² See Wiggins, David, ‘Truth, Invention and the Meaning of Life’, British Academy lecture (1976)Google Scholar; and ‘Deliberation and Practical Reason’, in Essays on Aristotle's Ethics, Rorty, Amélie (ed.) (California, California University Press, 1980).Google Scholar

³ Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1980), 344–345Google Scholar. I have discussed Rorty's views in some detail in a review of his Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis, 1982)Google Scholar: New York Review XXX, No. 7 (28 04 1984).Google Scholar

⁴ There is a confusion between what might be called empirical and transcendental pragmatism. Some similar problems arise with the later work of Wittgenstein: see ‘Wittgenstein and Idealism’, in Understanding Wittgenstein, Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures Volume 7 (London, Macmillan, 1974)Google Scholar, and reprinted in Moral Luck (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; and Lear, Jonathan, ‘Leaving the World Alone’, Journal of Philosophy 79 (1982).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵ Rorty, , ‘The World Well Lost’, in Consequences of Pragmatism, 14Google Scholar. See also Davidson, Donald, ‘The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 67 (1973/1974).Google Scholar

⁶ Cf. Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1978)Google Scholar. See also Jardine, N., ‘The Possibility of Absolutism’, in Science, Belief and Behaviour: Essays in Honour of R. B. Braithwaite, Mellor, D. H. (ed.) (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1980)Google Scholar; and McGinn, Colin, The Subjective View (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1984).Google Scholar

⁷ Notably McDowell, John, ‘Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 52 (1978)Google Scholar; ‘Virtue and Reason’, Monist 62 (1979)Google Scholar. McDowell is above all concerned with the state of mind and motivations of a virtuous person, but I understand his view to have the more general implications discussed in the text. The idea that it might be impossible to pick up an evaluative concept unless one shared its evaluative interest I take to be basically a Wittgensteinian idea. I first heard it expressed by Philippa Foot and Iris Murdoch in a seminar in the 1950s. For the application of ideas from Wittgenstein's later philosophy to ethics, see e.g. Pitkin, Hanna F., Wittgenstein and Justice (California, California University Press, 1972)Google Scholar, and Lovibond, Sabina, Realism and Imagination in Ethics (Oxford, Blackwell, 1984)Google Scholar. McDowell himself draws important consequences in the philosophy of mind, rejecting the ‘belief and desire’ model of rational action. I do not accept these consequences, but I shall not try to argue the question here. Some considerations later in this paper, about the differences between ethical belief and sense perception, bear closely on it.

⁸ McDowell (‘Virtue and Reason’) allows for this possibility, but he draws no consequences from it, and ignores intercultural conflict altogether. He traces scepticism about objectivity in ethics, revealingly, to what he calls a ‘philistine scientism’, on the one hand, and to a philosopical pathology on the other, of vertigo in the face of unsupported practices. Leaving aside his attitude to the sciences, McDowell seems rather unconcerned even about history, and says nothing about differences in outlook over time. It is significant that in a discussion of the virtues that mostly relates to Aristotle, he takes as an example kindness, which is not an Aristotelian virtue.

⁹ The most subtle and ingenious discussion of propositional knowledge I know is that of Nozick, Robert in Chapter 3 of his Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1981)Google Scholar. Some central features of Nozick's account, notably its use of subjunctive conditionals, had been anticipated by Fred Dretske, as Nozick acknowledges in his note 53 to that chapter (op. cit. 630), which gives references.

¹⁰ How rough? Perhaps he cannot read four dots as 4, though he can read six dots as 6. What if he can only read six dots as 6, and everything else as not 6?

¹¹ Tarski, A., ‘The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages’, in Logic, Semantics, Meta-Mathematics (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1956)Google Scholar. On the present issue, cf. Wiggins, David, ‘What Would be a Substantial Theory of Truth?’, in Philosophical Subjects: Essays Presented to P. F. Strawson, van Straaten, Z. (ed.) (Oxford, Blackwell, 1980)Google Scholar. Wiggins' discussion raises a further issue, whether the observer could even understand what the sentences mean, unless he could apply a disquotational truth formula to them. (In this he is influenced by Davidson, Donald, ‘Truth and Meaning’, Synthese 17 (1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The fact that there can be a sympathetic but non-identified observer shows that it cannot be impossible to understand something although one is unwilling to assert it oneself.

¹² See Skorupski, John, Symbol and Theory (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1976).Google Scholar

¹³ Cf. Wiggins, , ‘Truth, Invention and the Meaning of Life’Google Scholar; McGinn, Colin, The Subjective View (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1984), 9–10, 119–120.Google Scholar

¹⁴ A formulation of the distinction between primary and secondary qualities is very nearly as old in the Western tradition as the self-conscious use of a principle of sufficient reason.

¹⁵ I have taken two sentences here from an article, ‘Ethics and the Fabric of the World’, to appear in Morality and Objectivity, Ted Honderich (ed.) (London, Routledge, forthcoming), a volume of essays in memory of John Mackie; it discusses Mackie' views on these subjects, and in particular his idea that perceptual and moral experience each involve a comparable error. See also McGinn, op. cit., especially Ch. 7.