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The Myth of Mere Movement

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Abstract

Since Wilfrid Sellars’s “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” the myth of the Given has been central to philosophical discussions of perceptual experience and knowledge. In its most prominent form, the idea of the Given is the idea that perceptual experience can rationally support one’s thoughts but has no conceptual content. Now, intentional action is widely thought to be the structural complement of perceptual experience; via perceptual experience, the world impresses itself on the mind; via intentional action, the mind impresses itself on the world. But if that is true, we should suspect that there is something structurally similar to the idea of the Given in our thinking about intentional action. In this essay, I show in detail that indeed there is. Roughly, it is the idea that intentional actions can be rationally supported by one’s thoughts but have no conceptual content. I contend further that if the Given is a “myth,” so too is this structural analog. I also argue that if John McDowell’s way of avoiding the Given is satisfactory, there is a correlative way of avoiding the structural analog. The intriguing result: intentional action must have conceptual content. In the end, I raise two key questions about whether we should accept this result.

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Notes

  1. Many people contend that there are different forms of the Given. See, for instance, deVries (2005), deVries and Triplett (2000) and Sellars (1956).

  2. ‘The Myth of the Giving’ is a suggestive phrase in this context, but it’s too awkward. Also, Susan Hurley uses that expression to refer to a different idea, e.g. Hurley (1998, Chs.2, 7, 8). See also Rowlands (2006, Ch. 4).

  3. I will use small capital letters to refer to thoughts.

  4. Henceforth, I will talk simply of experiences, rather than perceptual experiences.

  5. In McDowell’s explanation of the reasoning that leads one to appeal to the Given, he says that it seems like experience needs to be “outside” of or “external” to thought (1994, 5). More exactly, where I am using “thought”, he uses “conceptual”; thus, the idea would be that experience needs to be outside of or external to the conceptual.

  6. There is a large literature on conceptual and non-conceptual content. For some representative contributions to the discussion, see Evans (1982), Haugeland (1992/1998), Peacocke (1992), McDowell (1994, pp. 46–65, 162–174), Heck (2000), Speaks (2005), and Brewer (2005).

  7. Thus, for me here, non-conceptual content corresponds with what Speaks calls “absolute non-conceptual content” and with what Heck calls “content nonconceptualism”.

  8. Most prominently, Sellars (1956) and McDowell (1994).

  9. This version of the case against the Given—against this version of the Given—derives primarily from the more comprehensive cases made in deVries (2005) and deVries and Triplett (2000), both of which purport to be clarifying Sellars’s original arguments.

  10. In “Avoiding the Myth of the Given,” McDowell rejects his earlier view (from Mind and World) that experiences have exactly the sort of content expressible in declarative sentences of natural language, so-called propositional content (258). Nevertheless, he maintains, experiences still have conceptual content (2009, 260). For a similar suggestion, see Kukla and Lance (2009).

  11. One common suggestion: nonconceptual content is exemplified by pictures. The trick is then to explain how that sort of content is essentially different from the content of, say, sentences of natural language. See, e.g., Haugeland (1992/1998). A different important proposal comes from Peacocke (1992): nonconceptual content is a “scenario,” consisting of an origin and orientation on axes.

  12. Just as many contend that there are different versions of the Given, and I have focused on only one such version, so too there are probably different versions of the analog of the Given, and I am focusing on just one.

  13. Sellars does not discuss the idea. See, e.g., Sellars (1963a, b, c, 1967, 1976). Moreover, recent commentators on Sellars who have recognized this idea have not developed it. See, for instance, McDowell (1994, pp. 89–90, 2010, 2011a, b), Brandom (1994, pp. 294–295), and Brandom (2000, pp. 31, 94–95). The idea is not discussed by deVries (2005) or O’Shea (2007). Earlier important comments on Sellars and action also do not discuss the issue, e.g., Aune (1975, 1978), and Castañeda (1975). The issue lurks but is not pursued in the recent debate between McDowell and Hubert Dreyfus (Schear 2013).

  14. See also Davidson (1980c, d). For many contemporary philosophers of action, this is the problem of action, to use Harry Frankfurt’s expression (1978).

  15. See, for instance Davidson (1980a, c, d).

  16. In later work (1980d, 1985), Davidson no longer holds that the cause of an action is a belief-desire pair (as he does in 1980a), but holds instead that the cause is an intending, which results from the belief-desire pair.

  17. (McDowell 1994, 14–18).

  18. He calls this “minimal empiricism,” “the idea that experience must constitute a tribunal, mediating the way our thinking is answerable to how things are” (1994, xii).

  19. McDowell does mention another option: “bald naturalism” (1994, xviii–xxiii, 67, 76–77, 88–89). According to McDowell, bald naturalism abandons the idea that thought is “answerable” to the world in any normatively rich sense—it abandons “minimal empiricism”. In turn, it is not interested in trying to understand how thought is so answerable to the world. Bald naturalism differs from Coherentism, which accepts the idea that thought is answerable to the world, but holds that a merely causal relationship between experience and thought will afford such answerability.

  20. (McDowell 1994, 28).

  21. McDowell (2010, 2011a, b). In different ways, Levy (2013) and Valaris (2015) defend the more specific idea that intentional actions themselves are cognitive or mental. This idea resonates with various suggestions that minds are essentially embodied and enacted. Seminal work includes Varela et al. ( 1991), Haugeland (1995) and Clark and Chalmers (1998). For more recent discussion, see Clark (2008), Adams and Aizawa (2008), Menary (2010).

  22. Robert Brandom says that “acting is making-true”, whereas thinking or believing is “taking-true” (2000, p. 158). In these terms, one might think that reasons for making-true are fundamentally different from reasons for taking-true.

  23. For helpful comments on earlier drafts, I am grateful to Zed Adams, Nat Hansen, Nathaniel Goldberg, Steven Levine, and Willem deVries, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for Erkenntnis.

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  1. Philosophy Department, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA, 17013, USA

    Chauncey Maher

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Maher, C. The Myth of Mere Movement. Erkenn 82, 1177–1193 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-016-9864-0

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