Abstract
We can distinguish two senses of the Given, the nonconceptual and the non-doxastic. The idea of the nonconceptual Given is the target of Sellars’s severe attack on the Myth of the Given, which paves the way for McDowell’s conceptualism, while the idea of the non-doxastic Given is largely neglected. The main target of the present paper is the non-doxastic Given. I first reject the idea of the nonconceptual Given by debunking the false assumption that there is a systematic relation between the conceptual and the nonconceptual. I then propose a constitutive understanding of experience and concept, which at once challenges the idea of the non-doxastic Given. Unlike the more familiar Davidsonian challenge, which questions the transition from the non-doxastic to the doxastic, the constitutive understanding implies that the idea of the non-doxastic Given endangers the very possibility of having thought about the world. I urge an exorcism of the Myth of the Given by proposing doxasticism, the view that experience is essentially a doxastic attitude towards that which is experienced.
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Notes
Lewis later moves in this direction. He writes: “We must not forget that experience is all that is given to us for the purposes of empirical knowing, and that such knowledge of objective facts as we achieve is simply that body of beliefs which represents our over-all interpretation of experience” (1952, p. 174).
McDowell takes this to be a Kantian understanding of experience. For an opposite understanding of Kant see Hanna (2008).
In a similar vein, Crane suggests that “it is more plausible to suppose that belief formation conceptualizes the content of perceptual states” (1988, p. 153).
Note that Evans is here talking about knowledge of one’s “informational state” (1982, p. 228).
Rosenberg makes a similar point (2006, p. 160).
There is a further worry about the connection between looking green and being green which makes Alston’s view even more problematic. A tree’s looking green cannot cause and thereby justify one’s belief that the tree is green, if we agree that things do not always look the way they are and we do not always take things to be the way they look.
This echoes Evans, who writes: “It is not necessary, for example, that the subject possess the egocentric concept ‘to the right’ if he is to be able to have the experience of a sound as being to the right” (1982, p. 159). In a similar vein, Davies declares: “a subject may have an experience without possessing the concepts that would be used in the specification of the content of that experience” (1991, p. 462).
For this reason, the phenomenology of linguistic thinking consists in the phenomenology of the relevant language. This is true even when one is neither thinking aloud nor thinking with one’s pen or keyboard. The same goes for those who think in sign language.
This is why Pietroski understands McDowell as considering language ability temporally prior to experience. He thus thinks that McDowell owes us a theory of concept acquisition and complains that “[o]ne does not acquire conceptual capacities in a vacuum” (1996, p. 634). In a similar vein, Roskies argues that “conceptualism entails that perceptual concepts cannot be learned” (2008, p. 637). De Gaynesford nevertheless understands McDowell as holding “an interdependence claim”. He writes, “it sometimes seems as if McDowell regards our experience and concept use as two aspects of what is essentially the same arrangement” (2004, p. 26).
As Cowley remarks, “we never see or hear anything except as such-and-such, under a certain description” (1968, p. 150).
Again, as Cowley puts it nicely, “What we hear the sounds as, is the meaning” (1968, p. 151). The idea that we hear or see meanings in hearing or reading sentences is clear in McDowell, who writes, “the contents of the used sentences” are “something present in the words—something capable of being heard or seen in the words by those who understand the language” (1987, p. 99). In a similar vein, Fricker argues that in hearing an utterance, one “perceives not just the sounds, but equally perceives their meaning” (2003, p. 325). For more recent defence of the view that we hear meanings directly see Brogaard (2018). For the opposite view see O’Callaghan (2011).
See Boyle (2018) for an interesting exploration concerning the difference between human mind and animal mind.
In a similar vein, Noë claims, “The content of perceptual experience is conceptual not in the sense that it is judged, but in the sense that it can be judged” (2004, p. 189). For Noë, “To have visual experiences is not to judge that things are some way or other, but it is to represent things as being some way or other” (1999, p. 260). This is the same for Sellars 1956/1997. Sellars seems to change his mind in his later writings, where he writes, “It can be argued that what we are aware of in perception is what we perceptually take there to be, what…we perceptually believe in” (1982, p. 109; see also Sellars 1978).
Friedman thus has a point in accusing McDowell of embracing “a version of Coherentism” (1996, p. 444).
Craig nevertheless draws a distinction between belief and sensory judgement. See no. 28.
I own the example to one of the anonymous reviewers, who cites this as a case against the idea that application of concept always entails belief.
It is worth pointing out that we decide the truth of the proposition that O is F by considering whether O is F.
The distinction between the description, the object, and the content of belief parallels Prior’s distinction between “what we think”, “what we think about”, and “what we think about it” (1971, p. 3).
This is one point on which I disagree with Stroud, whose puzzling distinction between “objectual” seeing and “propositional” seeing seems to ruin his otherwise insightful observation that seeing “is believing” and “is, or can be, knowing” (2011, p. 87). Stroud’s distinction explicitly echoes Dretske’s distinction between non-epistemic seeing and epistemic seeing, according to which, non-epistemic seeing “is devoid of positive belief content”, while epistemic seeing possesses “a positive belief content” (1969, pp. 6, 13).
Dretske may give the impression that he embraces the partial view. But his view does not count as a doxastic account of experience, since he does not consider experience as basically doxastic. For Dretske, non-epistemic or simple seeing is more fundamental than epistemic seeing (1979, pp. 101–102).
Note that doubting, disbelieving, and suspending judgement are also forms of doxastic attitude.
Smith claims that “a certain kind of perhaps qualified belief is essential to perception” (2001, p. 288). He makes a distinction between perceptual belief and theoretical belief and insists that “perceptual belief can exist alongside a contradictory theoretical belief” since “the senses are irrational” (2001, p. 292). Byrne, on the other hand, appeals to the modularity of mind and argues that one can have perceptual belief that p while holding a rational belief that not-p. While insisting that “perception constitutively involves a propositional attitude rather like the non-factive attitude of believing”, Byrne understands perceptual belief as “the output of (largely) informationally encapsulated perceptual modules” (2009, p. 437) and hence agrees that “Inconsistent beliefs are perfectly common” (2009 p. 450; see also 2016, pp. 962–963). Quilty-Dunn argues that “perceptual beliefs…should be formed automatically and may persist despite not being endorsed by the perceiving subject” (2015, p. 552). Craig’s judgemental theory can also be considered an irrational doxastic account. Craig claims that “having a sensory experience is making a judgement about the environment” (1976, p. 8). He nevertheless thinks that “what a person sensorily judges is not necessarily what he believes” (1976, p. 15) and hence, “Seeing…is not quite believing” (1976, p. 16).
Smith suggests that we “reject as mere dogma the presumption that belief can only be propositional in nature” (2001, p. 308). By “propositional”, Smith actually means “conceptual”. This reminds us of Armstrong’s claims that the beliefs acquired by perception “must be conceived of as sub-verbal beliefs” (1968/1993, p. 209). On the other hand, Glüer chooses to “remain neutral” on “the question whether experience content is conceptual or non-conceptual” (2009, p. 299, no. 4).
The idea is clear in Plato, who declares, “Reason…either is the same as truth or of all things it is most like it and most true” (1997, p. 455, 65d). According to Plato, “in their most accurate sense and appropriate use”, reason and knowledge “are applied to insights into true reality” (1997, p. 449, 59d). Similarly, for Aristotle, “of the intellectual states by which we grasp truth some are always true and some admits falsehood (e.g. opinion and reasoning—whereas understanding and comprehension are always true)” (1984, p. 166, 100b6-8).
Similarly, Dancy observes: “I might check on my decision that the tin is in the cupboard by looking; I would not check on what I see by considering whether there are reasons to suppose that things are as I see them to be, except in special cases” (2010, p. 115).
More generally, I agree with Boyle that believing is agential. But there are two points to note. First, as argued in Sect. 7, believing for me is taking something to be something, while for Boyle, believing is assenting to a proposition (2009, p. 143). Second, believing for me is voluntary in the sense of being subject to one’s rational control. This is true even when belief formation is not obviously active. (For a nice account of passive voluntariness see Anscombe 1957/2000, pp. 89–90.) For Boyle, believing is an involuntary action because it “is not the sort of thing that can be done ‘at will’” (2009, p. 144). Boyle seems to follow Williams’s (1970) understanding that being voluntary is acting at will, which is divergent from the Cartesian-Spinozian conception of freedom advocated in Sect. 9.
Siegel argues that experience is rational or cognitively penetrable. She claims that “all perceptual experiences are epistemically charged” and that “perceptual experiences might be the kind of mental phenomena that are susceptible to epistemic appraisal” (2018, p. 173). She nevertheless insists that “there are good reasons to think that experiences aren’t beliefs” (2017, p. 41).
Both of the two points apply to Gendler’s cases of alief (2008).
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Acknowledgements
Extended versions of different parts of the paper were presented over the years as invited talks or conference papers at Beijing Normal University, China University of Political Science & Law, Chinese Academy of Sciences University, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Nankai University, Nihon University, Peking University, Renmin University, Shandong University, Tsinghua University, Zhejiang University, the 24th World Congress of Philosophy in Beijing. My thanks to Laura Gow, Yuan Huang, Takashi Iida, Ivan Ivanov, Wei Jiang, Asher Jiang, Mark Kalderon, Sean Kelly, Tetsuyo Kono, Yimin Kui, Mike Martin, Jian Li, Hong Li, Chang Liu, Xiaoli Liu, Zhe Liu, Heather Logue, Michelle Montague, Antonio Nunziante, James O’Shea, Paul Snowdon, Galen Strawson, Ping Tian, Jerry Valberg, Huaping Wang, Qi Wei, Zhu Xu, Chuang Ye, Wenqi Yin, Shouqing Zhao, Pirui Zheng, and Yujian Zheng for questions, comments, or discussions on these and some other occasions. Special thanks to Wenjing Cai and Hao Tang for written comments. I am very grateful to Andrea Altobrando and Haojun Zhang for editing the topical collection which prompted the writing of the whole paper. Finally, my thanks to the anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments and suggestions.
Funding
This work was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China (15BZX028, 21&ZD049). This article belongs to the topical collection "Demystifying the Given", edited by Andrea Altobrando and Haojun Zhang.
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Tang, R. Exorcising the Myth of the Given: the idea of doxasticism. Synthese 200, 305 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03778-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03778-9