Abstract
The aim of this paper is to properly situate and contrast McDowell’s and Sellars’ views on intuitional content and relate them to their corresponding views on the myth of the Given. Although McDowell’s and Sellars’ views on what McDowell calls ‘intuitional’ content seem at first strikingly similar, at a deeper level they are radically different. It will be suggested that this divergence is intimately related to their different understanding of what the myth of the Given consists in and how it should be best avoided. It will also be argued that certain McDowell-inspired objections against the viability of the Sellarsian concept of the Categorial Given actually misconstrue the place of this notion in Sellars’ system. If the myth of the Categorial Given can be considered as a genuine version of the Myth (and McDowell has offered no compelling reasons for thinking otherwise) then McDowell’s account of intuitional content does indeed fall prey to it. I shall further argue that a McDowell-inspired objection against Sellars to the effect that his account of proper sensibles compromises the openness of intuitional content to the world ultimately fails, and, finally, I shall suggest that Sellars’ views on proper sensibles and intuitional content provide a more promising account of the way our thought and experience can be rationally open to the world itself than McDowell’s position.
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Notes
Notice that although the above concepts can be actualized in the intuitional content of the experience they cannot be reduced to concepts of proper and common sensible themselves precisely because they are the result of a categorical synthesis of the proper and common sensibles accessible to sight (shape, size, position, movement and its absence).
As deVries observes, this whole analysis of the content of an intuitional ‘this’ in terms of ‘this-such’ is reminiscent of the holistic, ultimately Hegelian in spirit, view to the effect that “pointing-out is a pointing-out, and especially the particular pointing-out that it is only because it occurs within and against a background of demonstrative practices that determine a complex space of possible demonstrations [both similar and contrasting]. This background of demonstrative practices is normatively constituted and accounts for the normative (i.e., conceptual) force of any particular act of demonstration [i.e., it provides a normative standard by which demonstrations can be assessed as correct or incorrect, as justifying some further representations but not others] … Every demonstration possesses its determinacy in virtue of its place in a complex system of possibilities, a complex classificatory system. The implicit but complex classificatory system against the background of which any act of demonstration must emerge has some categorial structure, whether it is the relatively abstract/formal categorial structure of space (this place), or time (this moment), the categorial structure of the sensory (this colour or this smell) or the physical (this physical object)” (deVries 2008, p. 73).
The importance of this distinction becomes clear if one realizes that the image-models do not present the causal properties of objects in perception, nor do they present the object as a substance having attributes. As Sellars himself observes “we do not perceive of the object … its character as belonging with other substances in a system of interacting substances, its character as conforming to laws of nature. In short, we do not perceive of the object what might be called ‘categorial’ features. For the image construct does not have categorial features. It has an empirical structure which we can specify by using words which stand for perceptible qualities and relations” (Sellars 1978, §39). By way of contrast, ‘this-such’ intuitive representations of external objects can function as such only if a background classificatory scheme with a definite categorial structure is already in place (see note 2). As Sellars notes: “[‘this-such’] intuitions are complex demonstrative thoughts which have grammatical (and hence, categorial) form” and they “contain in embryo the concept of a physical object now, over there, interacting with other objects in a system which includes me” (Sellars 1978, §49–50).
Notice that the predicative component of this proposition is a perceptually grounded judgement with propositional content, where what one judges includes, over and above content contained in the ‘this-such’ intuition itself, concepts whose figuring in the judgment reflects recognitional capacities brought to bear on something the intuition makes present to one.
In a recent conference presentation (2014), McDowell objected to the view that intuitional content has a ‘this-such’ form (irrespectively of whether the latter is construed as fragmentarily discursive or not) on the grounds that “demonstrative reference is a feature of the content of discursive acts made possible by the perceptual presence of things to the subject”. And he further claimed that “an object of intuition is present to the subject as a this -that is, as something she could refer to demonstratively if she had occasion to refer to it- not because a demonstrative mode of presentation of it is already an element in the content of the intuition, but because one of the ways it is presented in the intuition is as occupying a determinate spatial position relative to the subject. The intuition locates its object in the subject’s egocentric space, and so puts her in the kind of relation to the object that makes it possible for her to refer to it with a perceptually grounded demonstrative mode of presentation” (McDowell 2014, p. 3). I think that this kind of critique, to the effect that demonstrative reference is a feature of discursive, not of intuitional, acts, overlooks the fact that Sellars uses the notion of demonstrative reference of a ‘this-such’ form as an analogical model for understanding intuitional content. And, as Sellars makes clear, an analogical model is always accompanied with a ‘commentary’ which specifies the disanalogies of the model in relation to the phenomenon it is used to throw light upon. One of those disanalogies is precisely that demonstrative reference at the level of intuitional content should not be understood as being discursive or propositional in character. In this way, I take it that Sellars would embrace McDowell’s above suggestion up to a point, albeit without relinquishing the possibility of a non-propositional use of demonstratives at the intuitional level.
It might seem that ‘thinking in colour’ or ‘thinking in sound’ expresses a sense of non-discursive intentionality at work in experience which is different from the mere non-propositional character of ‘this-such’ contents. In a sense this is indeed the case. However, I take it that these senses are complementary in that the phenomenological construal of visual or auditory perception as ‘thinkings in colour’ or ‘thinkings in sound’ is a suggestive way of explicating our claim that Sellarsian ‘this-such’ contents are non-propositional not only in a general sense but in the specific sense of being non-decomposable (i.e., incapable of being broken down to further, isolable, ‘semantically significant’ parts). In cases of ‘thinkings in colour’ or ‘thinkings in sound’ the content of thought is itself ‘infused’ with colour or sound-patterns (qualities and relations), as it were. That is, those proper sensible qualities and relations are not conceptualized as distinct intentional objects (i.e., as objects that intentional thought-acts are about) and this is precisely why at this level of perceptual experience conceptual content is non-decomposable.
Sellars puts this point as follows: “sense impressions or raw feels are common sense theoretical constructs introduced to explain the occurrence, not of white rat type discriminative behaviour, but rather of perceptual propositional attitudes, and are therefore bound up with the explanation of why human language contains families of predicates having the logical properties of words for perceptible qualities and relations” (Sellars 1965, VI).
This is connected to the fact that, according to Sellars, cases of seeing and cases of seeming to see e.g., a pink ice cube differ only in the endorsement of the intentional content involved (e.g., ‘there is a pink ice cube there’), not with respect to the very content itself. Both seeings and appearings are about the pinkness as a sensible quality exemplified (in the veridical case) by a physical object. Appearings do not refer to special ‘inner’ objects, of a different categorial nature than ordinary manifest-image objects (Sellars 1956, §16–18). It is exactly for this reason that, e.g., I am unable to provide any illuminating explanation about what is happening if it is pointed out to me that although it appears to me that ‘there is a pink ice cube in the glass’ there is in fact no ice cube, pink or otherwise, in the glass (and, maybe, no glass either). I can only talk about abnormal conditions of observation (and what they do to the perceiver) or I can swear that ‘it was just as if I were seeing a pink ice cube in the glass’ but I cannot further determine, solely on the basis of manifest-image concepts, what is the common experiential element which is phenomenologically indistinguishable in cases of veridical and non-veridical perception alike beyond conceding that “somehow’ there is actually ‘something’ which is a cube of pink’ (notice that this ‘common experiential element’ has actual existence -though in an unspecified way and non-apperceived as such- because, even in non-veridical cases, the experience itself actually exists; it is not merely imagined to be an actually existing experience). That is the end of what phenomenological reflection can do for us.
As Sellars himself observes: “The pinkness of the pink sensation is ‘analogous’ to the pinkness of a manifest pink ice cube, not by being a different quality which is in some respects analogous to pinkness (as the quality a Martian experiences in certain magnetic fields might be analogous to pink with respect to its place in a quality space), but by being the same ‘content’ in a different categorial ‘form’” (Sellars 1981, p. 73).
Of course, the fact that the intentional directedness of perceptual experience is contrasted with the non-intentional presence of its non-conceptual, sensory component in consciousness does not mean that those aspects of experience are not intimately related. But how can non-conceptual sensory experiences be representationally connected with external objects and their properties without being, as such, intentionally directed to them? The key to answering this question lies in drawing a distinction between non-conceptual sensory experiences as intrinsic states of the human organism and as functionally individuated theoretical-explanatory posits necessary for understanding how human organisms can successfully orient themselves within a complex, changing and unpredictable environment. Non-conceptual sensory experiences, considered as states or episodes, only have intrinsic (‘auto-presentational’) properties (not apperceived as such by the ‘self’ of course); yet, as explanatory posits, they also play -precisely in virtue of having their distinctive intrinsic, qualitative character- a certain functional role to a wider system of patterns of behaviour (dispositions for action) whose raison d’être is to optimize the ‘navigation’ of human organisms in a dynamic and constantly changing external and ‘internal’ environment -where the notion of an ‘optimal navigation’ or ‘orientation’ is, of course, intimately related to the satisfaction of basic human needs and interests (e.g., of survival) (Coates 2007, pp. 125–47; deVries 2011, pp. 59–60). Moreover, in the case of human beings, the above biologically determined functional role is ‘always already’ integrated into a further network of behavioural patterns and uniformities, namely that of implicit social-linguistic rules of correct use which Sellars calls ‘ought-to-be’ rules (O’Shea 2010, pp. 72). This latter pattern does involve intentionality in the strict ‘space of reasons’ sense of the term, but this is not to say that sensory representation is itself intentional: the ‘of-ness’ of sensations is that of intensionality, not that of intentionality.
Here it could be argued that Wittgensteinian ‘hinge propositions’, being as they are amenable to historical change (gradually shifting thereby what might be called the ‘historical a priori’ structure of our most basic conceptual categories) enable McDowell to formulate a distinctive conception of ‘categorial revision’, equally distinct both from mere gradual change of the ‘historical a priori’ and from Sellars’ own view of categorial revision (which could then be criticized, from this point of view, as merely borrowed from the progress of the exact sciences and thereby having no relevance to transcendental philosophy). In response to this three points can be made right away: First, Sellars’ notion of categorial revision is justified for transcendental, not merely empirical reasons (see pp. 19–20 and n. 8, 14). Second, it must be noted that McDowell finds Wittgensteinian hinge propositions interesting only to the extent to which they provide an example of propositions which delineate the necessary categorial structure of our mindedness (this is why he explicitly says that he is interested only in a proper subset of Wittgenstein’s hinge propositions, namely those that they can be considered as delineating the necessary structure of our mindedness (McDowell 1994, p. 158)). McDowell’s project in this case is that of delineating the ahistorical core of our conceptual system for transcendental purposes (namely, the system of categorial concepts without which we would lose our grip on what makes us persons responsive to an objective world and responsible for their beliefs about it). Notice also that McDowell explicitly holds that the concept of unrevisability come what may is not as such a case of Givenness, unless it reflects absence of mediation by our world-picture (which in turn presupposes our shared language and thereby a tradition) (McDowell 1994, pp. 185–86). This brings me to my third point: Even if McDowell actually purported to make room for a new conception of categorial revision (different both from the mere gradual change of Wittgensteinian hinge proposition and from Sellars’ notion of categorial revision), would not the latter fit uneasy with McDowell’s combination of a basically Gadamerian view of language and conceptual revision (which only allows for piecemeal changes of the underlying ‘historical a priori’ descriptive and explanatory ‘horizons’ of our epistemic practices) with a supposedly ‘benign’ sense of categorial unrevisability come what may? For example, does this latter account not exclude the possibility of radical conceptual (or, more interestingly, categorial) innovation and revision of our conception of intuitional content, i.e., our most basic level of perceptual contact with the world (allowing only for ‘local’ conceptual revision at the level of discursively articulated content)? (See also Does McDowell’s Notion of ‘Intuitional Content’ Fall Prey to a Version of the Categorial Given? section for further elaboration of this point.)
See also “Does McDowell’s Notion of ‘Intuitional Content’ Fall Prey to a Version of the Categorial Given?” section, where it is suggested that this problematic conception of the transcendental is related to an elevation to the level of transcendental necessity of the categorial structure of what Sellars calls the ‘manifest image’ of man-in-the-world.
Notice that although Sellars makes frequent use of the term ‘conceptual framework’ (e.g., to characterize the manifest and the scientific image), he is no less hostile to the scheme-content dualism than McDowell (notice, for example, that Sellars (1967b, p. 639) rejects the view that categorial forms are empty containers or molds waiting to by ‘filled’ by unformed non-conceptual sense-impression contents). Hence, Sellars can well hold that the concept of ‘category’ or ‘categorial structure’ is intimately bound up with that of a ‘conceptual framework’ without thereby being committed to an untenable scheme-content dualism.
Recall that it is precisely because of the lack of categorial specificity in the determination of the distinctively sensory character of perceptual experience (we can only say in this case that “something, somehow a cube of pink in physical space is present in the perception other than merely believed in”) that Sellars takes it that the only ‘positive’ characterization of sensory experience that we can come up with in this case is in terms of a structural isomorphism (ultimately to be cashed out in scientific-image terms) between the proper and common sensible properties of external physical objects and those of sense-impressions themselves.
The manifest image expresses man’s understanding of reality and its place in it before the advent of scientific postulational methods of explanation. It is “the framework in terms of which man came to be aware of himself as man-in-the-world” (Sellars 1963, p. 6). The basic conceptual category of the manifest image framework -which cannot be further explanatorily reduced within this image- is that of a person. Persons are human beings conceived as single logical and metaphysical subjects that have the capacity to act at will within a world populated by macroscopic inanimate (and other, non-human, animate) objects. Another crucial categorial distinction of the manifest image is that between ‘animate’ and ‘inanimate’ objects. The most important characteristic of the manifest image is the radical, unbridgeable (logical and explanatory) gap within it between the way it construes human behaviour and action and its conception of the non-human behaviour of ‘sub-personal’ human parts (e.g., the brain), of animal organisms and inanimate, ‘merely material’ objects. On the other hand, according to the scientific image the best way to understand (explain) the behaviour of perceptible objects and properties, including the observable behaviour of humans, is to postulate the existence of certain unobservable entities, which are essentially understood as being non-normative and non-conceptual in nature (Sellars 1963, pp. 9, 21). In the scientific image, the distinctions between persons and non-persons or between ‘animate’ and ‘inanimate’ objects are considered as derivative, not basic.
And this means that, in this case, McDowell would happily embrace the categorial given while insisting that it is not a case of the pernicious Given.
Notice that, according to Sellars, the manifest image is clearly distinct from (and in conflict with) the scientific image if these terms are used to denote a conceptual system with a certain determinate categorial structure (i.e., with specific (basic and derivative) descriptive and explanatory concepts, such as that of a ‘person’). In this sense, the scientific image supersedes the manifest image and eventually replaces it in the domain of describing and explaining the world. Yet, notice that the above distinction is drawn in terms of the image’s categorial structure, not in terms of their capacity to be manifestly open to external reality (recall that, for Sellars, scientific-image theoretical-postulational terms may well obtain a reporting-observational role). In this latter sense, the categorial structure of the scientific image can in principle be manifestly open to reality, provided it obtains a reporting-observational role in our everyday epistemic practices.
According to the Sellarsian myth of Jones, colour is categorially reconceived within the manifest image -in order to account for the fact that in the cases of perceptual illusions or hallucinations we have the same conceptual response as those in veridical cases- and is thought to be a state of the perceiver (i.e., of a person). (In the scientific image colour is transposed to yet another categorial key: it is understood as a subjectless and objectless ‘sensum’, belonging to the category of ‘pure processes’.) This account of the place of proper sensibles within the manifest image diverges from McDowell’s view. McDowell’s disjunctivism about perception allows him to evade this Sellarsian recategorization of proper sensibles within the manifest image, albeit only at the cost of leaving as an unexplained brute fact 1) the sameness of our conceptual response in veridical and nonveridical cases alike, and, more importantly, 2) the phenomenological indistinguishability of the perceptual experience itself as well as the fact that the latter has some kind of actuality (since it is certainly not merely imagined to be an experience) both in the veridical and the unveridical case.
Notice that this radically non-apperceptive character of the ‘qualitative sensory space’ enables Sellars, among other things, to reject what McDowell terms ‘the highest common factor’ conception of experience (a presupposition of which is that what is experientially common in cases of veridical and non-veridical -albeit, phenomenologically indistinguishable- perception is itself an object of perception) without at the same time embracing disjunctivism, i.e., without rejecting the view that there is something in common in cases of veridical perception and hallucination which is in some way in consciousness (albeit, non-apperceived as such). According to this conception, what goes wrong with the traditional argument from illusion is not that it postulates the existence of a common experiential element in veridical and non-veridical cases alike, as McDowell and disjunctivists urge, but rather that this common experiential element is itself the object of perception (i.e., it is what is perceived). It is precisely this latter view that we need to reject in order not to fall prey to the scepticism about the external world which is the real outcome of the argument from illusion. Those sceptical consequences do not necessarily follow from the mere postulation of a common experiential element in cases of veridical perception and corresponding hallucination.
As Houlgate succinctly puts this point (on Hegel’s behalf): “Sensation is a form of awareness; yet, no sensation brings with it a clear awareness that we stand in relation to something separate from ourselves. Consciousness (i.e., the activity of understanding), by contrast, understands what is sensed in precisely this way: as something that stands over against the self, as a Gegenstand. Consciousness, therefore, differs from mere sensory awareness in being the activity of understanding what is sensed to form a realm of independent objects which stand over against the self or the ‘I’. … The self actively differentiates the sensed content from itself and places or posits that content over against itself. The self thus understands the sensed content to be an object distinct from itself” (Houlgate 2008, pp. 93–94). Moreover, Houlgate cites certain passages from Hegel whose similarity with Sellars’ view of the relation between sensation and intuition is at least remarkable: “[Intuition itself] casts the content of sensation out into space and time.” (Hegel 1971, p. 195). Intuition does not thereby alter the given content of sensation; rather, “the activity of intuition produces a shifting of sensation away from us, a transformation of what is sensed into an object existing outside of us” (Hegel 1971, p. 197). Intuition finds itself confronted by things, therefore, only by virtue of the fact that it actively opens the space in which they are found (Houlgate 2008, p. 96).
This is where McDowell makes his famous ‘disjunctivist’ move: From the fact that cases of veridical perception may well be subjectively indistinguishable from cases of unveridical perception, it does not follow the epistemic grounds of the former can be no better than (i.e., are common with) those available in cases of unveridical perception. An appearance that such-and-such is the case can be either a mere appearance or the fact that such-and-such is the case making itself perceptually manifest to someone. Hence, in cases of veridical perception the categorial features of the world itself (e.g., the colour of external objects) are themselves perceptually manifest to us. Sellars, on his part, would reject McDowell’s disjunctivism (for the reasons mentioned in n. 18) and I take it that he would ultimately accuse disjunctivists of conflating transcendental necessity with categorial necessity. More importantly, I think that Sellars could also argue that one can reject (as one must, if one does not want to end up to scepticism about the external world) the ‘highest common factor’ conception of experience (i.e., the view according to which genuine perceptions and subjectively indistinguishable hallucinations do not differ in their epistemological significance), without at the same time embracing disjunctivism (see n. 19). Sellars’ own conception of sensory experience is not a ‘highest common factor’ conception, and this by itself shows that disjunctivism is not necessary for providing a response to the sceptic.
As McDowell puts this point elsewhere: “if it is correct to think in terms of another horizon at all, it must be possible for it to be fused with ours” (McDowell 1999, p. 107).
This would be my response to McDowell’s following line of thought regarding the problem of the fusion of horizons between us and the Martians: “What we are envisaging, when we envisage [the possibility that there may be secondary qualities undetectable by us], is subjects with some cognitive powers unlike ours, who are nevertheless recognizable as subjects at all only by virtue of being recognizable as more of us, as belonging in the circle of those whom we can speak of, and for, in the first person plural” (McDowell 1999, p. 97).
For example, in the case of echo-locating Martians Sellars would say that the quality of their experience in certain magnetic fields could be analogous to e.g., the redness of a red sensation by being a different quality which is in some respects analogous to redness with respect to its place in a quality space (Sellars 1981, p. 73).
In this way, those (novel) categorial concepts could provide a common conceptual ground in relation to which we could meaningfully view both our human form of life and the ‘radically alien’ Martian form of life as alternative possible world-views of the same reality. Thus, it seems that we cannot make sense of a fusion of horizons between us and the Martians unless perceptual experience (and intuitional content in particular) is understood in this non-McDowellian fashion.
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Christias, D. Sellars Contra McDowell on Intuitional Content and the Myth of the Given. Philosophia 43, 975–998 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-015-9632-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-015-9632-4