Mc Dowell Second Nature
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I guess we need to deal with two parts here: a description the concept of second nature as Mc Dowell conceives of it and a description of its role in his argument (although at some stage it might be interesting to look at what use the concept could be put to if one lifts it out of McDowell’s context).
The concept of second nature In its most general sense, the idea of second nature (which Mc Dowell relates to the concept of Bildung) is a way of postulating that nature is not just the realm of law. It is important to note that this it is not an attempt to eliminate this aspect of an account of nature but rather to extend any such account.
Second nature is something that relates only to beings that are capable of wielding concepts and is the way in which these beings are initiated into the employment of their spontaneity (i.e. the active concept-wielding thingme) including the ability to recognise and develop normative attitudes towards the concepts relating to the world produced by our passive receptivity. By virtue of this initiation way of looking at second nature (i.e. that we “come into” our second nature), it is clear that social considerations have a large role to play here.
Another important point is the link Mc Dowell draws between second nature and language. For him, the primary function of our natural language is as a “repository of tradition” (i.e. a major component of what contributes to our second nature).
Also, the Bildung via which our second nature is formed is a key part of McDowell’s “naturalised platonism.” It is the social nature of this Bildung that enables it to transcend the animal individual in a way that does not lead to “rampant platonism.”
Second nature in McDowell’s argument
For McDowell, it is second nature that enables us to move beyond the view of nature as the realm of law and so lift ourselves off the supervenience axis that forces us into the choice between smooth and bald naturalism (see Mc Dowell Naturalism for details of this). By placing our (mental) ability to wield concepts within the natural realm we are no longer forced to postulate a supervenience relation, the psychological is fundamentally integrated with the physical by virtue of their integration in nature.
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- {[green Are we actually able to say that animals do not wield concepts in some way? Surely, predator recognition requires some sort of abstract concept of that species of predator in order that the animal can recognise different predator-instances? Chris ]} — {[green But maybe this just highlights an aspect of second nature not captured in the above account: perhaps we need to distinguish between genuinely wielding a concept (including the freedom to situate that concept within a normative framework as we see fit) and some sort of trained Pavlovian stimulus response. (I imagine going back through the chapter in which he deals with Evans will make this a little clearer for me.) Chris ]} — {[blue Discussion with Jason lead to the conlusion that maybe there is no way in which to distinguish humanistic concept-wielding from animalistic similarity-recognition. (It also lead to the conclusion that Pavlovian response is a rather old-fashioned and inaccurate way of looking at these things.) ]}
- {[blue Perhaps one can think about it this way: ]} — {[blue 1. Wielding a concept => being able to draw some sort of similarity relation inherent in that concept. ]} — {[blue 2. We often observe evidence of animals behaving in ways that indicate the recognition of similarities. ]} — {[blue 3. It then remains to be seen whether or not we can draw some sort of biconditional relation between similarity-recognition and concept-wielding. Furthermore, seeing as we would like to situate ourselves in some way within the natural realm (and this position seems fairly uncontroversial), it seems that the burden of proof lies with someone who would wish to deny this biconditionality. Chris ]}
- {[green One way of arguing against the biconditional view might be to claim that concept-wielding is related to the ability to employ a language that features a complex grammatical structure. However, this does not seem especially convincing: firstly, it is not at all clear that such a simple link between the conceptual and the linguistic can easily be argued for; and secondly, very little research into the communicative structures (which may be non-verbal) of animals has been carried out. Chris ]}
- {[green Could one then say that perhaps Mc Dowell is wrong to argue for second nature being a purely human thing? Maybe it is just the intricacy (or even less, the accessibility) of second nature that differs between humans and other animals? Chris ]}
- {[green Ok, I’ve started a new page on the animal/human distinction in McDowell: Mc Dowell Rational Animals . Chris ]}
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