing. 106 'The Problem of Perception,' section 3.2.1, my italics. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 124 explained shortly, but this is far from central if we respect the thought that the central issues we are dealing with arise from the argument from illusion. If I am right about the distinction between representationalism and intentionalism in my sense, the failure of distinguishing them is striking. What can possibly explain this? I propose two reasons. First, one line of argument for representationalism is the so-called 'transparency of experience.' Generally, it says that when we pay attention to our perceptual experiences, we are only aware of properties of external objects, as opposed to properties of experiences. If this is correct, the qualia theory is falsified, for transparency shows that all properties present in perceptual experiences are not intrinsic to experiences. Philosophers like Tye use this to rebut the qualia theory. But notice that transparency (if any) is a phenomenon about perceptual experiences, not experience in general. Maybe transparency does show that in perceptual experiences, there is no intrinsic quality of experiences, but this is not the conclusion about the scope of the representational at the general level. In using transparency as an argument against the qualia theory, representationalists shift their topics to perception, a particular kind of experience. The second reason is that intentionalists like Crane read the argument from illusion as a phenomenological argument, for example he says that '[t]he adverbial theory explains the phenomenal character of experience in terms of its intrinsic qualities,' as quoted above (I add italics for this time), and that disjunctivism holds that 'the phenomenal character of a genuinely perceptual experience depends upon these [mind-independent] objects.'107 Phenomenology to an important extent underlies the sense-datum inference and the generalizing step, to be sure, but phenomenology itself is not the very thing for those theories to debate; rather, those theories disagree with one another principally about the object of perception. They also disagree about phenomenology, but those are not the objective of responding to the argument from illusion. In reading the argument in the phenomenological sense, philosophers are led to think that intentionalism here is the same theory as the one in philosophy of mind. Crane's colleague Martin also reads the argument in this way; that's why his disjunctivism is the phenomenal one. It is of course legitimate to urge phenomenal disjunctivism, but we should not, pace Martin, regard it as a direct response to the argument from illusion. To sum up, McDowell is a representationalist in the sense that he rejects the existence of qualia, and he seems to be an intentionalist disjunctivist, for his talk about 'mere appearances' can be read as 'mere intentional objects,' in the deflationary sense of course, and his commitment to the distinction between presentation and representation seems to allow him to say that perception is a form of intentionality without buying the common kind thesis. What's more, he seems to be a disjunctivist 107 Ibid., section 3.4, my italics. Episode V. Apperceiver and Homo sentiens 125 least the weak version), onalism, the qualia theory, intentionalism, and disjunctivism. lthough this detour is far from satisfying, at least it fits well with the following But they are not two simply different problem areas: we get into trouble over sentience because we And explaining sentience is one of the most central projects for the followers of McDowell, or so I shall urge.110 about state, reason, content, and phenomenal character (at with the primeness reading. In this way, he can be an intentionalist without the narrow assumption that associated with the common kind version.108 As I mentioned in the beginning of this section, McDowell does not say much about sentience per se. I attempt to say something about it for him by clarifying the issues about representati A remarks by McDowell: Not, of course, that we cannot distinguish sapience from sentience. misconceive the role of sapience in constituting our sentient life.109 108 I argue that representationalism is a theory about philosophy of mind, not about perception. But I acknowledge that there are some relations between representationalism and disjunctivism. For example, in my footnote 62 I mentioned Byrne's suggestion; his view seems to be that content disjunctivism is consistent with weak representationalism, which explains qualia with the relation of supervenience. They are compatible because weak representationalism allows that different contents determine the same phenomenology. See also Tye, 'Intentionalism and the Argument from No Common Content,' in John Hawthorne (ed.) Philosophical Perspectives 21 (Northridge: Ridgeview Publishing, 2007), pp.589-613. The distinction between pure / impure representationalism may also be relevant: weak representationalism seems to encourage pureness, for it has allowed for different contents, and there seems to be no reason to complicate the issue by saying that the modes are also different. Besides, intentional modes may generate additional problems here, for perceiving and seeming to perceive are presumably different modes, but it seems clear that different phenomenal characters are not due to the difference between modes. But these issues deserve further considerations, for example, in his forthcoming paper Crane identifies the impure version with the 'inter-modal' version, but this seems to be falsified by the fact that, say, seeing and seeming to see are different modes (I suspect that he thinks they are the same mode, given his common kind assumption). If we distinguish the impure from the inter-modal, maybe we can hold the latter without committing the former. I myself tentatively maintain inter-modal weak representationalism cum disjunctive intentionalism. 109 'One Strand in the Private Language Argument,' p.296. 110 Part of this episode is extracted as 'Disjunctivism, Intentionalism, and the Argument from Illusion.' I have made various revisions there, but since it has not been stable, I shall not revise the materials in the present episode. E P I L O G U E Self-Determining Subjectivity When I say: I think, I act, etc., then either the word 'I' is used falsely or I am free. Were I not free, I could not say: I do it, but rather I would have to say: I feel a desire in me to do, which someone has aroused in me. But when I say: I do it, that means spontaneity in the transcendental sense. – Immanuel Kant, Metaphysics, L1 The I shall be a self-determined I. – J. G. Fichte, Fichtes Werke, IV Freedom 1. When McDowell introduces the notion of 'the space of reasons,' he identifies it with 'the realm of freedom.' His project is to show how human beings' standings in the space of reasons can be natural, and how this second nature endows each of us a Cogito, being a perceiver, knower, thinker, speaker, agent, person, and conscious / self-conscious subject. In my previous episodes, I have tried to describe and evaluate this project of McDowell. Since 'the space of reasons' and 'the realm of freedom' are virtually the same, we need to understand how McDowell understands the very notion of 'freedom' and how this understanding fits his thinking about the space of reasons as described above. The situation, however, is rather dim. To be free, a subject must initiate its thinking and actions by itself; the causes of its thinking and actions must be part of the very idea of that subject. And by hypothesis, human freedom is located in the space of reasons. It follows that to understand human Epilogue. Self-Determining Subjectivity 7 12 freedom, human 'self-determining subjectivity,' we need to have an intelligible notion of 'causation in the space of reasons.'1 As I mentioned in my first episode, footnote 3, the notion of 'cause' can present in both the space of reasons and the realm of law. The reason for this, to rehearse, is that reasons can be causes, and to say we are free agencies is not to say that we live in a causeless world. Freedom is not random. As inhabitants in the space of reasons, we enjoy 'space of reason causations.' This is at odds with the scientific understanding of the world, but as we have seen, McDowell objects to this scientific hijacking of the concept of causality, according to which the concept is taken to have its primary role in articulating the partial world-view that is characteristic of the physical sciences, so that all other causal thinking needs to be based on causal relations characterizable in physical terms.2 But as Gaskin notices, 'this merely negative elucidation of the notion of space of reason causation cannot be regarded as satisfactory.'3 We learn that causality should not be restricted in the realm of law, and that the space of reasons is constitutively sui generis, i.e., not a special case of the realm of law. But one wants to know more about its positive features. To be sure, McDowell does say a lot about the space of reasons, and I myself think most of the relevant remarks make good sense. The trouble is that there seems to be something still left out after McDowell's efforts. As I discussed in the first episode, Paul Bartha and Steven Savitt mistakenly think McDowell is willing to let the same kind of causality occupy both the space of reasons and the realm of law, but their misunderstanding is reasonable to some extent because McDowell does says less than he needs to say about causality in the space of reasons. In particular, philosophers of science try hard to understand causality and related notions in the realm of law, and for most of them that kind of causality is the only kind. To rebut this, McDowell and his followers need to at least say more about extant understandings of causality and in which respects they need to be improved. We can say something on McDowell's behalf. For him, the urgent task is to find a way of thinking that exempts us from the anxiety characteristic of our modern conception of the world. In doing this, one only needs to undermine the assumptions that generate the anxiety in question. And McDowell does exactly this. Nonetheless, one might still want to know more about the nature of self-determining subjectivity 1 Richard Gaskin, Experience and the World's Own Language, p.28. 2 'Gadamer and Davidson on Understanding and Relativism,' p.178. For similar line of thought, see 'Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind,' in Mario de Caro and David Macarthur, (eds.) Naturalism in Question (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp.91-105. 3 Experience and the World's Own Language, p. 31. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 128 and causality in the space of reasons, for philosophy is not restricted to diagnoses. McDowell is quite right that we should stop and reflect our seemingly-unproblematic assumptions, but it shouldn't prevent us from trying to understand the nature of things. To understand more does not amount to engage in constructive philosophy. 2. In recent years, McDowell spends more time writing about self-determining subjectivity, especially in the context of German Idealism. As he says, '[a] stress on self-determining subjectivity is characteristic of German Idealism in general.'4 This descends the main theme of Mind and World: to have an appropriate understanding of subjectivity, we need a satisfying conception of external and rational constraint. In the paper I just quoted and another piece on Hegel5, McDowell further elaborates his thoughts about the shape of this crucial external constraint. In a piece on apperception in Kant and Hegel, McDowell talks about constraint from otherness.6 None of these, however, says directly how self-determining subjectivity per se is to be understood. We hear familiar McDowellian voice like the following: One is responsible for how one's mind is made up. To judge is to engage in free cognitive activity, as contrasted with having something merely happen in one's life, outside one's control. So freedom is central to Kant's picture of conceptual capacities.7 My italics points to many interrelated notions that need to be understood together, and indeed McDowell has done a lot to shed light on those relations. But we hope to know more about exactly how reasons can be causes, what causality in the space of reasons looks like. To this McDowell might reply that we demand too much here, for maybe there are some 'reductive' impulses lurking in this kind of query. I am not sure. Self-Determining Subjectivity defines 'I,' and as discussed in my fourth episode, McDowell thinks that 'there is no commitment to some peculiar extra ingredient, which would ensure determinateness of identity, in a person's make-up.'8 I said that I am hesitant to think with McDowell that 'there is no further fact.' Although I have not come up with any satisfying answer to this, I venture to put my very tentative thought 4 'Self-Determining Subjectivity and External Constraint,' in Karl Ameriks and Jürgen Stolzenberg (eds.) International Yearbook of German Idealism 2005: German Idealism and Contemporary Analytic Philosophy (Walter De Gruyter Inc, 2005), pp.21-37, at p.21. Cf. my opening quotation from Fichte. 5 'Hegel and the Myth of the Given,' in Wolfgang Welsch and Klaus Vieweg (eds.), Das Interesse des Denkens: Hegel aus heutiger Sicht (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2003), pp. 75-88. 6 'The Apperceptive I and the Empirical Self: Towards a Heterodox Reading of "Lordship and Bondage" in Hegel's Phenomenology,' Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 47/48 (2003), pp. 1-16. Notice that McDowell insists that 'Hegel is not here talking about multiple human beings' (p.9), so 'otherness' has a rather special meaning in McDowell's context. 7 'Hegel and the Myth of the Given,' p.79. 8 'Reductionism and the First Person,' pp.378-9. Epilogue. Self-Determining Subjectivity 129 like the following: there are further facts about the 'I' and its self-determining subjectivity, that is, they are socially, as opposed to physically, real. This is not to say that they are social constructs. Quite the contrary. They are as real as any physical phenomenon. It is just that their realities are constituted by social interactions, or in McDowell's term from Wittgenstein, by forms of life. Our task is to understand how those social institutions enable us to be 'us,' to be equipped self-determining subjectivity, through the space of reasons causations.9 I think this is central for any development in McDowell's vein, for what makes us distinctively human is the fact that we live in the realm of freedom. Furthermore, this makes the topic discussed in my previous episode more important, for the 'idea that we sometimes exercise freedom without being aware of it is at best awkward.'10 Wisdom 1. To reflect on our self-determining subjectivity is to touch the root of McDowell's overall project, and we shall remember that the root of the project is his use of the Aristotelian notion 'second nature.' It should be clear that the notion is essentially ethical and practical, though I do not pursue this line in the present essay. Consider this passage: The practical intellect's coming to be as it ought to be is the acquisition of a second nature, involving the moulding of motivational and evaluative propensities: a process that takes place in nature. The practical intellect does not dictate to one's formed character – one's nature as it has become – from outside. One's formed practical intellect – which is operative in one's character-revealing behavior – just is an aspect of one's nature as it has become.11 In this final section, I do not intend to reopen the discussion about second nature. All I would like to do here is to remind that perhaps we can find some resources in this practical notion, since wisdom and freedom constitute the dual cores of McDowell's naturalism. In understanding and evaluating McDowell's thoughts in this practical domain, we shall bear the concerns and perhaps misgivings discussed in my previous section in mind: we know that he thinks our second nature endow us the ability to exercise the space of reasons causations, in both practical and theoretical domains; the 9 Here I am inspired by Robert Brandom. During the conference in Taipei I asked a question about the self, and he says something in this line. Of course he holds no responsibility of my thoughts here. 10 'Hegel and the Myth of the Given,' p.80. 11 'Two Sorts of Naturalism,' in Rosalind Hursthouse, Gavin Lawrence, and Warren Quinn (eds.) Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996), pp.149-79; reprinted in his Mind, Value, and Reality, pp.167-97; at p.185. W O R L D A N D S U B J E C T 130 concern is that how that is supposed to get a foothold in our animal nature, given that before gaining abilities to be responsive to reasons, we are mere animals. It seems that in this practical domain the same challenge arises for McDowell and his followers. This needs cooperation. As mentioned above, the notion of causality is a big topic in philosophy of science, but most of the people in that discipline, I presume, advocate bald naturalism. Bald naturalism may turn out to be true, but before that can be demonstrated, we need to leave room for the possibility of naturalism of second nature. Experts in philosophy of science need to have that possibility in view; otherwise, we cannot have the best players in the relevant field to work out the details about how reasons can be causes. Davidson offers a possible, and to some extent plausible, way for us to think about, but as evaluated towards the end of the fourth episode, that proposal tends to result in epiphenomenalism, to put it mildly. Most of McDowell's arguments for causality in the space of reasons are transcendental, but even for those who have accepted its ontology, how that is supposed to work is an independently interesting and important question. One of the merits of McDowell's works is that it arouses more attentions to an important alternative: instead of simply pointing to a conceptual possibility, he offers a strong case for that alternative. But we need more attentions, especially from those who specialize in the problem of causality and that of freedom of the will. Younger generations should take more responsibilities, for they (we) grow up in a century that heavily under McDowell's influence, in a very good way. 2. The western tradition has it that the hierarchy of understanding starts from data, information, knowledge and finally to wisdom. This reflects the atomist intuition, and even nowadays the intuition is still widespread and deep-rooted. If data means sub-sentential contents, the data-information order has been reversed by Frege. The order between information and knowledge is fine; as McDowell notices, the problem (if any) about intentionality is always conceptually prior to that about knowledge. But McDowell also reverses the knowledge-wisdom order: by his light, we need to be initiated into a tradition, understood in terms of 'practical wisdom,' in order to have thoughts and knowledge. This is compatible with the commonsense that we can learn most wisdom only after we are equipped with plenty of information and knowledge; McDowell's revolutionary move is that information and knowledge are constitutively dependent on wisdom, in the sense we have discussed throughout the essay: practical wisdom is what brings us from mere lower animals to mature human beings, from proto-subjectivity to genuine perceivers, knowers, thinkers, speakers, agents, persons, and (self-) conscious beings in the world. I hope the plausibility of this general picture has been reinforced by my essay to some extent, and I hope the remaining question I Epilogue. Self-Determining Subjectivity 131 tried to point out in this final episode is sensible and positive. Subjectivity in a broad sense has always been a central concern in western philosophy, and the key to have a satisfying understanding of it is to investigate the way self-determining subjectivity, which is able to exert causality in the space of reasons, relates to causality in the realm of law. I commit myself to this challenging task. Bibliography Alweiss, Lilian. (2005) 'The Myth of the Given,' in János Boros (ed.), Mind in World, Brambauer Pécs, pp.39-65 Ayers, M. (2004) 'Sense Experience, Concepts, and Content – Objections to Davidson and McDowell,' in Ralph Schumacher (ed.), Perception and Reality: From Descartes to the Present, Paderborn, pp.239-62 Bartha, P. and Savitt, S. (1998) 'Second-Guessing Second Nature,' Analysis 58, pp.252-63 Bird, G. (1996) 'McDowell's Kant: Mind and World,' Philosophy 71, pp.219-43 Blackburn, S. (1981) 'Rule-Following and Moral Realism,' in Steven Holtzman and Christopher Leich (eds.) Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, pp.163-87 Blackburn, S. (1983) Spreading the Word, Clarendon Press, Oxford Blackburn, S. (1984) 'The Individual Strikes Back,' Synthesis 58, pp.281-301 Block, N. (2007a) 'Mental Paint,' in his Consciousness, Function, and Representation, MIT Press, pp. 533-70 Block, N. (2007b) 'Is Experiencing Just Representing?' in Consciousness, Function, and Representation, pp.603-10 Brandom, R. (1994a) Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment, Harvard University Press Brandom, R. (1994b) 'Perception and Rational Constraint,' in Enrique Villanueva (ed.), Perception, Ridgeview Publishing Company, pp. 241-59 Brandom. R. (2002) Tales of the Mighty Dead Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality, Harvard University Press Brentano, F. (1973) Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, Routledge and Kegan Bibliography 134 Paul Byrne, A. (2001) 'Intentionalism Defended,' The Philosophical Review 110, pp.199-240 Byrne, A. and Logue, H. (2008) 'Either / Or,' in Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge, pp.57-94 Chalmers, D. (2004) 'The Representational Character of Experience,' in Brian Leiter (ed.) The Future for Philosophy, Oxford University Press, pp. 153-81 Cheng, H-Y. (2006) 'An Initial Defense of Semantic Primitivism,' unpublished Cheng, H-Y. (2007) 'On Meaning Skeptics' Cartesian Model,' presented at Philosophy Graduate Conference of National Cheng-Chi University 10 Cheng, H-Y. (2008a) 'Evaluating Williamson's Anti-Skepticism,' Sorites 21 Cheng, H-Y. (2008b) 'Scheme-Content Dualism, Experience, and Self,' presented at Philosophy Graduate Student Forum Cheng, H-Y. (2008c) 'Self, Action, and Passivity,' unpublished Cheng, H-Y. (2008d) 'The Skeptical Paradox and the Nature of the Self,' Aurora 2 Cheng, H-Y. and Lin, C-I (2008) 'Openness and the Social Initiation into the Space of Reasons,' presented at Conference on Brandom's Philosophy,' March 2008 Chisholm, R. (1942) Perceiving: A Philosophical Study, Cornell University Press Collins, A. (1998) 'Beastly Experience,' Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58, pp. 375-80 Crane, T. (2005) 'The Problem of Perception,' Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-problem/ Crane, T. (2006) 'Is There a Perceptual Relation?' in Tamar Szabó Gendler and John Hawthorne (eds.) Perceptual Experience, Clarendon Press, Oxford, pp.126-46 Crane, T. (forthcoming) 'Intentionalism,' in Ansgar Beckermann and Brian McLaughlin (eds.) Oxford Handbook to the Philosophy of Mind (forthcoming), Oxford University Press de Gaynesford, M. (2003) 'Kant and Strawson on the Firs Person,' in Hans-Johann Glock (ed.) Strawson and Kant, Clarendon Press, Oxford, pp.155-67 de Gaynesford, M. (2004a) John McDowell, Polity Press de Gaynesford, M. (2004b) 'On Referring to Oneself,' Theoria 70, pp.121-61 deVries, W. and Triplett, T. (2000) Knowledge, Mind, and the Given: Reading Wilfrid Sellars's 'Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc Dancy, J. (2006) 'Acting in the Light of the Appearances,' in C. MacDonald and G. MacDonald (eds.), McDowell and His Critics, pp. 121-34 Davidson, D. (1974) 'On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,' in Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 47; reprinted in his Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (2001), Clarendon Press, Oxford, pp.183-198 Bibliography 135 Davidson, D. (1983) 'A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge,' in Kant oder Hegel? (1983); reprinted in his Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (2001), Clarendon Press, Oxford, pp.137-153 Davidson, D. (1984) 'Communication and Convention,' Synthesis 59, pp.3-17; reprinted in his Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, pp.265-80 Davidson, D. (1986) 'A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,' in Richard E. Grandy and Richard Warner (eds.) Philosophical Grounds of Rationality, Oxford University Press; reprinted in his Truth, Language, and History (2005), Clarendon Press, Oxford, pp.89-107 Davidson, D. (1988) 'The Myth of the Subjective,' in Michael Benedikt and Rudolf Berger (eds.) Bewusstein, Sprache und die Kunst, Edition S. Verlag der Österreichischen Staatsdruckerei; reprinted in his Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, pp.39-52 Davidson, D. (1991) 'Three Varieties of Knowledge,' in A. Phillips Griffiths (ed.) A. J. Ayer Memorial Essays: Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 30, Cambridge University Press; reprinted in his Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, pp.205-20 Davidson, D. (1992) 'The Second Person,' in Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, and Howard K. Wettstein (eds.) Midwest Studies in Philosophy 17: The Wittgenstein Legacy, Indianapolis: University of Notre Dame Press; reprinted in his Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, pp.107-21 Davidson, D. (1994) 'The Social Aspect of Language,' in B. F. McGuinness and Gianluigi Oliveri (eds.) The Philosophy of Michael Dummett, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp.1-16; reprinted in his Truth, Language, and History, pp.109-25 Davidson, D. (1999) 'Reply to John McDowell,' in Lewis Edwin Hahn (ed.) The Philosophy of Donald Davidson, Open Court, , pp.105-08 Dennett, D. (1987) The Intentional Stance, MIT Press Dennett, D. (1988) 'Quining Qualia,' in A. Marcel and E. Bisiach, (eds.), Consciousness in Modern Science, Oxford University Press; reprinted in David Chalmers (ed.) Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings, Oxford University Press, pp.226-46 Dingli, S. M. (2005) On Thinking and the World: John McDowell's Mind and World, Ashgate Publishing Dretske, F. (1995) Naturalizing the Mind, MIT Press Dreyfus, H. (2001) 'Todes's Account of Nonconceptual Perceptual Knowledge and Its Relation to Thought,' in Body and World, MIT Press, pp.xv-xxvii Dreyfus, H. (2006) 'Overcoming the Myth of the Mental: How Philosophers can Profit from the Phenomenology of Everyday Expertise,' in Topoi 25, pp.43-49; also Bibliography 136 http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/pdf/Dreyfus%20APA%20Address%20%2010. 22.05%20.pdf Dreyfus, H. (2007a) 'The Return of the Myth of the Mental," Inquiry 50, pp.352-65 Dreyfus, H. (2007b) 'Response to McDowell,' Inquiry 50, pp.371-77 Ducasse, C. J. (1942) Moore's Refutation of Idealism, ' in Arthur Schilpp (ed.) The Philosophy of G. E. Moore, Northwestern University Press, Chicago, pp.225-51 Dummett, M. (1981) 'Frege and Wittgenstein,' in Irving Block (ed.) Perspectives on the Philosophy of Wittgenstein, Blackwell, Oxford Dummett, M. (1989) 'Language and Communication,' in Alexander George (ed.) Reflections on Chomsky, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, pp.192-212 Fodor, J. (1989) Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind, MIT Press Gadamer, H-G. (2004) Truth and Method, Continuum Publishing Group, (rev. trans.) Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall Gaskin, R. (2006) Experience and the World's Own Language, Oxford University Press, USA Gendler, T. S. and Hawthorne, J. 'Introduction: Perceptual Experience,' in Perceptual Experience, pp.1-30. Gibson, J. J. (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Houghton Mifflin Ginsborg, H. (2006) 'Reasons for Belief,' Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 72, pp.286-318 Gupta, A. (2006) Empiricism and Experience, Oxford University Press, USA Haddock, A. and Macpherson, F. (2008) 'Introduction: Varieties of Disjunctivism,' their (eds.) Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, and Knowledge, Oxford University Press, pp. 1-24 Hornsby, J. (1980-1) 'Which Physical Events are Mental Events?' Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 81, pp.73-92; reprinted in her Simple Mindedness: in Defense of Naïve Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind (1997), Harvard University Press, pp.63-97 Husserl, E. (2001) Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic, Springer Jackson, F. (2004) 'Mind and Illusion,' in Peter Ludlow, Yujin Nagasawa, and Daniel Stoljar (eds.) There is Something about Mary: Essays on Phenomenal Consciousness and Frank Jackson's Knowledge Argument, MIT Press, pp.421-42 Johansson, J. (2007) 'What is Animalism?' Ratio 20, pp.194-205 Kant, I. Critique of Pure Reason, Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (trans.), Cambridge University Press Kripke, S. (1982) Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Harvard University Bibliography 137 Press Kusch, M. (2006) A Sceptical Guide to Meaning and Rules: Defending Kripke's Wittgenstein, McGill-Queen's University Press Leibniz, G. W. (1991) Monadology, Nicholas Rescher (trans.), London, Routledge Leibniz, G. W. (1999) New Essays on Human Understanding, Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett (trans.), Cambridge University Press Locke, J. (1999) An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Tom L. Beauchamp (ed.), Oxford University Press, USA McCulloch, G. (2002) 'Phenomenological Externalism,' in Nicholas H. Smith (ed.) Reading McDowell: on Mind and World, Routledge, pp.123-39 McDowell, J. (1978) 'On "The Reality of the Past",' in Christopher Hookway and Philip Pettit (eds.), Action and Interpretation: Studies in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp.127-44; reprinted in his Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality (1998), Harvard University Press, pp.295-313 McDowell, J. (1981) 'Anti-Realism and the Epistemology of Understanding,' in Herman Parret and Jacques Bouveresse (eds.) Meaning and Understanding, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, pp.225-48; reprinted in his Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality, pp.314-43 McDowell, J. (1982) 'Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge,' Proceedings of British Academy 68, pp.455-79; reprinted in his Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality, pp.369-94 McDowell, J. (1984) 'Wittgenstein on Following a Rule,' Synthesis 58; reprinted in his Mind, Value, and Reality (1998), Harvard University Press, pp.221-62 McDowell, J. (1985) 'Functionalism and Anomalous Monism,' in Ernest LePore and Brian McLaughlin (eds.) Actions and Events: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, Blackwell, Oxford, pp.387-98; reprinted in his Mind, Value, and Reality, pp.325-40 McDowell, J. (1986) 'Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space,' in Philip Pettit and John McDowell (eds.), Subject, Thought, and Context, Clarendon Press, Oxford, pp. 137-68; reprinted in his Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality, pp.228-59 McDowell, J. (1987) 'In Defense of Modesty,' in Barry Taylor (ed.) Michael Dummett: Contributions to Philosophy, Martinus Nijhoff, Dordrecht, pp.59-80; reprinted in his Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality, pp.87-107 McDowell, J. (1989) 'One Strand in the Private Language Argument,' Grazer Philosophische Studien 33/34, pp.285-303; reprinted in his Mind, Value, and Reality, pp.279-96 McDowell, J. (1991) 'Intentionality and Interiority in Wittgenstein,' Klaus Puhl (ed.) Meaning Scepticism, De Gruyter, Berlin and New York, pp.148-69; reprinted in his Bibliography 138 Mind, Value, and Reality, pp.297-321 McDowell, J. (1993) 'Meaning and Intentionality in Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy,' Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., and Howard K. Wettstein (eds.) Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 17: The Wittgenstein Legacy, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, pp.40-52; reprinted in his Mind, Value, and Reality, pp.263-78 McDowell, J. (1994) 'The Content of Perceptual Experience,' The Philosophical Quarterly 44, pp.190-205; reprinted in his Mind, Value, and Reality, pp.341-58 McDowell, J. (1995) 'Knowledge and the Internal,' in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 55, pp.877-93; reprinted in his Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality, pp.395-413 McDowell, J. (1996a) Mind and World, Harvard University Press McDowell, J. (1996b) 'Two Sorts of Naturalism,' in Rosalind Hursthouse, Gavin Lawrence, and Warren Quinn (eds.) Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory, Clarendon Press, Oxford, pp.149-79; reprinted in his Mind, Value, and Reality, pp.167-97 McDowell, J. (1997) 'Reductionism and the First Person,' in Jonathan Dancy (ed.) Reading Parfit, Blackwell, Oxford, pp.230-50; reprinted in his Mind, Value, and Reality, pp.359-82 McDowell, J. (1998a) 'Response to Crispin Wright,' in Crispin Wright, Barry C. Smith, and Cynthia Macdonald (eds.) Knowing Our Own Minds, Clarendon Press, Oxford, pp. 47-62 McDowell, J. (1998b) 'Reply to Commentators,' Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58, pp.403-31 McDowell, J. (1998c) 'The Woodbridge Lecture 1997: Having the World in View: Sellars, Kant, and Intentionality,' Journal of Philosophy 95, pp.431-91 McDowell, J. (1999) 'Scheme-Content Dualism and Empiricism,' in Philosophy of Donald Davidson, pp.87-104 McDowell, J. (2002a) 'Gadamer and Davidson on Understanding and Relativism,' in Jeff Malpas, Ulrich Arnswald, and Jens Kertscher (eds.) Gadamer's Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer, MIT Press, pp.173-93 McDowell, J. (2002b) 'Responses,' in Reading McDowell: on Mind and World, pp.269-305 McDowell, J. (2002c) 'Knowledge and the Internal Revisited,' Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64, pp.97-105 McDowell, J. (2003a) The Apperceptive I and the Empirical Self: Towards a Heterodox Reading of "Lordship and Bondage" in Hegel's Phenomenology,' Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 47/48, pp. 1-16 McDowell, J. (2003b) 'Hegel and the Myth of the Given,' in Wolfgang Welsch and Bibliography 139 Klaus Vieweg (eds.), Das Interesse des Denkens: Hegel aus heutiger Sicht, München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, pp. 75-88 McDowell, J. (2004) Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind,' in Mario de Caro and David Macarthur, (eds.) Naturalism in Question, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, pp.91-105 McDowell, J. (2005a) Self-Determining Subjectivity and External Constraint,' in Karl Ameriks and Jürgen Stolzenberg (eds.) International Yearbook of German Idealism 2005: German Idealism and Contemporary Analytic Philosophy, Walter De Gruyter Inc, pp.21-37 McDowell, J. (2005b) 'Conceptual Capacities in Perception,' in Günter Abel (ed.), Kreativität: 2005 Congress of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Philosophie, pp. 1065-79 McDowell, J. (2006a) 'Response to Rovane,' in McDowell and His Critics, pp.114-20 McDowell, J. (2006b) 'Response to Dancy,' in McDowell and His Critics, pp.134-41 McDowell, J. (2007a) 'What Myth?' Inquiry 50, pp.338-51 McDowell, J. (2007b) 'Response to Dreyfus,' Inquiry 50, pp.366-70 McDowell, J. (2008) 'The Disjunctive Conception of Experience as Material for a Transcendental Argument,' in Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, and Knowledge, pp.376-89 Martin, M. G. F. (2002) 'The Transparency of Experience,' Mind and Language 17, pp.376-425 Martin, M. G. F. (2004) 'The Limits of Self-Awareness,' Philosophical Studies 120, pp.37-89 Martin. M. G. F. (2006) 'On Being Alienated,' in Perceptual Experience, pp.354-410 Miller, A. (2002) 'Introduction,' in Alexander Miller and Crispin Wright (eds.) Rule-Following and Meaning, McGill-Queen's University Press, pp.1-15 Nagel, T. (2007) 'The Incompleteness of Objective Reality,' in Brie Gertler and Lawrence Shapiro (eds.), Arguing about the Mind, Routledge, pp.36-49 Noonan, H. (2003) Personal Identity, Routledge, second edition Olson, E. (1999) The Human Animal: Personal Identity without Psychology, Oxford University Press, USA Olson, E. (2007) 'There is No Problem of the Self,' in Brie Gertler and Lawrence Shapiro (eds.), Arguing about the Mind, Routledge, pp.262-77 O'Shea, J. (2007) Wilfrid Sellars: Naturalism with a Normative Turn, Polity Press Parfit, D. (1984) Reasons and Persons, Clarendon Press, Oxford Parsons, C. (1980) Non-Existent Objects, Yale University Press Passmore, J. (1961) Philosophical Reasoning, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons Pietroski, P. (2000) Causing Actions, Oxford University Press Bibliography 140 Quine, W. V. O. (1960) Word and Object, MIT Press Rorty, R. (1979) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton University Press, Princeton Rosenberg, J. (2007) Wilfrid Sellars: Fusing the Images, Oxford University Press, USA Rouse, J. (2005) 'Mind, Body, and World: Todes and McDowell on Bodies and Language,' Inquiry 48, pp.36-61 Russell, B. (1917) 'On the Notion of Cause,' in his Mysticism and Logic, George Allen and Unwin, London, pp.132-51 Searle, J. (1983) Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind, Cambridge University Press Searle, J. (1987) 'Indeterminacy, Empiricism, and the First Person,' Journal of Philosophy 84, pp.123-46; reprinted in his Consciousness and Language (2002), Cambridge University Press, pp.226-50 Sellars, W. (1956) 'Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,' in Herbert Feigl and Michael Scriven (eds.), Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 1, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp.253-329 Sellars, W. (1962) 'Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,' in Robert Colodny (ed.), Frontiers of Science and Philosophy, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, pp.35-78 Shoemaker, S. (1970) 'Persons and Their Past,' American Philosophical Quarterly 7, pp. 269-85 Smith, A. D. (2002) The Problem of Perception, Harvard University Press Snowdon, P. (1980-1) 'Perception, Vision, and Causation,' Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 81, pp.175-92 Strawson, P. F. (1959) Individuals: an Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics, Methuen, London Strawson, P. F. (1966) The Bounds of Sense, Methuen, London Stroud, B. (1984) The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism, Clarendon Press, Oxford Thornton, T. (2004) John McDowell, McGill-Queen's University Press Todes, S. (2001) Body and World, MIT Press Travis, C. (2004) 'The Silence of Senses,' Mind 113, pp.57-94 Tye, M. (2007) 'Intentionalism and the Argument from No Common Content,' in John Hawthorne (ed.) Philosophical Perspectives 21, Northridge: Ridgeview Publishing, pp.589-613 Williamson, T. (2000) Knowledge and Its Limits, Oxford University Press Wilson, G. (1994) 'Kripke on Wittgenstein on Normativity,' in Peter A. French and Bibliography 141 Howard Wettstein (eds.) Midwest Studies in Philosophy 19, pp.366-90; reprinted in Rule-Following and Meaning, pp.234-59 Wittgenstein, L. (1958) The Blue and Brown Books, Basil Blackwell, Oxford Wittgenstein, L. (1969) On Certainty, Basil Blackwell, Oxford Wittgenstein, L. (1978) Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Basil Blackwell, Oxford Wittgenstein, L. (2001) Philosophical Investigations, G. E. M. Anscombe (trans.), Blackwell Publishing Wright. C. (1989) 'Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy of Mind: Sensation, Privacy, and Intention', presented at an American Philosophical Association symposium on Wittgenstein on December 30, 1989 Wright, C. (2002) 'Human Nature?' in Reading McDowell: on Mind and World, pp.140-59 Wyller, T. (2000) 'Kant on I, Apperception, and Imagination,' in Audun Fsti, Peter Ulrich, and Truls Wyller (eds.) Indexicality and Idealism, Mentis Publishing, pp.89-99 Many philosophers find it difficult to have a comprehensive and thoroughgoing understanding of John McDowell's philosophy. McDowell's thinking ranges from ancient philosophy, ethics, philosophy of language and mind, epistemology, metaphysics, and German Idealism. Besides, his way of putting things is often not very straightforward. Pitfalls and difficulties await anyone who tries to articulate McDowell's overall position. In his Master Thesis, Huei-Ying Cheng embarks on this daunting task by concentrating on aspects of subjectivity as McDowell conceives them. The working hypothesis of this exposition is that different portions of McDowell's thinking form a systematic whole, which requires us to understand it in a systematic manner. Huei-Ying Cheng is a master student of philosophy at National Cheng-Chi University, Taiwan. N A T I O N A L C H E N G – C H I U N I V E R S I T Y Department of Philosophy Taipei, Taiwan Design by Huei-Ying Cheng Cover Image: Photo of John McDowell, Howison Lectures in Philosophy at U. C. Berkeley, April 25, 2006 Back Image: Photo of the Author, at Soochow University, June 23,