Tom Swann Mc Dowell Mind And World
Mc Dowell - Mind and World (1996) Postscript, Part 1: Davidson in Context
My interest in normativity and naturalism stems from Mind and World, where it is one of Mc Dowell’s driving concerns. The first three chapters discuss issues to do with the structure and epistemic role of perceptual experience. But he later turns to a broader ‘diagnosis’ of the metaphysical presumptions which he claims prematurely foreclose his envisaged option. This broader discussion orbits some rather eccentric play with the concept of nature. Mc Dowell thinks that the way of seeing the world won through hard intellectual labour in the scientific revolution leaves the world devoid of the normative relations constitutive of meaning and justification. He calls for a new, looser conception of nature as ‘partially re-enchanted’ with the normative relations constitutive of meaning and our abilities to intuit them.
But Mc Dowell is notoriously unclear what this is supposed to come to. If there is something in his account, I think it must be found in Mc Dowell;s thoughts about perception. I want to try to get clearer on what’s required of an account of perception if it is to account for its epistemic role, and just why, as Mc Dowell thinks, its playing this role should be seen as a condition of empirical thought in general. Unfortunately, despite Mc Dowell being clear that he thinks these are requirements of a transcendental flavoured epistemology, just why they are requirements are not very clear in MW!
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##1) this postscript showing how, despite the beating he takes in the lectures, Davidson is Mc Dowell’s ally.
##2) Quine’s Two Dogmas.
Quine’s Two Dogmas (these he denies) 1) Fundamental celeavage between analytic and synthetic 2) That empirical significance can be parcelled out statement by statement
Holism. Unit of empirical significance is whole of science. Takes to be equal to statements facing tribunal of experience as a corporate body. So empirical significance is being subject to the tribunal.
Makes it sound like empirical significance ~> empirical content
First dogma says that truth depends on world and on meaning. Analyticity is where the world factor is null. Not claiming there aren’t two factors, but that they cannot be separated out statement by statement. The world factor is just answerability to experience.
Vindicates the impression that the second dogma is the whole point. First dogma can be true only if the second is. For if the world factor cannot be parcelled out statement by statement, then a statement can’t have any world factor, including none.
##3 Truth depends on language and experience. Endogenous and exogenous. The latter is the tribunal. Language is the counterpart of meaning.
Empirical significance is not the counterpart of meaning, but of the world factor.
So empirical significance cannot be the same as Mc Dowell’s ‘bearing on the world’, empirical content, how one takes the world to be.
Why is this exactly? Is empirical significance to be understood in terms of the impacts on our web of belief, rather than truth conditions? So truth-conditions ~> content, are mappings from the web to sets of stimuli. This seems right. Then we ask: mappings how? To do with whether the stimuli puts the web under pressure. So confirmation is just survival. Nice Popperian point’ <<<
Comes out again in the indeterminacy of translation. Point is to stress ‘the extent of man’s conceptual sovereignty’. Empirical significance can be investigated scientifically. Conceptual sovereignty cannot, and so lies outside the reach of science, and so is dubious.
Talk of tribunal makes it look like a Kantian point. But it’s not. E.N P 75 ‘the stimulation of’ sensory receptors is all we have to go on” Causal pressures, not logical / rational pressures.
P133 ‘Quine conceives experience so that it could not figure in the order of justification, as opposed to the order of law-governed happenings.’
why the exclusion? Sure, he seems to want to understand it non-rationally. But does this mean that rational appraisal is not possible?<<<
Same point in Two Dogmas as well. Mcdowell Thinks this is more than a rhetorical point. P134 ‘If experience is not in the order of justification, it cannot be something that world-views transcend’ as is needed for the conceptual sovereignty thesis.
‘If experience plays only a causal role in the formation of a world-view, not a justificatory role, then it does not serve as evidence at all.’
something has to be taken as a reason to count as evidence. But surely there will be a causal story explaining our ever taking anything to be a reason. So the ‘only’ is crucial.
Can accept that a judgement that something was caused will itself fail to give us reasons for any particular judgment. But of course, it might. For it to do so will depend on the inferential properties of the judgment as it features in our framework of concepts. And if it does, then, contingent on the judgment having this inferential role, it will be a matter of necessity that it gives us these reasons. For the inferential role will constitute these reasons.
This goes for more than judgements /about/ causal relations. Any judgment we find ourselves making or having made can serve to feature in on going reasoning in light of the rest of our commitments. This includes those that are caused in us by whatever means. Now, the means in which the judgment was caused can also be the object of a further judgment, and so itself stand as evidence as to the stand appropriate to take to the initial caused judgement. But in doing so we are trading on the inferential roles of this latter judgment about causation.
Mc Dowell wants more than this. But what!? <<<
##4 Attractive reading of QUine’s rejection of the first dogma has him also rejecting an internal Given, from the structure of the understanding. Against foundations in sense or in thought, the a priori.
P136 “What we take experience to tell us is already part of the system, not an external constraint on it.”
No exogenous given. “But there is one thing wrong with reading Quine like this, as claiming that nothing is Given from inside the evolving system either, and that is the word”either”.”
from one perspective Quine leaves the external Given in place. tries to reject the endogenous Given without rejecting the exogenous Given. conceptual soveriegnty free to play within the boundaries offered by stimulus-meaning.
Does Quine ’concieve experience so that it stands outside the order of justification? isn’t this what observation sentences are meant to provide?<<<
##5
Davidson also hostile to anything that puts our touch with the world at risk, as Mc Dowell claims Quine does.
How at risk? Quine will just say that what it is to be in touch with the world is to be caught up in the process of adjusting our system of the world to the stimulus we recieve.<<<
Davidson OTVIOCS: Quine retains a third dogma “the dualism of conceptual scheme and empirical content” [Quine’s language and empirical significance]
OtVIoaSC: the idea of incommensurable schemes is an idea of the extent of conceptual soveriegnty that makes no sense.
OaCToTK: no “basis for knowledge outside the scope of our beliefs”. argument as with Sellars.
Davidson thinks this helps us get in touch with the objects. so should be a model for Mc Dowell. But Davidson resolves the tension in Quine in the wrong direction.
P138 “Davidson sees that Quine has no coherent way to make something out of, in effect, the idea that systems of empirical belief result from the co-operation of spontaneity and receptivity…”
I need to get much clearer on why this is.
“the idea of an interaction between spontaneity and receptivity can so much as seem to make it intelligible that what results is a belief, or a system of beliefs, about the empirical world — something correctly or incorrectly adopted according to how things are in the empirical world—only if spontaneity’s constructions are rationally vulnerable to the deliverances of receptivity.”
but not to the world? what he wants surely is receptivity making spontaneity rationally vulnerable to the world. <<<
“Quine’s official view of experience disrupts Quine’s attempt at a version of that picture.” [the picture above]
Fn 12 nothing in particular to do with Quine’s focus on stimulations. “Davidson’s general thought is that if experience is understood as what receptivity provides us with, then, whatever the details of the conception, experience is eo ipso understood in a way that removes it from the space of reasons.”
Davidson thinks the operations of spontaneity are rationally unconstrained from outside themselves.
for Davidson appearings can enter into thought, but sense-impressions cannot.
“receptivity” seems a moving target.<<<
Davidson talks of appearings as perceptual belief. P140 “It’s appearing to me that things are thus and so is not obviously to be equated with my believing something. Certainly not with my believing things are thus and so.” but no big issue here. Mc Dowell can just translate.
echo of Sellars. Sellars defends a notion of sensations. Non epistemological, the basis of epistemological.
Impressions are receptivity in operation. by definition. receptivity is in the explanatory background.
P141 “I claim that although Quine’s half-hearted attempt to picture world-views as products of a rational interaction between spontaneity and receptivity is unacceptable, as Davidson sees, that is no reason to discard the very idea of such an interaction.”
… “Quine conceives receptivity in such a way that it cannot impinge rationally on anything.”
Quine will say that what it is to impinge rationally is to lead to
“There really is a prospect of finding empirical content, as possessed by exercises of spontaneity, unmysterious if we can think of it on the lines that Davidson and Sellars disallow, and that Quine is officially committed to disallowing.”
is the idea that only if concepts are at work in our direct contact with the world can our use of the concepts have any content at all…? so the claim is not that receptivity is passive spontaneity, but that it is passive conceptuality, while spontaneity is active. but then the stuff about co-operation falls away.<<<
It is not enough to say with Sellars and Davidson that we respond to perceptual beliefs. P142 “does not entitle us to find no philosophical mystery in thought’s bearing on the world.”
“appearings are just more of the same kinds of things beliefs are: possessors of empirical content, bearing on the empirical world. And now we cannot make the question”How can beliefs (say) have empirical content?” look any less pressing by talking about a rational interplay between appearings and belief. The question is really “How can anything have empirical content?” and it is no good just helping ourselves to the fact that appearings do.”
But Davidson will /not/ buy into this! he surely will say that our thought gets its content by way of interpretatability.<<<
“If the rational answerability is to receptivity itself… then in being subject to the tribunal of experience, exercises of”conceptual sovereignty” are rationally answerable to the world itself.”
How exactly?<<<
“(Recall the image of experience as openness to the world)”
So it is this that does all the work<<<
P142-3”There cannot be a problem about the idea of a stand as to how things are, correctly or incorrectly adopted according to the layout of the world, if shaping a world-view is rationally answerable, by way of experiential openness, to the world itself.”
paraphrasing: No problem of content if thinking is rationally answerable to the world through perceptual experience
But why perceptual experience? why isn’t it enough to say “No problem of content if thinking is rationally answerable to the world”? Surely this is Davidson’s position: we believe correctly when what we believe is how things are. <<<
Davidson thinks the problem with epistemic intermediaries is that they might be lying. But Mc Dowell thinks the problem is that they can’t say anything to us.
epistemic intermediaries understood as non-epistemic loaded items. Mc Dowell’s complaint must go through. For Davidson is not saying that no epistemically loaded items (beliefs) can lie to us i.e. be false. The issue is how to understand the turning of such non-epistemic into the epistemic. But this doesn’t help Mc Dowell’s case. Davidson’s response can simply be taht it’s a matter of causal process.<<<
P143 “When we take receptivity itself to impinge rationally on belief, we equip ourselves to understand experience as openness to the world. And now the problem of making it intelligible that experience is endowed with content lapses…”
But this contradicts the above claim? I thought the picture was that openness to the world, which I understood as accuracy-conditioned perceptual experience, enables the rest of our thought to have content. But here the thought is that the content-enabling connection between perception and belief allows perception to be open to the world. Is it meant to be both ways?
Maybe the claim here is that the content of experience simply consists in how it is able to ‘impinge rationally on belief’.<<<
of course experience is fallible. when experiece gets it wrong, “there is a sense in which it intervenes”
emissaries only in the bad cases? how to read without this bad implication…<<<
“it is only because we can understand the notion of appearings constituted by the world’s making itself manifest to us that we can make sense of the empirical content, the bearing on the world, embodied in the idea of a misleading appearance.”
the idea of content is prior to the idea of error. fine. but what is this “appearings constituted by the world’s making itself manifest to us”? Phenomenological middle voice. Why is it a condition on our being able to think about the world that it ‘make itself manifest’ in any sense stronger than providing a causal structure which constrains our thought? or is the issue just how this causal structure does its job? <<<
Mc Dowell happy to emend Davidson’s constraint to say that “nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except something else that is also in the space of concepts”. >>>not S O Reasons? no, that would be trivial!<<<
from outside of thinking but not outside the thinkable.
P144 >>>lots of table thumping here<<< Davidon can’t countenance external rational constraints on spontaneity.
but he doesn’t think we need any!<<<
this is disastrous. “it ensures that we cannot refuse to find a mystery in the bearing of belief, or anything else, for instance appearing, on the empirical world.”
for Sellars and Davidson, the way sensations causally mediate between the world and beliefs is itself a topic for belief. and these can ground other beliefs. belief about reliability of senses
Fn 19 Sellars EPM: authority of observation from knowledge that one’s own reports are reliably correlated with the things being as reported. Impressions themselves can be treated as such reports.
but this is different from saying that “the belief that an object has an observable property can be grounded in an impression itself: the fact’s impressing itself on the subject.” impressions are transparent. for Davidson and Sellars they are opaque. one can argue from them to conclusions, but they do not themselves disclose the world
P 145 “If we cannot conceive impressions as transparent, we distance the world too far from our perceptual lives to be able to keep mystery out of the idea that our conceptual lives, including appearings, involve empirical content.”
Why?<<<
Mc Dowell is also attacking the view that appearings are impressions if there is a conceptual remove between being an appearing and being an impression. straddling a conceptual boundary: “not by virtue of being the impression it is that an item is the appearing it is.” might be more congenial to Davidson. seems to be Sellars’s line. doesn’t think this makes any difference to his point. qua impressions they will be opaque. just another way of refusing to countenance a rational engagement between spontaneity and receptivity as such.
there is still an in-out dimension. >>>!!!<<< order of justification. the world is the furthest out.
##6
Clearer target than Davidson would be Rorty’s reading of Davidson in Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth thinks Rorty takes the bit of Davidson Mc Dowell objects to, commends it, and makes it undermine the rest of Davidson.
concerns about knowledge are the same as concerns about content. D goes former, McD goes latter. both about the gap between M&W
Mc Dowell’s issue with Davidson is not that he doesn’t explain how anything can have content, but that he doesn’t ensure that the problem ‘lacks urgency’ >>>i.e. his picture throws it into question<<< Rorty just plugs his ears.
Rorty’s endorsement of Davidson’s coherentism is put in these terms: must hold apart view of beliefs “seen from the outside as the field linguist sees them (as causal interactions with the environment)” ad the view of beliefs seen “from the inside as the pre-epistemological native sees them (as rules for action)”… “abjure the possibility of a third way of seeing them—one which somehow combines the outside view and the inside view, the descriptive and the normative attitudes” P 345
I have trouble seeing how this comes out of Davidson’s coherentism<<<
the outside view is causal, beliefs linked with their causes; the inside is normative, beliefs linked with what is taken to give them their rational credentials.
Rorty splits notions of truth between them. the use in the descriptive picture is disquotational, the internal picture has a normative use of true.
this looks like it’s not quite what Rorty says. he says that there are two uses. There is a difference between using ‘true’ to say that ‘X’ is true and using ‘true’ to say that someone takes or holds ‘X’ to be true. Accepting the former commits one to different consequences than accepting the latter. Only in the former case is one committed to X. But accepting either is a normative matter, qua undertakig commitments one undertakes. In what sense then is the use of ‘truth’ in the descriptive picture not normative? <<<
Davidson’s field linguist uses ‘true’ disquotationally to construct a theory of truth for languages. P148 “easily generalises to the idea of cancelling semantic ascent; that need not be effected by a move in the language from which the ascent was made, as with disquotation strictly so called.” fn 24 Quine’s Philosophy of Logic P 10 - 13 >>>confused.<<<
Rorty’s idea is that such theories are constructed from the outside, descriptive rather than under the normative concern of finding the truth.
unsatisfying in itself and as a reading of Davidson.
this shown by how Rorty responds to Putnam. Putnam says that “_if the causal story is not to be and need not be supplemented by a normative story… then there is no way in which the noises we utter… are more than mere “expressions of our subjectivity”.” (emphasis and interpolation are Rorty’s).
Rorty responds. suggestion is that disquotationalist theories of truth think there is only a behaviouristic story to tell. Why shouldn’t we insist on a normative story? Why never search for the truth?
“Putnam, I think, still takes a”philosophical account of X” to be a synoptic vision which will somehow synthesize every other possible view, will somehow bring the outside and the inside points of view together”
Mc Dowell thinks the first bit is ignoring Putnam’s concern. Putnam is not saying we shouldn’t try to udnerstand people as trying to get things right. He is not saying the causal story should exclude the causal story. He is objecting to the view that Rorty endorses in the final sentence, that we /must/ treat them as seperate.
Putnam’s problem with this is that “if we occupy a standpoint from which our beliefs are in view along with their objects and our causal engagements with the objects, then we cannot, from that standpoint, bring the beliefs under the norms of inquiry.”P150 Mc Dowell endorses this worry. makes it a mystery how the things under consideration are beliefs, stances as to how the world is. We can concieve these things as beliefs only under the second standpoint, where they are subject to the norms of inquiry.
“If the view from this second standpoint is not allowed to embrace the causal interactions between believers and the objects of their beliefs… then it simply becomes mysterious how we can be entitled to concieve what organizes the subject matter of the second standpoint as the norms of inquiry.”
because inquiry must be about the world? but surely it will be something up for grabs in inquiry as to how our beliefs causally connect to their objects? the claim must be …
<<<
“the question of whether a belief achieves disquotability is supposed to be descriptive as opposed to normative, and Rorty’s picture keeps it apart from any question we address in our capacity as”earnest seekers after truth…But this severs what we want to think of as responsiveness to the norms of inquiry from any connection with that unproblematic notion of getting things right… Norms of inquiry are normative for the process of inquiry precisely because disquotability is the norm for its results.”
Rorty thinks “there seems no obvious reason why the progress of the language-game we are playing should have anything in particular to do with the way the rest of the world is.” P 336 But this extraordinary. It is the whole point of the game of inquiry that we aim at getting things right. This threatens even Davidson’s very ordinary world of things that make our statements true or false. Rorty’s refusal to deal with this problems is a deliberate act of will, plugging of the ears.
also unsatisfying as a reading of Davidson.
radical interpretation only unable to say what the object counts as reasons for what at the outset. if interpretation is successful, we find out what norms regulate the language game. the outside standpoint is sideways on. if she succeeds, she finds out what it’s like on the inside.
##7 Insistance that the two points of view be kept seperate is an expression of the dualism of reason and nature. the dualism is insisting that the two modes of organisation cannot be combined.
In Mc Dowell’s reading, Davidson’s commitment to the dualism is a defect. In Rorty’s it to be commended. ironic that Rorty thinks that he is dissolving dualisms. the dualism between causal description and epistemic evaluation is central to his thought. claiming his pragmatism is half-baked by his own criteria of what pragmatism should do.
##8
Davidson’s rejection of the third dogma is this that epistemic intermediaries cut us off from the world. Rorty generalises to other ‘tertia’ Mc Dowell thinks we can allow that such things are constitutive of our openness to the world.
##9 Mc Dowell thinks following Davidson’s rejection of the third dogma is devastating to Quine. diverge from Davidson’s own self-conception
Quine’s indeterminacy of translation is supposed to show how far the products of thinking fall short of scientifically treatable facts about “empirical significance”.
discarding the third dogma discards the framework in which this thought is posed. not surprising that meaning underdetermined by empirical significance. just because the exogenous factor of empirical significance cannot really be a kind of significance, because it is “excluded from having anything to do with the order of justification”.
doesn’t show that meaning is completely indeterminate. “That would require that we have an ineliminable freedom of play when we look for a kind of understanding that takes us outside the ambit of”empirical significance”: a kind of understanding that involves seeing how the phenomena of our subjects’ lives can be organized in the order of justification, the space of reasons.” Quine can’t help us see this. >>>WTF! really no idea what this is about he can’t here be saying that meaning is indeterminate in the sense that people accuse Quine of offering an incoherent position. <<<
analytic/synthetic? thinks Davidson corrects Quine’s way of putting it. analyticity as true by virtue of meaning alone is suspect if thought of in the sense of conceptual schemes as suspect. if we reject the dualism of endogenous and exogenous factors, then we reject this notion of analyticity. the picture of the conceptual as unbounded on the outside is meant to reject the idea that meaning’s impact on what we should believe is endogenous. nor that it is exogenous. but this doesn’t deprive us of meaning. just stops us from trying to put it in terms of the dualism
room for rehabilitating the notion of true by virtue of meaning? non-dualistic notion of scheme? can reject the two factors while holding on to the idea that our mind has a necessary structure. analytic truths might be those that “delineate” such a structure.
Sellarsian thought is that nothing is Given exogenously or endogenously. Mc Dowell suggests this is the same as Davidson’s rejection of scheme and content. But room to question whether absolutely everything is up for revision? “Immunity to revision, come what may, is a mark of Givenness only if it is understood in terms of the two factors, and it need not be.” P158
full blown transcendental idealism thinks we can’t be fundamentally wrong about the world since it is constituted by us. vestige in Wittgenstein? that we can’t be fundamentally wrong about our conceptual scheme, just in the sense that we can’t even ask the question
“how we go on” = our mindedness. mind and world as transcendentally made for each other. the mind making it so. but nothing like this in Wittgenstein. How we go on is constituted harmony with the world, not something that constitutes the harmony from the outside. Nothing in Witters doing the latter thing.
in section 2 Quine’s rejection of analyticity was a corollary of the holism. appreciating the peculiarity of the notion of “empirical significance” lets us see the gap between the idea that we can’t apportion empirical signficance to individual statements and the rejection of analyticity.
P160 “So if”empirical significance” in Quine’s sense cannot be apportioned between statements, that does nothing to show that rational answerability to experience cannot be apportioned between statements.”
if we concieve experience so that it /can/ be a tribunal we commit ourselves to seeing rational answerability as apportionable between statements. experiencing a black swan and the belief “there are no black swans”, there is a “germaneness” relation between them that is not simply how likely one is to give up the belief.
rationally apportionable, but not in the sense in which Quine is concerned to to dispute. there will always be changes makeable elsewhere to accomodate any commitment we make. <<<
Duhem’s argument can lead to an argument for meaning indeterminacy only if the language in which we capture experience is held apart from the language of the theory. there may be contexts in which there is a seperation into observation and theory languages. but we cannot extract a general indeterminacy from this. to seperate all language into observation and theory is the third dogma. “the cogent argument can at best be local. So if we see our way through the third dogma, we cut the Duhemian point down to size”.