McDowell is visiting IU this week.
Some numbers for the week:
Number of receptions: Two.
Number of dinners the department's paying for that I'm signed up to attend: Two.
Number of catered lunches for grad students: One.
Number of parties: One.
Number of the above that McDowell will be at: Six (assuming he attends his own receptions).
Hooray for free food~
Also there's a two-part seminar for the department, a public lecture, and open office hours. I'm hoping that somewhere in there I can get McDowell to explain what's going on with "Avoiding the Myth of the Given" (the bit where he limits which conceptual capacities are involved in the content of experience).
I need to figure out what else I want to ask him about in the next day or so. "Davidson in Context" and the indeterminacy of translation both come to mind. I also hear he presented a paper on the B-Deduction at the Haugeland (RIP) conference this spring; I should try to get a copy of that.
I also want to know why "The Content of Perceptual Experience" hasn't been collected yet. It's from April 1994, The Philosophical Quarterly (Vol 44, No. 175), and he told us to read it in preparation for his visit. So far as I could find, it's the only piece of his that wasn't collected in any of the four volumes of his papers (apart from short replies). If he hadn't told us to read it, I probably wouldn't have known it existed. (It's about Dennett and animal cognition; nothing world-shaking, but a solid statement of McDowell's rejection of the (more than causal) relevance of sub-personal states to personal-level explanations.)
There are some other things that've come up in the McDowell reading groups that I want to hear McDowell respond to, but I figure other people can worry about remembering those. Nobody else is going to bug him about "Avoiding". (It was news to most people here that McDowell had revised his views in the past decade.)
Meta-note: The blog is not dead; I was just busy with moving & work & such all summer, and since I've gotten to IU I've been busy with school things. Also, random articles and such I've wanted to link have ended up getting linked on facebook instead of here, which has cut down on the amount of random incentives to post I've had. (Feel free to friend me if you read this.)
One thing I meant to note when it happened, but didn't: Barry Stroud spoke here a few weeks ago, and I was surprised to find myself agreeing with almost everything he said. It seems his view of perception is now pretty close to McDowell's, with a strong disjunctivist aspect to it. The only place he explicitly disagreed with McDowell was in whether there was any reason to call his view "idealism" (which I tried to smooth over in the Q&A*), and the only place I noticed him missing something McDowell noticed is that Stroud didn't seem to distinguish between experiences and beliefs formed on the basis of experience. (Which made his views an interesting hybrid of McDowell and the still-not-quite-right parts of Davidson.) I need to get a copy of the paper he delivered, to make sure I heard him right; it felt strange to agree with Stroud so strongly.
*Stroud was referring to the part at the end of "Conceptual Capacities in Perception" where McDowell says the label "idealism" is "a good fit" for the view he defends (p.143 in "Having the World in View"). Stroud took himself to be defending the same view as McDowell, but was troubled by the fact that McDowell thought that this view was an "idealism". I suggested that all McDowell meant to be doing by saying his views are "idealism in an obvious sense" was indicating solidarity with Hegel, since it's clear that McDowell wants to defend "common-sense realism" (also on p.143), and Hegel is an example of a self-avowed "idealist" who also wasn't an idealist in the sense that seemed to worry Stroud. (He's also the only person I can think of who could say "the world itself is structured by the form of judgement" and not mean anything worrisome about it, which is another thing McDowell says. Kant can almost say this and get away with it, but McDowell is clear in holding that transcendental idealism spoils the story. I should ask McDowell if he thinks the TLP says it, since proposition 1 of that book is nonsense.) Stroud's reply was "Well, when I asked McDowell about this, he told me 'Idealism is not a theory'". And then everyone in the auditorium had a good laugh about that.
04 October 2010
McDowell Week at IU
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20 comments:
I don't get it. (That last bit.)
Stroud is indeed good on some things, but I also find it very weird to agree with him when I do.
Also, "The Content of Perceptual Experience" is essay 16 in Mind, Value, & Reality (pp. 341-58). Do you mean some other essay?
"Also, "The Content of Perceptual Experience" is essay 16 in Mind, Value, & Reality (pp. 341-58)."
Huh. So it is.
For some reason the list of things McDowell told us to read in preparation only had references to the books if they were in "Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality". Weird. I checked the two recent collections when looking for the article; I didn't remember that MVR had some of the perception stuff.
As Gilda Radner said: Never mind.
"I don't get it. (That last bit.)"
I probably should've provided more context: I asked my question after Stroud and Allen Wood* had had a back-and-forth over whether maybe McDowell was a transcendental idealist in a Fichtean/Husserlian sense: the everyday "common sense realist" position is quite right, but a philosophical analysis of what makes it possible reveals that, in another sense, the world of experience must be transcendentally ideal. Stroud rightly rejected this as a very un-McDowellian thought, and anyway as spoiling the anti-skeptical power of the view (since it makes our everyday knowledge seem like it has to be less than we took it to be). So it was a live issue in the discussion just how McDowell understood "idealism" in the relevant passage.
"Idealism is not a theory" was generally agreed to not be a helpful gloss on what he meant. And this was all McDowell had told Stroud. So we all sat in silence for a moment trying to figure out what it might mean, and then people started laughing at how little good it did to say "Idealism is not a theory" here.
Rereading the end of "Conceptual Capacities in Perception", I like it even less than I did initially. McDowell is emphatically rejecting the idea that the world is the totality of things, not facts, in favor of the view that the world is all that is the case. He can't do this in good faith while also thinking that the opening of the TLP is sheer nonsense. But I think that's a bad reading of that part of the TLP. As Conant's Johannes Climacus says in "Mild Monowittgensteinianism", it doesn't matter if you start with "The world is the totality of things, not facts" and "The world is all that exists" rather than how the TLP in fact opens; none of these has been given a sense -- we can say whatever we like and it doesn't matter, and it's a matter of chance that LW started one way rather than the other. One of the points that LW wants us to cotton on to via the TLP is the business about the bipolarity of the proposition, and this means that one of the main ways we're supposed to realize the various propositions of the book are nonsense is by realizing that it doesn't matter if we negate them and talk that way instead (which is related to why "logical truths" are said to not be true, which Diamond makes some hay about in "Throwing the Ladder Away"). I also found Climacus pretty convincing on the material issue of whether it matters how we talk about "the world": both are fine, neither are right. Talking either way can be useful to point out something about the whole fact-object-world spiel, but only dialectically; when we see things aright, we don't feel any need to assert either thing.
But Ayer wants to insist on saying "the world is the totality of things, not facts" and McDowell insists on saying "the world is the totality of facts, not things". So, I think I need to ask McDowell what he thinks about the TLP. (It's probably a good way to ask him about his meta-philosophy, too.)
*He was here for two weeks; he had a little seminar over the Religionbook. He may or may not be moving here from Stanford next year. Hopefully it's decided before December; it'd be a nice way to draw Kant people for next year if he's known to be coming back.
Good to know the blog isn't dead.
Incidentally, I'm also curious to know what McDowell had in mind in "Avoiding", specially viz-a-viz his relation to Evans. If you could report on his answer, I would be most grateful.
Other Daniel: It hadn't occurred to me that Evans was relevant to "Avoiding". Can you expand on that? Do you mean you think the criticisms of Evans in M&W have to change now that McDowell's view has changed, or did Evans discuss proper & common sensibles somewhere that I've missed? Or did you have something else in mind?
Reporting on McDowell in this sort of situation is the sort of things blogs are for.
Actually, to be frank, for now it's little more than a hunch; I need to re-read "Avoiding" with Evans (and McDowell's criticism of Evans) in mind in order to flesh out that hunch. The basic idea occurred to me after re-reading McDowell's chapter on Evans after reading some of Evans's papers and parts of The Varieties of Reference. McDowell develops his view not only as a criticism of Evans, but more importantly largely in agreement with him, specially in what constitutes conceptual content (i.e. they both agree that it's best to describe concepts not in terms of representations, but of abilities, and the structured character of such content probably means that McDowell also agrees with Evans's Generality Constraint and with the application of "Russell's Principle").
Now that McDowell has given up the idea that perceptual content is propositional content, I would like to know how this relates to Evans. For example, McDowell says that this new kind of "intuitional content" is not articulated, but articulable. Does this means that it isn't answerable anymore to the Generality Constraint? And if this "intuitional content" is not by itself structured, but only gives material for a more structured process, how does this differs from Evans views? Specially since, as McDowell himself stresses in Mind and World, Evans also held that the non-conceptual content, in the case of rational subjects, can only be considered as an experience if that content is suitable as input to a system of concepts.
In short, McDowell and Evans both share a view of conceptual content that is answerable to the same restrictions. They differ in how perception fits in this scheme, because McDowell thinks that the content of perception is answerable, in a way that Evans denies, to those restrictions. But in "Avoiding", McDowell seems to weaken his position, in a manner that makes unclear if he still thinks that the content of perception is still answerable to those restrictions. If they're not answerable, than I don't see how labeling this new "intuitional content" "conceptual" can make it any different from Evans's "non-conceptual content". I hope this makes some sense, as I'm still a bit lost in trying to make sense of this mess.
Incidentally, Evans does treat common and proper sensibles (though he does not use that terminology) in his outstanding paper on Molyneux's question. Interestingly, this paper is remarkably close to McDowell's view on "The Content of Perceptual Experience", as Evans also defends the Gibsonian approach to perception against (what could be interpreted as) Marr's criticism of it. The paper is incredibly dense, though, and, due to the early death of its author, it's missing a projected appendix where Evans intended to develop the notion of non-conceptual content.
By the way, I have a pdf of Evans's Collected Papers, if you so wish.
Actually, to be frank, for now it's little more than a hunch; I need to re-read "Avoiding" with Evans (and McDowell's criticism of Evans) in mind in order to flesh out that hunch. The basic idea occurred to me after re-reading McDowell's chapter on Evans after reading some of Evans's papers and parts of The Varieties of Reference. McDowell develops his view not only as a criticism of Evans, but more importantly largely in agreement with him, specially in what constitutes conceptual content (i.e. they both agree that it's best to describe concepts not in terms of representations, but of abilities, and the structured character of such content probably means that McDowell also agrees with Evans's Generality Constraint and with the application of "Russell's Principle").
Now that McDowell has given up the idea that perceptual content is propositional content, I would like to know how this relates to Evans. For example, McDowell says that this new kind of "intuitional content" is not articulated, but articulable. Does this means that it isn't answerable anymore to the Generality Constraint? And if this "intuitional content" is not by itself structured, but only gives material for a more structured process, how does this differs from Evans views? Specially since, as McDowell himself stresses in Mind and World, Evans also held that the non-conceptual content, in the case of rational subjects, can only be considered as an experience if that content is suitable as input to a system of concepts.
In short, McDowell and Evans both share a view of conceptual content that is answerable to the same restrictions. They differ in how perception fits in this scheme, because McDowell thinks that the content of perception is answerable, in a way that Evans denies, to those restrictions. But in "Avoiding", McDowell seems to weaken his position, in a manner that makes unclear if he still thinks that the content of perception is still answerable to those restrictions. If they're not answerable, than I don't see how labeling this new "intuitional content" "conceptual" can make it any different from Evans's "non-conceptual content". I hope this makes some sense, as I'm still a bit lost in trying to make sense of this mess.
Incidentally, Evans does treat common and proper sensibles (though he does not use that terminology) in his outstanding paper on Molyneux's question. Interestingly, this paper is remarkably close to McDowell's view on "The Content of Perceptual Experience", as Evans also defends the Gibsonian approach to perception against (what could be interpreted as) Marr's criticism of it. The paper is incredibly dense, though, and, due to the early death of its author, it's missing a projected appendix where Evans intended to develop the notion of non-conceptual content.
By the way, I have a pdf of Evans's Collected Papers, if you so wish.
"By the way, I have a pdf of Evans's Collected Papers, if you so wish."
I do so! IUB's library doesn't have a copy. I almost bought it last week, but it's still expensive and I'm still broke.
"the structured character of such content probably means that McDowell also agrees with Evans's Generality Constraint and with the application of "Russell's Principle""
This seems clearly right.
"For example, McDowell says that this new kind of "intuitional content" is not articulated, but articulable. Does this means that it isn't answerable anymore to the Generality Constraint?"
I don't think so. When saying why he still wants to call intuitional content "conceptual", McDowell says "the subject of an intuition is in a position to put aspects of its content, the very content that is already there in the intuition, together in discursive performances." (p.264 in HtWiV)
So if intuitional content was not subject to the same restrictions that discursive thought was (including the Generality Constraint and Russell's Principle), then it would let you know things in violation of those restrictions (since the things you can know via articulating intuitional content are (some of) the things that were in the content of that intuition). But McDowell still agrees with Evans that the Generality Constraint etc are restrictions on thought. So McDowell can't think of intuitional content as not subject to the constraints that discursive thought is.
Missed this bit:
"And if this "intuitional content" is not by itself structured, but only gives material for a more structured process, how does this differs from Evans views?"
I think McDowell does think of intuitional content as structured; this is how he can speak of "aspects" of intuitional content. That sort of talk wouldn't make sense if the content wasn't already diverse in itself. But it's not structured in just the same way that discursive thought is structured. Being "articulable" is like perforated lines in paper: it's clear where to tear it, and it tears clean. It just doesn't come pre-torn.
Dan and Duck, it's been so long.
I'm just finished the first part of Reading McDowell, and Mind and World makes so much better sense to me now (and since Rorty said much the same thing on the dust-jacket comment, I don't feel too bad about not understanding it before). That book should be required reading before anyone attempts to grapple with McDowell.
I don't have any questions intelligent enough to ask of McDowell, but the part of his project that intrigues me the most is his appropriation of 'second nature.' I wonder how Aristotelian that notion could be in McDowell (i.e., is it the full-blown second-potentiality as described in De Anima, II, 1). It's also not clear to me at present (and so prior to more reading) how second nature is supposed to reenchant nature.
The problem, of course, is how to cash out this metaphor about "articulable" content. And I can't help but think that, in doing so, McDowell has retreated to Evans's position. Let me try to develop this a bit further (forgive me if this is a bit lengthy).
It's true that McDowell insists that this "intuitional content" must be suitable for use in explicit discursive practices. But so does Evans. In The Varieties of Reference, Evans characterizes the representational aspect of nonconceptual content in terms of an analogy with a photograph. According to Evans, the content of a photograph can be specified by "an open sentence in one or more variables (the number of variables corresponding to the number of objects in the photograph)." So, to use Evans's example, a photograph of a red ball on top of a yellow square could be characterized as follows:
Red(x) & Ball(x) & Yellow(y) & Square(y) & On Top Of(x,y). (cf. §5.2, pp. 124-5)
Rick Grush helpfully glosses this passage by noting that Evans's use of an open sentence is meant to indicate the fact that such content purports to be of objects, without actually being so. That is, as Evans is at pains to stress, nonconceptual content is not equivalent to sense-data. The former are already objective in a way that the latter are not.
Nevertheless, such content violates both Russell's Principle and, by implication, the Generality Constraint. That is because, although the content purports to be of an object, I lack the necessary resources to discrimante the object and thus to aim my thoughts at it. Here, again Grush provides a helpful example. Suppose that I was presented with two identical photographs of identical twins, Bob and Rob, who are both tall and wearing a red hat. In this case, the content of both photographs should not be described as "this is Bob" and "this is Rob" (or whatever), but rather as "a tall person with a red hat". Since I lack the ability to pick out which of the two the photograph is about, I lack the necessary knowledge to discriminate them, thus failing Russell's Principle (the case is similar to the "steel balls" example that Evans gives). And, if I don't have any discriminating knowledge of the object, I do not have the ability to use thoughts about that object in further judgments, thus violating the Generality Constraint. Obviously, I can latter acquire the necessary ability and thus issue a thought (say, by learning that such a photograph is of Bob and not of Rob). But then this is not a matter of simply being in an informational state anymore.
Back to McDowell, that seems precisely the position that he is now retreating to. There are two remarks that support such a reading. The first is his remark, in §7, that the concept of the object presented by this "intuitional content" is merely formal. This has obvious resonances with Kant's "transcendental object=x", and seems to correspond nicely to the variables in the open sentence that describes nonconceptual content for Evans (they all fulfil the same function, of making the content a purporting to be of objects). In any case, if my gloss of the "mere formality" of the object here is right, then this violates Russell's Principle, which would require an object in a more weighty sense.
The second remark is in §6 and it is, I think, the most important one. I quote:
"Part of the point of is that there are typically aspects of the content of an intuition that the subject has no means of making discursively explicit. Visual intuitions typically present one with visible characteristics of objects that one is not equipped to attribute to the objects by making appropriate predications in claims or judgments. To make such an aspect of the content of an intuition into the content associated with a capacity that is discursive in a primary sense, one would need to carve it out, as it were, from the categorially unified but as yet unarticulated content of the intuition by determining it to be the meaning of a linguistic expression, which one thereby sets up as a means for making that content explicit."
But this seems to be an evident violation of the Generality Constraint, which requires from an individual the ability, precisely, of "making appropriate predications in claims or judgments" (that is the whole point of the Generality Constraint!). Suppose the "intuitional content" visually presents me with the intuitional analogue of the claim "a is F", which I have "no means of making explicit". Then I cannot make further judgments of the type "a is G" and "b is F", i.e. I lack the necessary concepts, "a" and "F". But if this is so, what's the point of calling this "intuitional content" conceptual? If the only reason to still call it "conceptual" is because "every aspect of the content of an intuition is present in a form in which it is already suitable to be the content of a discursive capacity" (§6), that was apparently the case with Evans nonconceptual content as well, and there seems to be good reasons for maintaining that "non".
Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me that McDowell's insistence in calling this kind of content "conceptual" is an instance of he called elsewhere (I don't remember where) mere labeling.
"That book should be required reading before anyone attempts to grapple with McDowell."
Yup. Agreed.
"I wonder how Aristotelian that notion could be in McDowell (i.e., is it the full-blown second-potentiality as described in De Anima, II, 1)."
I think it is. McDowell uses the first act/second act distinction in "Sellars's Thomism" in laying out his view, and that McDowell is some sort of Aristotelian is clear from "Virtue and Reason" and his other moral writings.
"It's also not clear to me at present (and so prior to more reading) how second nature is supposed to reenchant nature."
"Two Sorts of Naturalism" (in MVR) is good on this, I think. There McDowell defends his Aristotle-ish approach to thinking about living things. Also, Bernstein presses the "re-enchanting nature" point in "Reading McDowell" (thus the title of his essay), which helps to put what McDowell means by it into context. "The disenchantment of nature" is meant in many ways, and McDowell isn't trying to take on all of them.
Also, note that second nature doesn't re-enchant nature itself (as if it used to be enchanted, then God died, but now McDowell is bringing back part of the old magic), but that when we realize that a broadly Aristotelian picture of what rational animality is like can still be respectable, the tension between Nature and Reason ceases to feel like a real tension. ("Second nature is nature, too.") Nature has never been totally disenchanted, except in philosophers' fictions. (You probably already knew this.)
Other Daniel: That is a lot to think about, and I have a lunch (with McDowell and other grad students) in 40 minutes. edit: 30
I probably need to spend more time looking at Evans (I wrote a paper about his reading of Frege, and I have some exposure to him via conversation and McDowelliana, but I haven't finished "Varieties"). But I'm not sure that the violation of the Generality Constraint you see is so clearly there: once I do "carve out" a bit of content ("a is F"), I do, in the same act, gain the ability to make judgements of the form "a is G" and "b is F". So I'm never thinking "a is F" without being able to think "a is G", in the way that Evans's primary target seems to be.
But then you may be right that this doesn't make McDowell different from Evans. I need to spend more time trying to work out what Evans's own view was here. Lunch now.
The problem is that when I do carve out the bit of content (as you put it), what I end up with is not "intuitional" content, but "discursive" content. So it seems that we should fall back on Evans here, and represent "intuitional" content by open sentences and obtain "discursive" content by substitution of the relevant variables by determinate objects. In fact, this actually seems closer to Kant's view, who did consider "intuitional" content as indeterminate, than what McDowell had presented us with in Mind and World, where he seemed to consider even "intuitional" content as determinate (i.e. as emboding a proposition). I think a more careful reading of Lecture III of Mind and World is in order...
By the way, I hope you have a good lunch!
"I think a more careful reading of Lecture III of Mind and World is in order..."
This is fair. I need to read more Evans, and then go back and look at the Evans bits of M&W. Thanks again for the collected papers.
"In fact, this actually seems closer to Kant's view, who did consider "intuitional" content as indeterminate, than what McDowell had presented us with in Mind and World, where he seemed to consider even "intuitional" content as determinate (i.e. as emboding a proposition)."
Can you give me a passage citation for that part of Kant-on-intuitions? I can't remember where the explicit determinable-determinate distinction comes up (I think those are the terms Kant puts it in) as a way of distinguishing intuition from concept.
Assuming I remember how Kant draws the distinction, I would've thought that McDowell's view in "Avoiding" did a fine job of accommodating it. I have to "carve out" any particular bit of intuitional content to make it the content of a judgement; before I do this, it's not determined what bit I will carve out, or how I will do it ("a cube of this shade of blue" versus "a cerulean cube", say). Judgements are thus always more determinate than the intuitional contents they're based on, both in the sense that I always see more than I say that I see, and that two people can see things the same way while describing how they see it differently.
I apologize for not asking McDowell about Evans, but a) I don't have the background to ask what you want to ask as well as you would want it asked and b) the stuff about singular contents and the contents of experiences I heard this week seems to make the Evansian description of the content of experience something McDowell wouldn't want to accept.
I am puzzled about how McDowell is able to handle Kant's claim that intuitions are singular representations, now, but maybe he's willing to just let that part go. It's still the case that I can get indefeasible warrants to know that "a is P" by experience ("I know that John is thin by how he looks"); he just doesn't include these recognitional capacities under the header of articulating aspects of the content of an experience.
Hmm, maybe the fact that existential content ("There is an X which is F") is not singular content is part of why he wasn't sure he wanted to say that experiential content is existential. It makes him unable to say that what he says "intuitional content" is is a representatio singularis, or at least like it does. Wish I'd thought of that while he was here.
Don't worry about the stuff on Evans and McDowell; I'm not sure I have the details right myself! What mainly interests me here is not the relation between Evans and McDowell itself, but the way the latter's criticism of the former in MW reverberate on his current position.
As for the stuff on Kant's notion of intuition, I had in mind the opening of the Aesthetic, where he characterizes "appearance" as the "undetermined object of an empirical intuition". Since Kant distinguishes "appearance" from "phenomenon" in that the latter but not the former are "thought in accordance with the unity of the categories" (Cf. A 248-9), and since this is clearly an echo of the distinction also drawn in the Dissertation (Ak 2:394, §5) which specifies that this unity is brought by the "logical use of the understanding" (i.e. its reflective use in integrating these "appearances" into a world-view), I think it's fair to say that this notion corresponds (rather loosely) with what McDowell wants to express with his notion of "intuitional" content.
I'm not sure I understand why McDowell would need to let go the singularity criterion. Can you elaborate on that a bit?
Looking at chapter III of M&W, I immediately notice this bit from p. 48: "These non-conceptual informational states are the results of perception's playing a role in what Evans calls 'the informational system'.... It is central to Evans's view that... the operations of the information system are more primitive than the operations of spontaneity. This point is straightforward in the case of perception and memory, which, as Evans says, 'we share with animals'; that is, with creatures on which the idea of spontaneity gets no grip."
This is clearly still a thing McDowell rejects: nothing apperceivable is common between rational and non-rational animals. The way animals perceive is not the way we perceive (since it's intrinsic to our way of seeing that we know we might get things wrong and so are responsible for our taking things to be as they appear whenever we do so, whereas animals don't worry about this and are never held responsible for it), though both are ways of perceiving. The commonality between human and brute perception is not a shared element in perception, but that both are species of a common genus.
So long as this is still how McDowell thinks of Evans's view, the fact that the view he opposes it to has changed a bit doesn't matter.
"I'm not sure I understand why McDowell would need to let go the singularity criterion. Can you elaborate on that a bit?"
I was thinking of Sellar's proposal that we think of intuitions as having contents like "this red cube". This clearly makes intutional content singular, because demonstrative content is singular: you can't have that content without the particular red cube playing a part in making it the content that it is. "This is a red cube" expresses a singular thought.
But McDowell (from what I heard last week) now is inclined to say that the content of an experience doesn't include singular content: "There is a transparent red cube atop a brown surface" is the sort of thing I can say solely by virtue of articulating intuitional content, but "This is a red cube" is not. Singular thoughts I am enabled to know via perception are known by the exercise of recognitional capacities which do not merely carve out intuitional content. When I carve out intuitional content and don't add anything else, I just get existential claims.
So McDowell can say that the content of an experience is always the content of an experience I could have while in a "bad case": I can have the same content in an experience of a red cube even when there are no red cubes near me. This lets him express his disjunctivism about perception by saying that the good case and the bad case have the same content (which is the way he's talked about it for a while now -- I'm not sure how far back that form of words goes). This couldn't be so if part of the content of an experience was singular, because of the "de re senses" stuff: I wouldn't be able to have just those contents if the objects involved weren't present to me. (This is at least the case where the "bad case" involves living in a world where there are no red cubes, say; misidentifying objects doesn't raise the same problem as thinking that the non-existent exists does.)
So, if one wants to think of Sellars as getting the singularity of intuitions right, McDowell gets it wrong: what he calls "intuitions" are now something other than singular contents (including demonstrative contents).
Of course, there's some room for McDowell to wiggle here: intuitional content still "brings into view" objects that I recognize by exercising other recognitional capacities (such as John McDowell -- the way we recognize people was an example he kept returning to while discussing this on Wednesday, and of course proper names are singular terms). Perception is still the place that singularity comes in. But intuition by itself is articulated in claims with quantifiers, not claims with singular terms.
On Evans: I think you're misreading McDowell's criticism. Shortly after the passage you've quoted, McDowell makes very clear that Evans makes a sharp distinction between the non-conceptual informational states that we share with non-rational creatures and the perceptual experiences that we, qua rational, enjoy (see the remarks on p. 49-50, in which he notes that someone who wishes to detach the notion of perceptual experience from spontaneity "cannot easily enrol Evans as an ally").
This is also clear when he returns to this issue at p. 63: "Both Evans and I are committed to there being different stories to tell about the perceptual goings-on in creatures with spontaneity and in creatures without it." Obviously, there is a sense in which Evans's account appears to be more generous to other creatures than is McDowell's, as it allows some commonality of content between "us" and "them". But I don't think Evans's account needs to be pushed in that direction, and McDowell's own caveats seems to authorize such caution.
On the singularity criterion: This is very interesting! I will have to think more about this issue (in connection with Kant -- and Evans) before responding.
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