Abstract
Crispin Wright argues that John McDowell’s use of disjunctivism to respond to the sceptic misses the point of the sceptic’s argument, for disjunctivism is a thesis about the differing metaphysical natures of veridical and nonveridical experiences, whereas the sceptic’s point is that our beliefs are unjustified because veridical and nonveridical experiences can be phenomenally indistinguishable. In this paper, I argue that McDowell is responsive to the sceptic’s focus on phenomenology, for the point of McDowell’s response is that it is the phenomenal character of experience that makes the belief in disjunctivism rational, and thereby also makes rational the anti-sceptical belief that, other things being equal, the world is the way it appears.
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Notes
I use the term “metaphysical” here and elsewhere in the paper to echo the distinction to be found in the literature between “metaphysical” and “epistemological” disjunctivism (Byrne and Logue 2008; Haddock and Macpherson 2008, p. 21). Although some hold that McDowell is merely an epistemological disjunctivist (see, e.g., Snowdon 2005), Wright in effect characterizes McDowell as a metaphysical disjunctivist (as that term is understood by Haddock and Macpherson 2008), and I believe that Wright’s characterization is correct. In section 3, I argue that McDowell’s argument in section 3 of his 2008 can only be understood by attributing to him metaphysical disjunctivism. I also agree with Haddock and Macpherson (2008, pp. 11–12) that McDowell adopts metaphysical disjunctivism in his 1986.
Cohen distinguishes between the “underdetermination argument” and the “deductive closure argument” for scepticism (1998, p. 152). Although the deductive closure argument is more widely discussed in the contemporary literature, I am interpreting McDowell as responding to the underdetermination argument, for the underdetermination argument focuses more directly on the question of whether our perceptual experiences provide us with sufficient evidence for knowledge, and this is the question with which McDowell is concerned.
McDowell first introduced this terminology in his 1982.
Although McDowell notes that the claim that subjective indistinguishability is to be explained by phenomenal sameness “is open to dispute” (2008, p. 381), Wright responds, correctly in my view, that the claim is “nowhere seriously challenged in McDowell’s writings” (2008, p. 391). Given that the claim that veridical and nonveridical experiences can have the same phenomenal character is essential to Wright’s argument on behalf of the sceptic, and given that McDowell’s response to the sceptic does not involve the denial of this claim, for ease of exposition I shall write as if McDowell is willing to affirm this claim.
See McDowell (2008, p. 378): “This [i.e., the highest common factor conception] seems to reveal that perceptual experience provides at best inconclusive warrants for claims about the environment. And that seems incompatible with supposing we ever, strictly speaking, know anything about our objective surroundings.” McDowell argues in favor of this conclusion that knowledge requires conclusive evidence (warrants, reasons) in his 1995. See also his 1993 (pp. 421–422).
Nonveridical experiences include both illusions and hallucinations. Other disjunctivists hold that the relevant distinction is not between veridical and nonveridical experiences, but between nonhallucinatory and hallucinatory experiences, where nonhallucinatory experiences include both veridical experiences and illusions. See Byrne and Logue (2009, sec. 2) for a discussion of these two different kinds of disjunctivism.
My characterization of disjunctivism follows Snowdon’s (2005, pp. 135–137), except that Snowdon talks of external objects being the constituents of perceptual (i.e., nonhallucinatory) experiences, whereas I talk of external facts being the constituents of veridical experiences. I noted earlier (footnote 1) that Snowdon does not think that McDowell is a disjunctivist in this sense (2005, pp. 139–141).
McDowell’s most detailed exposition of his version of the disjunctive conception is in his 1986 (sections 5 and 6).
See Haddock and Macpherson (2008, p. 5), who claim that according to McDowell, a state of S seeing that p “is experiential in that if S sees that p then it looks to S as if p—where the consequent is interpreted phenomenologically, rather than ascribing a tentative judgment by S.”
See also McDowell (1982, p. 386): “Any capacity to tell by looking how things are in the world independent of oneself can at best be fallible.”
Here I have in mind McDowell’s understanding of the connection between reason and freedom: “When Kant describes the understanding as a faculty of spontaneity, that reflects his view of the relation between reason and freedom: rational necessitation is not just compatible with freedom but constitutive of it. In a slogan, the space of reasons is the space of freedom” (1994, p. 5).
That McDowell regards these two words as interchangeable is strongly suggested by a passage in McDowell 2009 (p. 257). Here, within the space of a paragraph, McDowell alternatively describes a perceptual judgment formed in response to a corresponding experience as having “rational intelligibility,” “intelligibility,” and “rationality.” He clearly intends these three terms to be synonymous.
See also Martin’s discussion of the “non-neutrality of experience” (2002, p. 391).
A sense-data theorist would presumably deny that perceptual experiences suggest the obtaining of external facts. But the sense-data theorist is mistaken. Perceptual experiences differ from mere sensations such as afterimages and phosphenes precisely in that sensations do not suggest the obtaining of external facts and perceptual experiences do (Langsam 2006, pp. 666–667; Millar 2012, pp. 7–8).
In other words, non-disjunctivist views such as intentionalism cannot explain how there can be something about the phenomenal character of an experience that suggests that the experience is veridical. Intentionalists such as Harman (1990) and Tye (2000, ch. 3) appeal to phenomenological considerations in support of their view; specifically, they appeal to the so-called transparency of experience. But the transparency of experience at best shows the falsity of sense-data theory and certain kinds of qualia views; it does not establish the truth of intentionalism or the falsity of disjunctivism (Martin 2000). I know of no successful intentionalist explanation of how the phenomenal character of an experience can be such as to suggest that the experience is veridical, whereas the phenomenal character of a conscious thought is not such as to suggest that the thought is true. On the contrary, Pautz, an intentionalist himself, has recently argued that intentionalism is “pretheoretically … very counterintuitive” (2010, p. 293) because it is “inconsistent with the general naïve intuition” (p. 292) about the “ground of visual phenomenology” (p. 291). (Pautz ultimately accepts intentionalism on the basis of other considerations.)
If the experience is in fact veridical, then given that the appearance just is the fact being disclosed to the experiencer, the subject will not only be aware of the appearance as the fact that p appearing to him, but will also have access to that fact. So although according to McDowell there is a sense in which the only thing about an experience to which the subject has access is the associated appearance, there is another sense in which veridical experiences can be said to provide subjects with access to external facts by means of appearances of those facts (sec. 2).
For a related view of how disjunctivism can explain how experiences make beliefs rational, see Martin (2002, pp. 399–401).
McDowell makes a similar criticism of those who advocate the highest common factor conception of experience (the “Cartesian picture”): “Ironically, when reverence for the authority of phenomenology is carried to the length of making the fact that internal configurations are indistinguishable from the subject’s point of view suffice to establish that these configurations are through and through the same, the upshot is to put at risk the most conspicuous phenomenological fact there is. The threat which the Cartesian picture poses to our hold on the world comes out dramatically in this: that within the Cartesian picture there is a serious question about how it can be that experience, conceived from its own point of view, is not blank or blind, but purports to be revelatory of the world we live in” (1986, p. 152).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Krista Lawlor for helpful discussion. I would also like to thank two anonymous referees for helpful comments. Thanks also to the University of Virginia for monetary support that allowed me to be on leave during the fall 2010 semester and write this paper.
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Langsam, H. A Defense of McDowell’s Response to the Sceptic. Acta Anal 29, 43–59 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-013-0188-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-013-0188-2