The Endogenous given: why I am not satisfied with McDowell on this front

I ended my last post on the endogenous given with this summary of how I think the dialectic of pure thought has gone:

Quine rejects the very idea of an endogenous given, and so becomes prone to speaking of logic as merely "obvious", of our knowledge of the law of non-contradiction as simply on a par with our knowledge of the solidity of the earth beneath our feet. He loses pure thought into the world. Carnap had tried to secure pure thought on a conventionalist basis, but this is hopeless; Quine reacted by jettisoning the very idea of it. But as Davidson showed, Quine also made empiricism impossible; where Quine wanted to maintain a link between thought and world, he lapsed into incoherence. McDowell showed that Davidson, in making empiricism impossible, unintentionally made thought itself impossible, and so sought to resecure empiricism. A task I think McDowell has left unfinished is a further retrieval: once empiricism has been vindicated, how are we to further vindicate pure thought?

In the comments, Nikhil asks a fair question: Didn't McDowell already answer this question in section nine of "Davidson in Context"? Why do I think he's left something unfinished? This post is my answer.

In section nine, McDowell says rejecting the dualism of scheme and content does not threaten "the idea that there are limits to what makes sense: that our mindedness, as Jonathan Lear puts it, has a necessary structure.... And analytic truths (in an interesting sense, not just definitionally guaranteed truisms like "A vixen is a female fox") might be just those that delineate such a necessary structure." This "interesting" sense of "analytic truth" is what I was calling "pure thought" in my previous post.

(To support my talking in this way, I note that two pages later (p.160) McDowell mentions that "An analytic statement should be a statement with no vulnerability to experience", and that the idea of the synthetic a priori comes up nowhere in the book. So I feel confident that the bolded claim from my last post was on the right track: the endogenous given includes both the analytic and the synthetic a priori.)

I take what follows in this section of "Davidson in Context" to be a series of gestures towards how we to think about "the idea that there are limits to what makes sense", how to think about pure thought.

First, Lear: if one turns to the Lear essay that McDowell mentions above, "Leaving the World Alone", one finds that Lear articulates his idea of a necessary form of mindedness in terms of the Tractarian doctrine of truths which can only be shown, and cannot be said. Statements that articulate the necessary forms of our mindedness are a special sort of nonsense, in that they show us thinking of both sides of the limits of how we can be minded. I think this idea is simply incoherent, as any serious attention to it shows. If we can't think something, we can't think it; we can't whistle it, either.

I think it's also not a doctrine espoused in the Tractatus, because that book is not a book of doctrine, and Wittgenstein did not conceive of philosophy as a body of doctrine. When I met him in 2010, I asked McDowell about his occasional use of "The world is all that is the case" to express the view of "the world" he wanted to call our attention to in, for example, the closing pages of "Conceptual Capacities in Perception". (p.143 in Having the World in View, where he calls it "idealism in an obvious sense".) I put the question to him: Does he deny that the world is all that is; that the world is the totality of things, not facts? Happily, he answered "No". Those are both perfectly fine ways of using the word "world", and he agreed with me that Wittgenstein did not mean in the Tractatus to promote one of them to the exclusion of the other; he likes the "resolute" approach to the book. He also emphasized that the closing pages of "Conceptual Capacities in Perception" must be read in the context of the Ayer essay it's responding to, which he clearly felt was just awful and deserved the response he gave it: "You think I can't talk in this way? Well I can, so nyah!" [My paraphrase.]

So, I think McDowell cannot be happy with resting on the idea that we can articulate the necessary structure of our mindedness by attempting to say what can only be shown, in Tractarian fashion. The Lear essay is a dead-end so far as rehabilitating the idea of pure thought goes.

The second way I see McDowell trying to think about pure thought is in terms of an idea of Sellars, discussed earlier in section four of "Davidson in Context". Sellars wrote in "Empiricism and Philosophy of Mind" that "empirical knowledge, like its sophisticated extension, science, is rational, not because it has a foundation but because it is a self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once." McDowell glosses this as saying "that any of our beliefs, including beliefs about structures that must be instantiated in intellectually respectable belief systems -- the beliefs that implicitly or explicitly govern adjustments in belief systems in response to experience -- are open to revision." (p.136) In section nine he returns to this claim: "Sellars's thought [that all forms of Givenness are to be overcome]... did not require him to claim that absolutely everything we think 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 [of scheme and content], and it need not be." (p. 158) So, he thinks that Sellars slipped up, and that immunity to revision come what may is an idea that needs rehabilitation.

Now, one reason I have for not being happy with this way of thinking about pure thought is just the fact that I like what Sellars had to say, in its full radicalness: thought is rational because it can put any claim in jeopardy, thought not all at once. (This may be stronger than Sellars himself meant it; I'm not sure if "empirical knowledge" is a pleonasm for him.) It seems to me that even in the realm of pure thought, there is room for disputation (though of a non-empirical sort).

For example: it is part of our form of mindedness that all thinkers have beliefs, have a way that they take the world to be. This is not an empirical claim, as if it just so happened that all thinkers we have found have beliefs, but a pure one: it is an interesting analytic truth, in McDowell's sense. But some have denied this: the ancient Pyrrhonists wrote that to live without doxa lead one to ataraxia, and some have read this as claiming that one should not have beliefs, or a view of the world, at all: one should suspend judgement about it, and be lead by impressions (which one does not take to give oneself a view of the world). Alternatively, Richard Jeffrey claimed that Ramsey "sucked the marrow from the bone of belief", and that we should henceforth talk of subjective probabilities instead: belief-talk was "the old religion" that has been replaced by the clear sunshine of probabilism, and it should be discarded, like phlogiston-talk has been. I want to say that it's good that these positions get argued over; I think we get clearer on what's involved with belief-talk, with it being a necessary part of our mindedness that we have beliefs, by seeing what's wrong with these alternative views. Why, then, would I want to deny that what I take to articulate a necessary form of our mindedness is up for dispute? I don't say this on Quinean grounds (the idea that everything is more or less physics), but on grounds of pure thought: I think dialectical encounters like this, which require that parts of our conceptual scheme be actually called into doubt by some parties to the encounter, are good for us reasoners. They help us to understand ourselves.

Historically, I suspect that the very idea of belief-talk in our familiar form got banged out because of Ancient philosophy's dealing with Parmenides: his weird split between the one truth/reality/Being and the "likely story" of the universe that is false (which occupies most of the proem that the goddess tells him) leads to Plato distinguishing various points along the divided line in the Republic, etc. It can be hard to take Parmenides seriously now, since he seems to simply say bizarre things, but he really was taken incredibly seriously by Plato and Aristotle, both of whom thought that his views were subtle and difficult to properly handle. I think a case can be made that Aristotle's distinctions among the ways in which "being" is said are due to his having to handle Parmenides: and Aristotle's success has passed into our common sense, which is why Parmenides now seems to simply be goofy. Such goofiness is the soil in which common sense is nurtured.

(Random aside, since I found it while trying to find that Jolley post: Yo Yo Ma on the floor of a bathroom, with a wombat.)

On another front: I continue to feel the attraction of Isaac Levi's version of decision theory/pragmatism, where all of my beliefs are on a par: I presently expect to revise none of them, ever, and for all of them to endure come what may. This is just what it comes to for me to take seriously that my beliefs are my worldview: this is how I take the world to be, and so I can't take the world to maybe not be this way. If I want to doubt my own view of the world, I can only do this on the basis of my own view of the world: thus I can only put things into question piecemeal, and not all at once, just as Sellars said. Empirical knowledge, on Levi's view, has a sort of unrevisability that is shared with pure knowledge: I have utmost confidence in it, and reject what is incompatible with it just on the grounds that it is incompatible with it. To have a view of the way the world is means also having a view of the way the world can't be, and isn't. All of this knowledge is revisable in the light of "experience" in Dewey's sense, the sense in which a job listing can ask for a typist with three years' experience, but this is just to say that (in some way or other) all parts of it can be put into question. It is still fully compatible with saying that Quine was wrong to think that logic and all the rest of pure thought were revisable because they were only remote parts of physical theory.

But, these are external criticisms (though ones I think McDowell should be somewhat sympathetic to). Can I also find internal criticisms to make of McDowell's idea that pure thought is what is unrevisable come what may?

I think I can, to some extent. One of the things McDowell implied above is that he wants to think that "beliefs about structures that must be instantiated in intellectually respectable belief systems" are unrevisable. But this idea of "structures that must be instantiated in intellectually respectable belief systems" strikes me as unsteady in the way that the Tractarian doctrine mentioned above is: it suggests that also thinkable are intellectually unrespectable belief systems, belief systems which lack the structures which are our necessary forms of mindedness. McDowell wants to deny that one could have beliefs about the structures which are our necessary form of mindedness such that one is thinking of such a belief system; if he does not, then I do not understand how he could claim that such beliefs are unrevisable. For unless one cannot get these structures wrong, beliefs about them must be revisable, lest we be stuck in eternal error about them. But if we can't get this sort of thing wrong, then I don't know what the contrast is supposed to be between intellectually respectable and intellectually unrespectable belief systems. The distinction can't be between those who do and don't make mistakes (fall for illusions, trust bad testimony), because the sort of structures McDowell is talking about have to be common between those if they are to be structures of our mindedness as such. But then the contrast seems to be: between minds which are minded and minds which are not. But this is no contrast at all. So, I think McDowell actually meant a contrast between minds which make mistakes regarding pure thought and those which don't. Intellectually respectable belief systems are those which are respectable qua intellect: they are not confused about thought as such, even if they are confused about empirical matters in various fashions. But then it looks like pure thought is a realm in which one can make mistakes (in a non-empirical fashion), and so one ought to hold beliefs about pure thought open to revision in the light of "experience" in Dewey's sense: further life and dialogue with others might lead one to see that one had not gotten clear about thinking, even when one thought one had.

The rest of section nine is involved in a discussion of transcendental idealism and its mere semblance of securing our beliefs, and some very brief remarks about Wittgenstein's talk of "how we go on". I think McDowell's simply right about Wittgenstein not being a transcendental idealist (at least in his later work), but that part of the essay seems to me tangential. The real issue is how Wittgensteinian "reminders" can do their work without providing the illusion of security that transcendental idealism (or conventionalism, I'd add) can appear to. But this post is already long and tangled, so I'll leave off here, with more closing obscure questions: McDowell, p.159: ""How we go on" is just our mindedness, which is ex hypothesi in constituted harmony with our world; it is not something that constitutes the harmony, as it were from outside." -- Is this harmony always so constituted? Can this hypothesis be false, in particular cases? What is one to say if one appeals to "How we go on" and is asked "But must we do this?" or "But should we do this?" or "Who is this we, Kemosabe?"

The Endogenous given: a possible breakthrough on my part?

The Myth of the Given is usually approached as if it was simply another name for sense-data theories, but Sellars had broader aims than that, as the opening of his essay makes clear. McDowell is sensitive to this; even though most of his discussions of the Myth occur in the context of discussions of perception, he is aware that this form of the Given is only "the exogenous Given".

I have hitherto been unable to make sense of what "the endogenous Given" would be, in McDowell's sense. I am now going to have another go at it, because I couldn't get back to sleep while it kept coming to mind.

The idea of the exogenous Given can be put like this: there are some truths which we must take notice of, give credit to, anterior to language. Language is the sphere of our conceptual sovereignty, and we can speak as we like, but we must pay respect to some superlative Facts (sensory stimuli, sense data, unschematized intuitions, raw feels). Whenever we rework our web of language-belief, there are some items which we regard as Given (prior to any way we wish to work out our web of language-belief, as these items have empirical content each on their own, and we must work around them in reworking our web). These are the items which impinge on our web of belief from outside, in Quine's terms, and prompt us to rework it in the first place; they are also what enable items within our web to have reference, to link up with the world at all, to be either true or false.

I will leave the problems with the exogenous Given aside; my readers are presumably very familiar with them. Now: can I modify this picture to depict an endogenous Given?

An attempt at doing so: the idea of an endogeous Given can be put like this: there are some truths which we can be secure in, anterior to the relating of language to the world. Experience is the tribunal in which our thoughts are tested, and the world is always liable to prove us wrong, but there are some truths which are safe from the world's onslaught: they are due solely to our free decisions. (Semantical rules, rules of grammar, L-rules and P-rules.) Whenever we rework our web of language-belief, there are some items which are not open to revision: not on the grounds that we must work around them out of respect, but on the grounds that they cannot possibly be causing trouble: they were part of the web before the web had any possible friction with experience. We rework our webs to accommodate experience's verdicts, but there are some items within the web which are prior to the linking-up of the web with any possible experience: and since they do not speak to experience, experience cannot speak to them. They are items within the web which are independent of the world, and have their position in our thought prior to thought's contact with the world. They give a structure to the web which we find useful, but which has nothing to do with the world.

McDowell thinks that Quine's attack on analyticity may manifest an awareness that there can be no endogenous Given. If I am now groping towards a correct understanding of what McDowell means by this, then I can make sense of his reading of "Two Dogmas" in this way: Carnap's language-systems laid out rules of various sorts (L-Rules and P-Rules in "Logical Syntax of Language", Semantical Rules once he decided he should add semantics to his arsenal), and these rules were 1) purely up to our free pragmatic decision, and incapable of theoretical defense or critique; 2) part of the language as soon as they were added (the analytic statements of the language, which were true before the language was put to work in science); 3) included in the language prior to decisions were made about how to handle protocol sentences within the language (the synthetic statements of the language, which would be made true or false by experience only). One way of putting a complaint of Quine's is then this: the sentences which Carnap calls "analytic" are not actually capable of defense or attack in a way distinct from any other sentences; as Carnap already allowed in "Logical Syntax of Language" section 82, any sentence (synthetic, L-Rule, or P-Rule) can be revised if it seems expedient to do so in the light of awkwardness among protocols, in the face of recalcitrant experience. Carnap had added that some revisions constituted changes of language while others constituted moves within a language, but it is hard to find a practical difference between the two. What Carnap called a move "within a language" was a change of truth-value of a synthetic statement when experience showed that it was necessary to revise some member of a cluster of statements (Carnap was already aware of Duhem, and is explicit that scientific hypotheses are not tested one by one). What Carnap called a "change of language" was a change of truth-value of an analytic statement when experience showed that it was necessary to change some member of a cluster of statements. The supposed safety of analytic statements from challenge by experience is illusory: they are only immune to revision so long as we are sovereign to continue speaking "the same language", to keep using the same artificial Carnapian construct, without any possible judgement from the world. But the idea that we can choose a language in the way that Carnap thought we could is illusory: we never inhabit a realm of "purely pragmatic" judgements anterior to theoretical defense or criticism, where Carnapian conventionalism could be the order of the day. No part of our language is in place before our language hooks up to the world, independently of our obligations as beings which think the world.

If this is right, then Quine's attack on Carnap is an attack on "the endogenous Given" because it is an attack on a purely pragmatic (a-theoretical, a-rational), conventionalist view of part of our language (part of our thinking). Carnap tried to lay out part of language prior to language, just as the exogenous Given tries to secure some experiences prior to experience: both are Given because each tries to have part of language-experience before both are operative. Meaning is not present without the world to articulate, and the world is not given without our thought articulating it.

Now, one of the central tasks of "Mind and World" is to lay out a way of thinking of an exogenous given (without the capital), such that within language-experience experience can serve as a tribunal for thought. In the first appendix to his book, "Davidson in Context", McDowell suggests that once this has been done, it can be seen that Quine's attacks on analyticity leave untouched "the endogenous given". This would have to be something like a way for language to structure thought within language-experience. The challenge to articulating an exogenous given was to make clear how experience could make a belief right or wrong without already being a belief, being something within our conceptual sovereignty; the challenge to articulating an endogenous given is to make clear how thought can be structured without already being among the items within thought, without simply being something the world contributes. The exogenous given always threatened to disappear within thought, leaving us with thought spinning frictionlessly; the endogenous given threatens to disappear into the world, leaving our minds as wax tablets which the world imprints upon.

This way of looking at it I think makes clearer what McDowell thinks as being in the extension of "the endogeous given": pure thought as such, in Kant's sense. This also makes clear why he refers to rehabilitating analyticity to articulate "the necessary structure of our mindedness", and to not simply contain "definitionally secured truisms like 'a vixen is a female fox'". The endogenous given will not simply be the analytic a priori, but also the synthetic a priori!

In Kant, the analytic a priori and the synthetic a priori are distinguished by the question of whether one needs to make reference to what can be given to us in a possible intuition, in our peculiar forms of intuition. McDowell follows Hegel in canceling part of this: the forms of intuition are not peculiarly ours, but belong to thought as such; all of pure thought thus has the generality Kant reserved for pure general logic. Where some of Kant's analytic a priori truths, such as the law of non-contradiction, had held independently of our forms of intuition, and others, such as the law of universal nomological causal connection, had not, for Hegel and McDowell no a priori truth can have less generality than another: they are the truths of thought as such.

This way of looking at it can leave mysterious why Kant held that a priori truths which had more limited application were synthetic, but this can be resolved by a Hegelian criticism: Kant held that those among his a priori truths which held only for thinkers with our peculiar spatiotemporal forms of intuition were synthetic because he held that they related concepts (our spontaneity) with forms of intuition (our receptivity), in dualistic fashion. What he called "analytic" he did not have to relate to a form of intuition which he regarded as being given independently of our concepts, our spontaneity; what he called "synthetic" he did have to relate to something he regarded as independently given. A symptom of this dualism in Kant's thought is the distinction between a "metaphysical" and a "transcendental" exposition/deduction of the forms of intuition and thought (space, time, and the categories): Kant lays out the forms of space and time and his Table of Judgements before going on to defend these as necessary forms of all our cognition (as united in the schematized categories). Hegel does not proceed in this way; his exposition of the categories in his system is immediately a defense of them as the necessary forms of our thought, for he produces them only as forms in which thought thinks itself. Hegel can thus say that the method of philosophy (his philosophy) is neither analytic nor synthetic: he neither reproduces what is provided from our spontaneity considered as something independent of our receptivity, nor relates our spontaneity to anything given in receptivity regarded as independent of our spontaneity. His label for his thinking is simply: Pure thought.

This way of thinking about the endogenous given, as encompassing pure thought as such, is especially helpful as a way of viewing Quine: Quine rejects the very idea of an endogenous given, and so becomes prone to speaking of logic as merely "obvious", of our knowledge of the law of non-contradiction as simply on a par with our knowledge of the solidity of the earth beneath our feet. He loses pure thought into the world. Carnap had tried to secure pure thought on a conventionalist basis, but this is hopeless; Quine reacted by jettisoning the very idea of it. But as Davidson showed, Quine also made empiricism impossible; where Quine wanted to maintain a link between thought and world, he lapsed into incoherence. McDowell showed that Davidson, in making empiricism impossible, unintentionally made thought itself impossible, and so sought to resecure empiricism. A task I think McDowell has left unfinished is a further retrieval: once empiricism has been vindicated, how are we to further vindicate pure thought?

Was Heidegger an Analytic Philosopher?

Brian Leiter is poking fun at the analytic/continental distinction again, this time by way of the late Dummett:

Unnoted, of course, is that Dummett's conception of "analytic" philosophy--as "an armchair subject, requiring only thought" and as trying "to clarify the concepts in terms of which we conceive of [reality], and hence the linguistic expressions by means of which we formulate our conception" as he put it in his last book--was such that huge numbers of philosophers in the Anglophone world today wouldn't qualify, though one can happily stipulate that Dummett is an "analytic" philosopher in his sense, and Heidegger is not.

The funny thing is, I'm not sure that Heidegger doesn't get counted as an "analytic" philosopher, if all we look at from Dummett's book is this one claim. He clearly wasn't doing "empirical" work in the way that Leiter likes to promote, so he can only be ruled out by the second part of Dummett's quote's criterion: Did Heidegger attempt to "clarify the concepts in terms of which we conceive of [reality], and hence the linguistic expressions by means of which we formulate our conceptions"?

My initial reaction is to say that he did, at least in Being and Time. It's easy to find passages like the one from section 14, where Heidegger presents a list of four ways in which the word "world" is used, and notes that he's "unraveling" these uses so that "we can get an indication of the different kinds of phenomena that are signified, and of the way in which they are interconnected." (p.93 in the Macquarrie translation). This looks to be straightforwardly what Dummett's quote says analytic philosophers do. But this is only a particularly clear instance of a general strategy: Being and Time is largely made up of discussions of ordinary sorts of words and experiences in a context which makes clear that it's easy to get confused about them. For instance, Heidegger's discussion of "reality" (the concept) is largely focused on the ways in which Descartes misunderstood things in this area, and the problems it lead him into. (Also fun is Leiter's joking attempt to unify "analytic" philosophers by the fact "that they all probably read "On Sense and Reference" at some point, given that we know that Heidegger read this work.)

What spurred me to think about this was a post Enowning linked to the other day; the post itself doesn't interest me, but I quite liked being pointed to a passage I had overlooked (it wasn't highlighted in my copy of the book): "Nevertheless, the ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself, and to keep common understanding from leveling them off to that unintelligibility which functions in turn as a source of pseudo-problems." (p.262 in the Macquarrie) The context of this quote is section 44 of the first division of Being and Time, the discussion of truth which closes that division, and why Heidegger is looking at (what he thinks of as) the etymology of "ἀλήθεια" in Greek. He notes that he needs to avoid "uninhibited word-mysticism" in doing this, and I'm not sure he meets his own demand here (and later on I think he clearly falls into it). But the success of what he's aiming at here doesn't interest me as much as what the goal he set for himself was: he's trying to avoid "that unintelligibility which functions in turn as a source of pseudo-problems" which comes from a "common understanding" which "levels off" words.

It seems to me that one of the main things that Heidegger is concerned with warding off in this section is the idea that it is only in true thoughts (judgements, assertions) that we (our minds, our thoughts, our language) "come into contact" with the world. This comes to seem obvious to us when we think of truth as exhausted by things like the T-schema: "S" is true IFF S. Truth is here a predicate of concatenated strings of signs, and to say of a string that it is true "is just to say what the string says itself": truth is chased up the tree of grammar. As a truth-predicate can be added onto any existing language without changing the inferential connections between the portions of that language which do not contain a truth-predicate, it can thus appear that truth is "not deep", is "redundant", "does not refer to a real property": thus we should handle how the language works without truth, and then a truth-predicate can be added onto it. This is what Heidegger has in view when he criticizes the idea that truth is rightly thought of as simply a property of judgements: to do so makes it easy to think that judgement should be intelligible without truth, and then truth be made intelligible in terms of antecedently-understood judgements.

Against this, Heidegger tries (in various ways) to get us to see that our ability to judge at all, rightly or wrongly, is possible only because of our "disclosedness": there is a binary hiddenness/revealedness to the entities uncovered in our being-in-the-world which is more primordial than explicit judgements, and our ability to say anything (truely or falsely) by means of concatenated strings depends on it. The appearance that the binary true-false predicates of truth could be added onto a language which was antecedently understood thus covered up the fact that the language was understood only against a background of some such disclosedness, which should itself be apprehended in a discussion of truth and falsity, as its binary and the true-false binary are kin. The "common understanding" that allows concatenated strings of signs to be regarded as "saying something (in a language)", and to take these independently-intelligible relations as a foundation for work in semantics, can only be achieved by a "leveling off" which occludes the fact that we symbolize only in the course of our lives together, and that we leave things unsaid if we insist on treating language solely in terms of signs, sets, and satisfaction-relations. Signs "in the language" have the set-theoretic relations they are established to have in the set-theoretic universe; symbols have meanings only in our life together.

So, it seems to me that Heidegger was concerned with clarifying our concepts (our thoughts) and the words we use to express them; if it is necessary to any analytic/continental distinction that Heidegger be opposed to the "analytic" group, then Dummett's quote does not give us such a distinction.

The Metaphysics of Lobstergod

DR linked to a silly "New Apps" post, "In Praise of the Incredulous Stare", and I'm proud enough of my comments on his comments on the comments to that post that I'm making a post out of them.

Here is a defense of philosophers who boldly go against common sense. It's weird (not exactly unusual, but disorienting) to see things from that point of view. In comments there, dmf writes that "If memory serves Rorty reads Davidson, after Kuhn, on "living" metaphors as non-sensical creations (perhaps provoked by encounters with the unassimilated) that evoke paradigm shifts and then are slowly incorporated into everyday use and slowly “die”." I don't know whether Rorty would have liked calling such things nonsensical (maybe that's just the word that Davidson uses, I don't know), but otherwise this idea sounds fine to me. It's hardly the same thing as philosophers claiming that possible worlds are real, though, or that nothing is a part of anything. Or so it seems to me.

Rorty wouldn't have been entirely happy with calling such things nonsense, and Davidson didn't. The problem with doing so is that the question of sense/nonsense is orthogonal to the issue of something's functioning as a live metaphor. A true sentence such as "Obama puts his pants on one leg at a time" or a false one such as "Love is a battlefield" can function as metaphors, and so can sentences like "Metaphor is the dreamwork of language" where I don't know what to say about its truth, falsity, or sensicality (does it presuppose that language can sleep? is "of language" an objective or subjective genitive?). And then some sentences of patent nonsense ("Books are rhomboid fluorine") and some sensical sentences ("There are black dogs") would be hard-pressed to do any work as metaphors. Sense/nonsense and good metaphor/bad metaphor are just independent axes of assessment.

Davidson says that metaphors function in the way that pictures do, and that "a picture is not worth a thousand words, or any other number. Words are the wrong currency to exchange for a picture." A picture can lead its viewer to think of certain things alongside one another, or in connection to or contrast with one another, which he would not have otherwise done. But the way it does so cannot be reconstructed as by supplying things which can serve as premises in a valid inference to the conclusion which is the thoughts inspired in the viewer, or anything along those lines -- pictures are not the sort of thing that can have the sort of content a sentence has (that is "the wrong currency"). Not all of our thoughts are arrived at rationally (in a way codifiable in valid inferences), and this is a good thing: creativity is a lovely and useful part of our lives, for example, and it is not a rational process. To say of some connection between thoughts that it is merely causal, not rational, is not necessarily to denigrate it.

"It's hardly the same thing as philosophers claiming that possible worlds are real, though, or that nothing is a part of anything. Or so it seems to me."

I'm actually not sure that this isn't a profitable way to think about those guys: they're providing new ways of talking, ways which are initially (at least somewhat) metaphorical (thus their air of paradox), but which can sediment into just being one more optional vocabulary we can take up at leisure. I don't think that this is how *they* think of what they're doing (though I'm less sure of David Lewis than of Sider or van Inwagen), but then the Idealists, Realists, and Solipsists of PI 402 don't think that they're working in the way Wittgenstein there says they are, either. But it seems to me that the shoe fits: Lewis wants to make it no longer seem pressing to answer questions like "What are modal claims about?" by talking in terms of "real non-actual worlds", and a lot of opposition to "modal realism" attacks this shift of vocabulary as if they were attacking something they already were talking about, but which (before David Lewis) everyone knew was false ("There is only one world!"). What looks like (can look like) disagreements in metaphysics are actually disagreements about metaphysical vocabularies: there's only a show of there being some theses which one side accepts and the other rejects, since there's no agreement in how any such thesis is to be understood (even where, among the supposed theses, are theses which look like "...and we understand by this claim that...." or "...which is meant in the sense of..."). The two "metaphysicians" disagree with one another not over the truth-value of a proposition, but over how metaphysicians should talk.

I think this is quite contrary to the spirit of the "New Apps" post, but I'm not sure it isn't closer to what Deleuze & Guatarri actually saw as the value of their work: as I see them, they were providing new vocabularies we could take up (or not), not trying to make us better "understand" "common sense" in the way that "conceptual analysis" or Hume's psychological speculations were meant to. Guatarri said that what he really wanted to do was "say stupid shit. Barf out the fucking-around-o-maniacal schizo flow", and it seems to me that any value in such a project would be very different from anything Hume could see as the value of *his* project, let alone Sider or van Inwagen. "Creating concepts" in the D-G sense is saying "God is a lobster" and then talking about the God-lobster in geological terms, not "God is an entity possessing maximal greatness" and then trying to derive as many conclusions from this as possible. The point is just to get us moving in different directions and see where that takes us. The bizarre style of Deleuze/Guattari's work is not an accidental feature of their philosophy.

(This is an extension of my short post on Andy Clark's extended mind thing from a while back.)

A Link Post

I haven't been keeping my blogroll maintained, so here's some links to blogs the reader might not have known of:

Early Modern Experimental Philosophy is about reading the early moderns along an experimental-speculative dichotomy rather than an empiricist-rationalist one. This has the merit of being a distinction actually in use at the time, rather than being one which first comes into full flower with Karl Reinhold. I continue to be impressed with how much of what "everyone knows" about Kant and Kantianism comes from places where Reinhold varied from Kant.

OLP & Literary Studies Online regularly links to/mentions new work on Cavell and Wittgenstein.

The Renaissance Mathematicus is a history of science blog. I should probably read more of those. They're fun.

Child's Play is a psychology blog that regularly says nice things about both Wittgenstein and "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs". They also had a nice post on the "Knobe Effect" a while back that I can't recall if I ever got around to linking.

Extrablogically, I am currently going back and forth between Schopenhauer, Frege, and Wittgenstein, looking for term paper ideas. Lots of connections slip in and out of view. Still in search of something term-paper-sized to poke at.

Making a Davidson Quote more Available, and a Hegel Paper

I've gestured at this quote before (in posts and in conversation), but Google shows that I've never actually typed it all up: it only showed up on Google Books and then in some guy's dissertation in Portuguese. I think it's revealing enough to deserve more prominence than that.

"I am deeply puzzled by McDowell's alternative account.... I do not see how the (propositional) content one takes in can be evidence for a belief, since it does not, in itself, have any subjective probability (if it did, it would be a belief). How can an attitude that assigns no probability to a proposition convey a probability (positive or negative) of, or provide positive evidence for, a belief?" ("Reply to Roger F. Gibson", p.135 in "Donald Davidson: Truth, meaning, and knowledge").

PS: I will finish recapping McDowell week after I get a draft knocked out for a paper I'm writing on Sebastian Roedl for a class on internalism & externalism. Sorry it's taken so long, been a busy couple of months.

Also, "Hegel on Reality as a Modal Notion" is one of the most stimulating things I've read in a while (and I heard Stekeler was a lot of fun in person). Here's some stuff I wrote on Facebook, which I shamelessly recycle to generate blog-content. The original context was my defending Stekeler's interestingness and intelligibility against a cultured critic; I would go back in and add citations to Hegel if I wasn't a hack, but it's all in the Logic chapters that are explicitly on modal topics ("Reality" in Stekeler's paper is Wirklichkeit, not Realitat -- which makes his title seem silly, since "actuality is a modal notion" is not news to anyone):

I thought he really did make Hegel's views on modality clearer. The role of contingency in Hegel's thought seems to me to be pretty much what Stekeler says on p. 21; or at least if this is Hegel's view, then this makes sense of how Hegel can both insist that there really is contingency (and that it would be foolish to try to reduce away all contingency as merely veiled necessity) while also often sounding like a necessitarian, even affirming some form of the principle of sufficient reason: it always makes sense to ask after the cause of any happening.

Answering this causal question takes the form of characterizing the happening as the result of some ground that it follows from in accord with some "generic law", some general claim that relates the sorts of things that the cause and the effect are such that the effect makes sense as being there, given that the cause is there. But no system of "generic laws" says what particular things there are, and to try to make "generic laws" imply the existence of particulars would be to fall into confusion about how causal explanations function (since they do their work by setting particulars in a broader framework, and using the fact that the relations in the framework are understood to make sense of the relations the particulars stand in; if the relations the particulars stood in needed to be understood to make use of the framework, then positioning them within the terms of the framework wouldn't be explanatory, but would merely bring back out what was already known). So it's foolish to try to pretend there's no contingency in nature, just because everything in nature has a causal explanation: Denial of "contingency" in the sense of things that happen for no reason at all, like the atomists' clinamen, doesn't mean that contingency has been shown to be an illusion or a result of our ignorance (which is how Spinoza thought of it - E1P29). Both of these views misunderstood contingency.

This also fits in with another of his criticisms of Spinoza in the "History of Philosophy" lectures: Spinoza has no way of getting attributes into the picture. He fudges that part: God has infinite attributes (by definition: E1D6), but "attribute" is something Spinoza characterizes only by reference to "what the intellect perceives as constituting the essence of substance" (E1D4 -- he needs to appeal to *us*, as intellects, to get attributes into play). He doesn't actually prove that God/Nature has any multiplicity to itself at all, from definitions; he merely seems to, because he's smuggled in our own viewpoint alongside the definitions. Thus Hegel's regarding Spinoza as an "acosmist", someone who has no place for a world at all. And as Spinoza is the paradigm denier of contingency in nature, it seems natural to connect these points in Hegel: denying contingency in nature happens when you've actually lost nature from the picture.

Before reading this paper, Hegel's stuff about contingency had confused me. Now it seems like good sense.

McDowell on Gjelsvik on McDowell on Rorty on Davidson on Brains in Vats

McDowell's criticism of Davidson on pages 16/17 of "Mind & World" has always bothered me. The topic is what Davidson says about brains in vats, based on the testimony of Rorty in "Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth". It turns out that there's a volume of "Theoria" made up of critical essays with McDowell's responses, and this comes up there. I didn't know McDowell had responded to any of those essays until a few hours ago; I was excited to find them. McDowell's return to this argument was the best thing I found in there.

M&W 16/17: "Suppose one feels the worry in this familiar form: so far as the picture goes, one might be a brain in a mad scientist's vat. The Davidsonian response seems to be that if one were a brain in a vat, it would be correct to interpret one's beliefs as being largely true beliefs about the brain's electronic environment.... But the response to the brain-in-a-vat worry works the wrong way round. The response does not calm the fear that our picture leaves our thinking possibly out of touch with the world around us. It just gives us a dizzying sense that our grip on what it is that we believe is not as firm as we thought."

And then McDowell has this footnote; I'll bold the part that's always upset me:
"It takes care to say precisely why the response is unsatisfying. It is not that we are being told that we may be egregiously wrong about what our beliefs are about. If I protest that some belief of mine is not about electronic impulses or whatever but about, say, a book, the reply can be: "Certainly your belief is about a book -- given how 'a book' as you use the phrase is correctly interpreted." The envisaged reinterpretation, to suit the hypothesis that I am a brain in a vat, affects my higher-level beliefs about what my first-level beliefs are about in a way that precisely matches its effect on my first-level beliefs. The problem is that in the argument Rorty attributes to Davidson, we ring changes on the actual environment (as seen by the interpreter and brought into the interpretation) without changing how things strike the believer, even while the interpretation is supposed to capture how the believer is in touch with her world. This strikes me as making it impossible to claim that the argument traffics in any genuine idea of being in touch with something in particular. The objects that the interpreter sees the subject's beliefs as being about become, as it were, merely noumenal so far as the subject is concerned."

In "Experience" (Theoria volume 70, issue 2-3), Olav Gjelsvik complains about this passage in just the way I have in the past: "McDowell allows himself a description of the case Davidson would hardly subscribe to, namely that “we ring changes in the actual environment without changing how things strike the believer”. Davidson,in this mood Rorty describes, would hardly let in the line “without changing how things strike the believer”." Gjelsvik makes the obvious point that "how things strike the believer" is, for Davidson, a matter of which beliefs the believer holds, and McDowell grants that those change with environmental changes in his footnote (what I mean by "a book" is not a book, if I've never come into even remote contact with books). So what's supposed to be the problem for Davidson, here?

McDowell's response clears things up (after regretting that he tried to make much out of a secondhand report about an oral remark about such a tricky topic):
"When I spoke of ringing changes in the actual environment without changing how things strike the believer, I was not talking about what an interpreter might come up with when faced with something that is undoubtedly a brain in a vat. Davidson’s remark, I took it, was meant to respond to the sceptical thought (or supposed thought), supposedly entertainable by each of us, “Perhaps I am a brain in a vat”. How things strike me (which I would express by saying such things as that there seems to be a computer screen in front of me) is given by the current state of my consciousness. In the thought experiment, we are invited to switch - without changing the current state of my consciousness - between the case as I take it to be, in which there really is a computer screen in front of me, and the case in which my visual experience is produced by electrodes implanted in the brain that, in this alternative scenario, is all there is to me. The putative reassurance of Davidson’s remark was that even if the case is the second of these, my beliefs (which I express by saying, for instance, that there is a computer screen in front of me) are still mostly true; it is just that my expressions of them need to be interpreted as being about the electronic environment of the brain that, on this hypothesis, I am. I stand by my claim that this is not much reassurance. But for someone who thought it was, it would be exactly the point - contrary to what Gjelsvik says - to allow the line “without changing how things strike the believer”. The whole point of the supposed reassurance would be to grant to the sceptic that the difference between the two scenarios would not make a difference to the state of my consciousness, but to deny that this threatens the thesis that most of my beliefs are true."

McDowell took "the Davidsonian response" to the brain-in-a-vat worry to grant that one's experience is indistinguishable from the experience of a brain in a vat, but that this shouldn't worry anyone because brains in vats have mostly true beliefs, too. This is supposed to be a plausible line for Davidson because for him "experience", "consciousness" etc. are epistemically inert to begin with. So McDowell didn't just (somehow) forget that the radical interpreter would change how he took things to be striking the believer to fit with changes ringed in the environment; he took Davidson's response to grant to the skeptic that "how things strike my consciousness" can swing wildly free of how the world is. And then the argument about "the veridical nature of belief" "comes too late", just as McDowell says, for the skeptical claim about experience is left untouched, and that's the spot that itches.

This is much more plausible as a criticism of Davidson, and I no longer hate that part of "Mind & World". I don't think it quite works as a criticism of Davidson (because I don't think that that is how Davidson actually thinks of brain-in-a-vat skepticism or of "experience"), but it's intelligibly directed against a "Davidsonian" view. And addressing it helps McDowell better get into view that what we need is a conception of a natural happening which is the world's impressing itself on a thinker. I think some of McDowell's criticisms of Davidson in "Mind & World" are less than perfect (as McDowell eventually recognizes in "Avoiding the Myth of the Given"), but he's certainly right that making sense of such a conception is a desideratum, and that Davidson was ill-poised to give it to us.

Spinoza and Anomalous Monism

From the comments to my previous post:

And that Spinoza class sounds awesome. Nadler is the man. Maybe you could post the Davidson/Spinoza stuff. My sense is the comparison is much richer than just saying, gee, they're both kind of saying "there's just one kind of stuff with different aspects." But I wonder what you said, and if Nadler said anything interesting back.

I do think that there's a deeper connection between Davidson and Spinoza than that. I think the most straightforward expression of this is actually in "Aristotle's Action"; Davidson is really free with his historical connections there, and praises Spinoza for his dismissal of "the will" in favor of having ideas themselves having force. (This is Spinoza's famous criticism of Descartes as imagining ideas as being like "mute pictures on a wall".) Davidson and Spinoza both have a keen sense of humanity as being a special sort of thing within nature, and not something which is added to nature from outside, as "a kingdom within a kingdom". This basic sense that "We are just bodies, though mental-talk isn't body-talk" is one thing that makes Spinoza feel special among the early moderns, and makes him relatable in a way that someone like Malebranche isn't.

My Spinoza paper's main argument was that to make sense of the argument for E2P7 as actually being something like a good argument, we had to understand Spinoza as committed to there being only one "order of things in nature", with each "connection" being both a causal connection between ideas and a causal connection between bodies (depending on how we make sense of it -- and we can only make sense of it in one of those two ways, and not just as "connected things in nature", because of Spinoza's connection of causation with knowledge in E1Ax4, which is supposed to be a sufficient proof for E2P7). Now, it's still hard to see how the argument in E2P7D is supposed to work, but if all Spinoza wants to say there is "Look, there's just the one nature with its mess of causal connections", then it can at least begin to make sense how this claim could have such slim argumentative support. Any richer notion of "psychophysical parallelism" as being what E2P7 is talking about has a serious problem trying to make sense of the idea that this follows "evidently" from "The knowledge of an effect depends on and involves the knowledge of a cause". That's just not a wide enough base to build much off of.

And if I can get that much from E2P7, then it's pretty easy to see that Spinoza is an anomalous monist: he's committed to there being no psychophysical laws (because all explanations are internal to a single attribute), he holds that all causation is backed by strict physical laws (because all things in nature are at least modes of extension, and all causation is lawlike, by E1Ax3), and he's committed to there being (in some sense) psychophysical causal relations. Which are close to the three premises from which Davidson gets to anomalous monism in "Mental Events"; at any rate they're close enough that showing their consistency leads to an interesting position.

This last premise was the part I had to argue for the most, since Spinoza seems to flatly deny it in E3P2. Davidson has some arguments for what to say about this in "Spinoza's Causal Theory of the Affects", but I found some aspects of his reading of Spinoza to be unsatisfying (because he relies on Curley's reading of "Ethics", which Nadler used as a foil for a lot of the class). Thankfully Della Rocca's work was incredibly helpful here ("Representation and the Mind-Body Problem in Spinoza" is fantastic). The key twist was to treat "a causes b" as intensional, for Spinoza. You can change its truth-value by changing how 'a' or 'b' is described. So Spinoza's explicit rejections of cross-attribute causation do not show that he has to reject an extensional notion of cross-attribute causation, which is what's at issue for Davidson's argument. And then all of the standard "psychophysical parallelism" bits in "Ethics" are pretty smoothly handled by treating Spinoza as talking about psychophysical causation while not mentioning extensional causal relations, and the general close connection of the mind and the body through "Ethics" (especially in the treatment of the affects) becomes easy to understand. (This obviously has a "principle of charity" motivation to it, too, since the complete rejection of psychophysical causal relations is pretty nuts; Spinoza's mockery of Descartes's attempts to make sense of the soul literally moving the body look a lot more sensible if he has some other way of saying how our attitudes can make us move. If Spinoza's real gripe there is that the idea of a Cartesian mind which is totally separate from the body does not make sense (and so instead we should identify the mind and the body, while understanding it in two different ways), then BS is suddenly a much more attractive character for we modern naturalists.)

Della Rocca also has a nice little argument that "things" (as in "one and the same thing expressed in two ways", E2P7S) have to be modes: all there is (for Spinoza) is substance and its modes, E1P15D; "thing" as "substance" does not make sense in the context of E2P7S, since then "the circle in nature" might as well be identified with "the idea of the Panama Canal" as with "the idea of the circle'; ergo things=modes. So modes can expressed in multiple ways (as bodies and as ideas). This was the only place where Nadler had a problem with my paper: Spinoza never talks about modes that way, as if they could have different descriptions under different attributes. And he sometimes seems to speak of the mind and the body as two modes, not one. But my answer to that was to take the same line as I did with causation: Spinoza has an intensional notion of mode-identity. The truth-value of "a is the same mode as b" depends on how 'a' and 'b' are described.

Now, one big difference between Davidson and Spinoza is on the nature of psychological understanding. Spinoza is the theorist of man as "a sort of spiritual automaton"; Davidson does not believe in psychological laws. One interesting thing that I realized during this paper is that the way Davidson introduces "anomalous monism" does not entail accepting the three principles he argues from in "Mental Events"; the position Davidson defends in that paper is just one possible form anomalous monism can take. So the three principles Spinoza accepts which I said were "similar" to Davidson's are in fact sufficiently similar to make him a genuine anomalous monist by the terms of "Mental Events".

The way Davidson divides up his four categories (nomological monism [materialism], nomological dualism [interactionism, parallelism, epiphenomenalism], anomalous dualism [Cartesian dualism], and anomalous monism) is by looking at whether one accepts or rejects psychophysical laws, and whether one identifies mental events with physical events or not. Spinoza clearly rejects psychophysical laws and identifies mental events and physical events. So Spinoza is an anomalous monist despite holding a nomological view of the mental. Which is an interesting sort of position.

One thing I didn't deal with in my paper (except very briefly) was adjudicating between Davidson and Spinoza on the topic of psychological laws. Davidson I think gets this just right: the anomalism of the mental is just the sort of freedom we should want the mind to have. I can't see the attraction Spinoza is supposed to have here; his lists of affects just felt tedious, though some of the definitions are clever, and I just don't see how the conatus argument in E3P6 is supposed to work at all. (Della Rocca and Nadler both said that the argument just doesn't work; it's a key part of the book where the argumentation is just shoddy, as with E1P6D. In fairness to Spinoza, his bad arguments are at least very clearly laid out.) This isn't even to mention the really embarrassing parts of Spinoza's psychology, like the incredibly simplistic account of memory in E2P18S. The interesting stuff in "Ethics" seems to me to largely be in the broadly naturalistic picture Spinoza offers, and in the fun Descartes-bashing and anti-religion stuff sprinkled throughout. (I think it's this last bit that Nadler got most excited about.)

I should read "Spinoza's Heresy" some day to see just how E5P23 is supposed to get dealt with; Nadler's view seems to be that the "eternal" part of the mind is just the abstract idea of its essence. Which seems to fit with the demonstration well enough, but I can't see how it fits into the book. On Nadler's reading, Spinoza just thinks that the soul is mortal and dies with the body, end of story; which makes all of the stuff about the "intellectual love of God" and "the eternity of the mind" that closes the book out very, very weird. On Nadler's reading it seems like all of the weirdness is superficial; really Spinoza is not saying anything that a materialist would have any problems with. But it feels like Spinoza has something in the background here that's going lost; that superficial weirdness is really weird, in a way that (e.g.) his doubletalk about the value of "religion" is not. The praise of religion is plausibly just Spinoza trying to win over converts to his anti-religious way of thinking; the stuff about the amor intellectus Dei doesn't seem like something that we're supposed to just slough off once we are converted to Spinozism. It's supposed to be genuinely liberating in some way; the sad passions are somehow being combated by the eternal part of the mind. This part of Spinoza is just dark to me. I don't get it.

i has an m.a.

I officially graduated last weekend. Finished my thesis in late November; I haven't been blogging because whenever I would get the urge to blog (or would begin a post), I would think "Shouldn't I really be working on my thesis instead?", and that killed the fun of it. And then after finishing my thesis, I had to get PhD applications done. Finished those of earlier this week. I am now free of any academical-type obligations, for the first time in quite a while. (It feels strange, like I must owe someone a paper, and just can't figure out who.)

So, now I can blog freely again.

Because it seems like a thing to do, here's a brief recounting of my year at Chicago:

Fall quarter was when I had to take the MAPH "core" course, which was about Theory. I was reminded of the "Theory's Empire" book-event from The Valve often. I did not enjoy this course, and was glad when it ended. I really can't say I got anything from this course, except some painful and awkward introductions to Freud, Lacan, and Adorno (and some other guys I would've been happy to never encounter). It wasn't even good for writing practice; the longest paper I had to write was five pages or something like that. And that paper was about Lauren Berlant and some movie I've never seen based on a book I've never read. Just a mess of a class.

There was an "introduction to analytic philosophy"-type course that was only open to MAPH students; I figured it was a good thing to take. There were issues that lead to the class being taught by a PhD student, Tom Lockhart, but he did a good job of it I thought. I enjoyed the class, and it was a pretty gentle way to get back into the swing of things after having a semester off (and before that, a semester of law school). I wrote a paper on the second part of "Mental Events" for it (and a shorter one on "Naming and Necessity", which was much easier to lay out than the second part of "Mental Events").

Haugeland's Heidegger's "Being and Time" was a good excuse to read the rest of division one of "Being and Time". I fell a day behind in the reading at one point, and caught up by skipping a section I'd read before: the bit about the broken hammer. It turns out that if you read all of division one except that bit, the "present at hand" sounds like a philosopher's fiction: nothing is ever actually given to Dasein like that. It's always something richer, like the ready-to-hand, the living, Daseins, etc.; the "present-at-hand" is paradigmatically what is presented to a res cogitans (i.e., it is nothing but something confused philosophers dreamed up). Now, in the broken hammer passage, this is clearly not Heidegger's view. We can see the broken hammer, and he says we see it as just something present-at-hand. So I spent a lot of this quarter misreading "Being and Time". I like my misreading a lot more than Heidegger's actual view, though, and I think that my misreading makes sense for pretty much all of the rest of division one (especially section 21, "Hermeneutic Discussion of the Cartesian Ontology of the 'World'"). Incidentally, this is the class that taught me how the quarter system works: I suddenly had to scramble for a paper topic when I realized the course was almost over, and ended up having to get an extension for the paper (by a week or two). I ended up writing something about Dreyfus's Heidegger and "Telling" that I don't think really came together, but was kinda fun to work on.

Winter quarter was very cold and dark.

I sat in on Ford's "Action and Practical Knowledge" seminar, which gave me an excuse to read Anscombe's "Intention" and Thompson's "Naive Action Theory", along with some more of Davidson's old action papers. This also got me up to speed on philosophy of action well enough to know some of what was going on at the Anscombe Conference in the early spring. Definitely glad I didn't take this for credit, though; I'm still mulling a lot of it over, and I'm not sure I really get what's so important about Thompson. (I've read the rest of "Life and Action" now, and still don't see it. Though he did say some stuff about gold and Kripke-Putnam essentialism in the third part that lead me to suspect I in fact do not want to get on board with his broader program. I should probably look at that passage again, and post on it.)

I also sat in on Irad Kimhi's "Active Thoughts" seminar. It was utter madness from beginning to end and I couldn't get enough of it. I couldn't tell you what the class was about, but there was a lot of interesting stuff crammed in there. Sitting in on it also gave me an excuse to read more Frege ("The Thought" and "Negation" especially), and some other fun logic-y stuff.

For credit, I took "Intermediate Logic", "Modern Moral Philosophy", and Pippin's "Kant's Critical Philosophy". Logic did not require me to write a paper, or to read very much; this made it an excellent course for the winter quarter. It was also fun to do more logic homework, though some of the completeness proofs were annoying.

"Modern Moral Philosophy" was taught by a visiting professor from Rome, Piergiorgio Donatelli. We read a little Bernard Williams, several Iris Murdoch pieces, two chapters from "The Claim of Reason", a McDowell essay I hadn't read yet, and then a lot of Cora Diamond's stuff. And Donatelli brought up dozens of other figures in the lectures. It was a heady mix of stuff; my lecture notes are a mess (though not as bad as the notes for "Active Thoughts"). I read an article of Diamond's that wasn't assigned for class (her piece in the "Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein") that bothered me in ways I couldn't quite get a handle on; I wanted to write on that, but wasn't getting a grip on it, so instead I wrote about something Diamond said about McDowell, and somehow a quarter of the essay ended up being about Davidson.

I read several Diamond pieces about Truth and Tarski-type approaches to it for this paper; I did not like them very much. She seemed to go after Rorty for the wrong reasons (as Conant did, in much greater length, in his article about Rorty and Orwell), and she seemed unhappy with Davidson's take on truth for no reason I could figure out. (If I recall correctly, it had something to do with there being "many ways something could be true"; I couldn't see how this was a problem for Davidson, since any difference between e.g. moral facts and chemical facts would be paralleled in the relevant T-sentences: they would say that the different sorts of sentences are true IFF different sorts of things are the case. Diamond didn't flesh any of this out so much as say we needed to pay attention to it. I can't tell what exactly I'm supposed to notice, so I don't see why Diamond-on-ethics-and-truth is so great.)

For Pippin's class I wrote a paper on the Transcendental Aesthetic. It was straightforward: Kant says that the transcendental ideality of space and time are established here; what are his arguments, and do they work? I defended the venerable "neglected option" objection, more or less. It was pretty easy to write, which was good because the rest of the quarter had me pretty frayed.

The Anscombe Conference was in the early spring. Thompson is a lot of fun to watch, and McDowell is surprisingly frail and birdlike in person; he looked like he might break if someone ran into him. I made it to most of the papers; most of them were good. McDowell had a paper on Anscombe-on-sensations that was pretty much the paper you would expect him to write on that topic. I will need to find my notes to say much about the rest of the speakers, but I do remember this: Thompson is a genius.

I was supposed to have a draft of my thesis done early in the spring; difficulties finding a workable topic lead to that not happening. I ended up writing about McDowell's criticisms of Davidson in "Gadamer and Davidson on Understanding and Relativism"; most of the paper was devoted to setting the stage, since "Epitaphs" is a tricky paper to get right. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, though Kremer (my advisor) remains unconvinced. One section of the paper ended up getting cut before it was even to the draft stage, what I was trying to articulate in the comments here, because a) I realized that spelling things out would take another paper to do well and b) I'm not at all sure that McDowell makes this argument against "Epitaphs" (and I'm suspicious that he doesn't make it because he knows it's not a good objection; certainly the closest he comes to making it explicitly is very hand-wavey stuff, and he could've made it very straightforwardly. I think Dummett does make it, for instance.). This paragraph probably makes sense to nobody except me, since only three or so people on the planet have read my thesis, but I refuse to cut it! Blogging is for vanity's sake.

Bridges taught a course on "Rationality" and a seminar on "Contextualism" in the spring; I considered both, but ended up taking neither. (I didn't know anyone in the seminar and it felt awkward; the "Rationality" course was not exciting in the first few courses, and was overfull -- I dropped it so someone else could have my slot.) Stephen Nadler (a visiting prof from U Wisconsin-Madison) had a course on Spinoza's "Ethics" which was simply phenomenal; I'd planned on just sitting in on it (and asking some questions about Hegel and Spinoza), but by the end of the second class I knew I had to take this course. Nadler did an amazing job leading the class: we got through the entire book, and discussion was always lively and unforced. I wrote a paper on Spinoza and anomalous monism, which I thought turned out very well, and it was the third Davidson-y paper I'd written in as many quarters. (When I asked Nadler about the topic, I assumed it was probably too banal to write on, and was going to ask for suggestions as to what in specific to focus on in the area; turns out it's not all that well-represented in the Spinoza literature, though Della Rocca does defend the connection, so I got to write a paper that came very easily.) Hands-down the best course I took for credit at Chicago.

Another (regularly) visiting professor, Jocelyn Benoist, was teaching a seminar titled "Intentional Objects: An Inquiry into the Common Origins of Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology"; about half of the course name shows up on my transcript. Benoist lectured about a lot of interesting people I'd had only superficial knowledge of before, like Bolzano and Brentano and Meinong, and some I had never heard of (mostly Polish philosophers, who were all interesting to read). All of it was shiny and new, and Benoist covered a lot of material very quickly. The guiding thread through most of the class was what to do about terms with sense without reference (if Meinong is wrong and there are any), and what lead into that question getting asked in that way. I wrote a paper about Frege and Evans's account of him in chapter one of "The Varieties of Reference", basically just trying to make sense of how Frege could be so cavalier in saying that "Odysseus" has the same sense whether or not Odysseus ever existed. (One nice point Benoist stressed was that Frege's example was not random; this was around the time when Troy was discovered by archaeologists, after having been considered as mythical for centuries.) I read a lot of Frege (and a fair bit of Evans) in preparation for this paper, but something just didn't quite come together in the end; I'm happy with what I have in the paper, but feel like I didn't really finish it. I don't know what I failed to write, but I definitely did not write something that needed writ.

It was a fun year.

And randomly: these conference papers are pretty good listenin'. And the "Coherentisme" paper is actually delivered in English. Hours of Sellarsian fun.

Towards a Reading of McDowell on English in Hegel and Gay People

McDowell, from "Toward a Reading of Hegel on Action in the Reason Chapter of the Phenomenology". He's just invoked Wittgenstein's claim that "light dawns gradually over the whole" -- the capacity to think doesn't come piecemeal, but involves a metabasis eis allos genos, as Aristotle and Kierkegaard put it -- a leap into another kind.

Now suppose that light has dawned for one, in the specific way that consists in becoming a speaker of English. If there are other speakers of English around, they will recognize one as a speaker of English. That is not an empirical claim -- as if speakers of English just happen to be good at recognizing one another (like gay people, as some folk wisdom has it). Being a speaker of a language is not contingently connected with the ability to recognize one's fellow-speakers. It includes that ability. It makes no sense to suppose someone might be a speaker of English though people who recognize one another as speakers of English do not recognize her as one, or she does not recognize them as fellow-speakers. This is an a priori link between the status and the idea of recognition.

I think that speaking English is more like "gaydar" than McDowell sees. Consider the Jive-talking scene in Airplane!

I venture the following bold conjecture: The Jive-talkers here are speaking English. (If it please you, they are speaking a dialect of it, but I shan't suppose there is any other way to speak English than by speaking some dialect or other.) Further, I claim that the stewardess and the old lady who "speaks Jive" recognize one another as speakers of English.

Hence this scene serves as a counter-example to McDowell's claim: It not only makes sense to suppose that someone might speak English despite not being recognized by other English-speakers (who can recognize each other as English-speakers), but I find it hard to believe that such things don't actually happen. Some people have really thick accents, or speak with odd grammars (Ebonics comes to mind), or just have vocabularies which are unfamiliar to the point of not being immediately comprehensible. (Jargon.) Or to use one of Davidson's favorite examples: it is hard to buy that James Joyce wrote in something other than English, and it is easy to understand why someone would deny it. (There's more than one way to write "in English".)

A possible response: "Jive" really is not English. After all, the lady claims to "speak Jive" like one might claim to "speak Spanish". But the old lady's claim to "speak Jive" is of course a joke; Airplane! is a comedy. One can "speak Jive" only by speaking English.

I think this is even clearer in this parody from a terrible webcomic: "Does anyone here speak 1337?" The fellow who needs his pills is merely employing an odd typographical scheme (and some odd spellings), in one of the manners which constitutes the family of "13375|>34|<". One can't understand what "| n33d m4 p|11z" means without understanding what "I need my pills" means (or at least, that's not how it generally goes -- I suppose there's nothing stopping someone from learning 1337 as their primary English script). (We can imagine all of this happening in a chat room, to skirt the issue of how one can speak in a particular typographical scheme.) Here we have three monolingual English-speakers, two of whom can understand all three, and a third who can only understand one of the others. But everyone involved would select "English" when asked to select a language at the ATM.

Mutual recognition just isn't as closely linked to "speaking the same language" as McDowell claims it is; it's not transitive. Two English-speakers can recognize each other as such without it being the case that any English-speaker one of them can recognize as such could be recognized as such by the other. (The fellow in the fourth panel can recognize all parties involved as English-speakers-writers, even if the stewardess can't.)

Historical shifts work here, too; there's a diachronic as well as a synchronic sense in which "English" is not One Thing. As an empirical matter, I'm not at all sure that most of the people we can agree are English-speakers would be able to tell you that "And these few precepts in thy memory look thou character" is a sentence of English, as opposed to random English words in a string. A moment's inquiry has convinced me that I don't know what this sentence means, at least if I don't look at it in context. So, if I did manage to correctly guess that this is English, I would get its meaning wildly wrong, if I could even hazard a guess at it.

Now, all of this is pretty obvious. But overlooking the obvious is de riguer in philosophy. Especially if one tells oneself things like "Speaking English is a matter of being a member of the community of English speakers".

The upshot of all this is, I think, that McDowell's initial supposition doesn't make sense. There is no specific way of having "light dawn on one" that is "becoming a speaker of English". There are many such ways to become the many such things which fall under the vague umbrella-heading of "speaker of English".

Now, even if McDowell's universal claim fails, there's clearly a weaker claim that's right: Being an English-speaker requires there being some other English-speakers that recognize you as an English-speaker. (Here "there being" should be read broadly: they can all be dead, and none of the ones that would recognize you need to have ever recognized you as an English-speaker, since you could learn the language from audio tapes.) Stronger than that: There have to be some causal connections of the right kind connecting one English-speaker up to some other English-speakers -- it has to be possible to tell a story about why a particular speaker counts as an "English-speaker" rather than a speaker of some other kind. The stories could be convoluted, in particular instances. But some sort of story has to be capable of being told, in principle, even if no one actually knows all the details.

This weaker claim, though, is compatible with taking Davidson's line on "natural languages" like English: Speaking English is a matter of being able to understand other English-speakers, more or less, much of the time, for the most part, in many cases, etc.. It's not cleaner-cut than that. (We can draw firmer lines, if we like, for particular purposes. Maybe there's good reason to not teach Ebonics-friendly grammar in middle-school English courses. If we like, these could also be grounds to say that Ebonics "isn't English". Or we could simply say they're reasons not to teach that sort of grammar to students, and remain silent on whether or not Ebonics "is English".) There is no one thing that is "knowing how to speak English". Speaking English is a motley.

McDowell seems to be a bit unfair to Davidson, in addition to being wrong about English. In introducing the notion of a broadly Hegelian approach to practices such as "speaking a language", he notes that it's not a given that this is a viable approach. "Donald Davidson, for instance, argues that there is nothing essentially communal about the ability to make oneself understood by, say, doing what we call "speaking English.""

In one sense, this is right: There's no identifiable community that we can point to as the body which is capable of judging what is or is not "speaking English". There is no such "community", if communities are entities with identity. (The French pretend to have such a body, but I think that is all they do: pretend. People speak French as they please, and the official body tries to make them stop using English loan-words.) This is presumably how McDowell meant to be understood, in context. It strikes me as rash to think that there's anything un-Hegelian in this. (More on that in a moment.)

In another sense, this is just wrong: "speaking the same language" for Davidson is a matter of frequently converging on passing theories, and this can hold between many speakers all at once. Adam and Betty and Charles can all frequently converge on passing theories when speaking to one another, and this would mean they all "speak the same language". Davidson does focus on the minimal case of two speakers trying to communicate with each other, but the sort of communality which is in play here isn't limited to groups of two. In the sense in which "speaking English" is mentioned at all, it's a case of this wider communality. One has to frequently converge with many speakers, at least counterfactually, to be a speaker of something like "English". (It's important to not take Davidson's position as more radical than it is. He thinks we should take measures to preserve Basque, for instance. He sees no puzzle in the idea that there are speakers of Basque, or of German, or of French, or of English. It's just that many philosophers and linguists have made it impossible to get what that involves into view, because of prior commitments about what "languages" are.)

The sense in which McDowell is right about Davidson is that there is no notion of the community which can be appealed to to make sense of "speaking English". But there are many groupings which we appeal to to make sense of someone who "speaks English", and Davidson recognizes this. From the response to Pereda in the appendix to "Truth, Language, History": "Pereda has the sensible idea of trying to reconcile the Wittgensteinian and Tarskian modes by emphasizing the importance of a general background against which deviant verbal behavior is understood.... I see nothing wrong with Pereda's view, as long as it is taken as saying that members of a "speech community" share a host of overlapping, non-identical, habits of speech, and have corresponding expectations about what others in the community will mean by what they say (such a set of expectations is what is characterized by what I called a "prior theory"). It's worth noting that Davidson's treatment of metaphors also requires this sort of general background be in view: only if the literal meanings of words is settled can metaphors be employed.

In the context of McDowell's article (which is a response to Pippin's most recent views about Hegel on action), the remarks about Davidson are a preamble. But the reason the preamble exists is because McDowell claims that we have to assume that Davidson is wrong about language if we are to take a Hegelian view of action (such as saying that things are thus-and-so). This would be unfortunate, if true. (Certainly I have a fair bit invested in its being wrong.) But I don't think the conditional holds.

Here's how McDowell puts the upshot of the Phenomenology: "The point is to equip the consciousness that is the recipient of the education recapitulated in the Phenomenology with a satisfactory conception of what it is to be an autonomous inhabitant of the space of reasons at all.... What is needed is awareness that one is in touch with reasons only by virtue of one's formation in a Sittlichkeit, combined with a critical attitude to the conception of reasons one finds oneself with." I think this is entirely compatible with Davidson, given a certain reading of "formation in a Sittlichkeit".

It would certainly be Davidsonian to claim that one can be in touch with reasons only by having been made a member of the "community of minds", and that it is in dialogue that understanding is reached -- not only understanding of others, but also of oneself, and of our shared world. This gives us the two parts of the Hegelian requirement McDowell mentions: the critical attitude is that openness to the other that characterizes genuine dialogue, which Davidson tends to thematize as the "understanding of the possibility of error", and the "formation in a Sittlichkeit" is just that whereby one has been made capable of coming to be a dialogue-partner at all: membership in the community of minds.

(I hasten to add that dialogue can involve more than two parties, as is the norm in Plato's dialogues. To put the point in a way McDowell should like: dialogue is not simply a matter of "I-Thou" relations between speakers, but is a matter of speakers coming under the sway of the dialogue itself; that I am a participant in the dialogue is thus a salient "I-We" relation. I can be made sense of, even in my self-understanding, only with reference to the dialogue, which can involve an open-ended number of participants. Apart from such ongoing enterprises of inquiry, I could not be in touch with reasons at all. And contrariwise, for a period of time I can be the only participant in a dialogue, soliloquizing. I can do this only against the background of inquiry in common with others, who are also capable of passing judgement on the notions I produce in my temporary solitude.)

Now, it's reasonable to think that I've here pushed the Hegelian notion of Sittlichkeit to the breaking point: such fluid and open-ended communities as "wherever conversations happen" don't seem to be the sort of thing Hegel meant. Sittlichkeit is more closely tied to World-History and the State, in Hegel. Forms of Sittlichkeit are the sort of thing that can be conceived as elements in the World-Historical unfolding of the Idea (from the Orient to the Germanic nations by way of Greece and Rome). So, "formation in a Sittlichkeit" must be more-or-less "becoming a citizen in some state or other". But I think this betrays the bad orientation towards Sittlichkeit that Hegel identifies with Greek culture: one's Sittlichkeit is simply given and stands independent of one. The proper, modern orientation is rather to see one's Sittlichkeit as not independent of one's subjectivity, but partly constituted by it: I am a moment of it, in my free particularity. There is nothing freestanding that I could be related to that would do the job of a Sittlichkeit; I simply find myself in the midst of a mass of concerns, and this is being formed into a moment of Sittlichkeit. There's nothing in the notion of Sittlichkeit as such that demands more than this. It takes more work for Hegel to show that the notion of "lots of subjects interacting with one another" has more structure than this, that it is and ought to be laid out in the way states are. Such concerns, I think, carry us beyond the arena McDowell is concerned with. A more chaotic, Davidsonian conception of what Sittlichkeits are will do as well for the purpose of providing a context in which mindedness can come on the scene. The question whether or not the very idea of responsiveness to reasons as such has any necessary connection to any particular way of organizing ourselves can be set to the side.

This approach also seems to fit more nicely with the "modernist" Hegel that McDowell takes over from Pippin: "In reflecting about how to think and act, we cannot take on trust the deliverances of any received authority. We are entirely on our own." Who the relevant "we" is can't be "taken on trust" either, but is also up for reflecting on. I have to judge for myself who my dialogue-partners are, and what the dialogue is about, and if there's even anything like this at all.

A postscript about the reading of Hegel that forms the bulk of the article: It all looks right to me; McDowell's reading here seems as able as his reading in Heterodox Lordship and Bondage. His reading here is less radical, though, since his opponent is just Pippin, rather than the received view of the "master-slave dialectic". McDowell seems to me to ably put paid to Pippin's view, both in itself and as a reading of Hegel.

A Puzzle about Reception History

In "Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective" McDowell wishes that Davidson offered us an account of brutes which had more to say than the rough, unsatisfying bits he actually offered. It's clear in the context that McDowell doesn't just wish that Davidson had offered a fuller account, but that he wants a fuller account period. Davidson's story is (at best) frighteningly incomplete, and probably just wrong on a lot, but McDowell doesn't have anything to offer in its place.

This essay was published in 2003. It can't have been written much earlier, since it was presented at a symposium devoted to Davidson's third collection (thus the title), and that collection didn't come out until 2001.

Michael Thompson had been an assistant professor at Pitt since 1992. He'd been an associate professor since 1999. "The Representation of Life" was first published in 1995.

It seems implausible that McDowell would not have mentioned "The Representation of Life" in this context, if he'd read it. It offers him just the sort of thing he asked for. It's not particularly subtle about it, either. McDowell wants a better treatment of brutes: here it is! That is all it is about! It is devoted to doing justice to just the sorts of facts that Davidson has to paper over!

But, McDowell shows no indication of being familiar with Thompson's treatment of brutes.

How could McDowell have missed reading one of Thompson's key essays for so long? Or if he hadn't, what the hell happened here? It can't be that he thought Thompson would be inimicable to Davidson (because of essentialism or whatever), since McDowell is normally fine with urging things on Davidson. But what problem could McDowell have had with Thompson? (There are no hedges when he footnotes "The Representation of Life" in "Avoiding the Myth of the Given" three years later, where he is drawing explicitly on Thompson's treatment of animals.)

I guess we all have things we mean to read, but haven't gotten around to....

McDowell's Certainty

Tim Thornton:

["Understanding Wittgenstein's On Certainty"] was suggested to me by one of Moyal-Sharrock’s PhD students at Hertfordshire, who said that it was an interesting counter to McDowell. I think that the contrast she had in mind was between McDowell’s commitment to the connection between mind and world being always within the realm of concepts and Moyal-Sharrock’s emphasis on a non-propositional bedrock of animal certainty / certainties.

Not having read the book, but having been keeping an eye out for McDowell's references to "On Certainty", my first impression is to expect that the difference comes in whether or not one wants to call "hinge propositions" things known. Wittgenstein pretty clearly thinks there's something wrong with that; McDowell thinks it's alright.

Now, going just by the bits I skimmed on Moyal-Sharrock's webpage and Thornton's remarks, I'm inclined to suspect that she crosses two different sorts of necessary conditions:

One has to be capable of reacting differentially to the sorts of things one is supposed to be regarding as salient in one's environment to be capable of reporting on how those things stand, or to be capable of "taking in" how those things are via experience. If one doesn't react in different ways to different sorts of stimuli, then one can't take notice of the distinctions between those sorts of things experientially. (I take this to be the point of Brandom's "RDRD"s, reliable discursive responsive dispositions.) If one's body was dead to the world, then one's mind would be, also. I take this to be what Thornton was gesturing at when speaking of the "animal" background necessary for the "game of giving and asking for reasons". All very standard Sellarsian stuff. This sort of thing is a necessary condition on being able to take a stand in the space of reasons (as it's a necessary condition on being able to know things noninferentially, and a body of knowledge needs noninferential "groundings" to distinguish it from "rumors and hoaxes", so being able to give reasons for what one holds requires RDRDs).

This is, I think, different from the sort of thing that bothered Wittgenstein in (large parts of) "On Certainty" -- "hinge propositions" (so-called because of two or three places where W. employs the metaphor of our practice "turning on them"). The thing that bothered Wittgenstein was that we can't sensibly try to figure out what is the case, in a particular instance, or what so-and-so means, in a particular instance, unless there is a great deal we simply do not put under question, in that instance. This is a necessary condition for inquiry or interpretation to be possible. Putting something in question requires not putting everything in question at once. (This is also a familiar Sellarsian/Davidsonian point.) It doesn't seem plausible to me to call this "animal" certainty -- what sort of certainty would it be being opposed to? For this sort of certainty is just: not doubting that that this is how things are.

This, I think, is what bothered Wittgenstein about Moore's "here's one hand, and here's another": In a situation in which no one is trying to figure out if there are any hands to be found, Moore presents himself as having concluded that: Yes, there are. Here is one hand, and here is another. But if this wasn't in question, then there's no conclusion drawn here. So Moore seems to "cross the streams". He takes something that was being held constant, and acts as if it was something he'd just discovered to be the case (or at least thought that we'd not noticed).

Now, McDowell. From a footnote in "Knowledge by Hearsay": "Much of "On Certainty" is about the status of this sort of knowledge. Wittgenstein himself is dubious about counting it as knowledge; but I think that is inessential to his main point, which is to warn against assimilating the sort of thing in question -- propositions that function as pivots on which our practices of looking for grounds for belief can hinge, by not being on the agenda for testing or confirmation -- to cases where it makes sense to look for the grounds of a belief. (Wittgenstein's doubt about counting these propositions as known may reflect the influence of the kind of conception of knowledge I am going to attack.)" For those who haven't read the essay, the attack in "Hearsay" is just what a reader of "Mind and World" would expect; McDowell thinks that testimony can put its hearer in touch with the facts themselves, and he opposes a "highest common factor" conception of what knowing via testimony must be like.

(A fun bit of trivia: in this essay, McDowell refers to his own position as "coherentism" and calls Davidsonian coherentism "the heroic position" -- heroic because it tries valiantly to just do without "absolute starting points" by just dropping noninferential groundings for knowledge tout court. The third position is still just the "Myth of the Given". I rather like the designation "the heroic position". And this way of laying out the dialect does a better job, I think, of making clear where Davidson fits into the dialectic of "Mind and World".)

Now, the way McDowell presents Wittgenstein's point here strikes me as agreeable. It is important to not assimilate things held in doubt to things not held in doubt. Missing this distinction will make a hash of any attempt to give an account of inquiry: it'll make it seem like Descartes was asking questions in the only way that it makes sense to ask them (or at least the only way that's not partly dogmatic). Any inquiry which doesn't begin by putting everything in question will look like it's "chickening out" in the face of hard, empirical Reality. From another vantage point: Not making Wittgenstein's distinction will make it seem like any claim to know something noninferentially is dependent for its strength on a background of premises which justify it, so that knowing that there's a pink cube in front of me must rely on my antecedently knowing that the world is laid open to view in front of me. And any attempt to know that the world is laid out in front of me by looking at it will beg the question, as the sort of knowledge I get from looking presumes what I here want to know by looking. Not drawing Wittgenstein's distinction then leads to a "highest common factor" view of knowledge. This is familiar territory for McDowell.

But, I think there's something more going on in McDowell here, and I don't like some of the other things I find. Spelling out what's bothering me here (and it's been bothering me since I first read the first appendix to "Mind and World") will require some quote-mining. I'll assume that the interested reader can look at section nine of the first appendix to "Mind and World" themself, but there are other bits that bear noting.

From the opening paragraphs of "Knowledge by Hearsay":

much of the knowledge we have through language was surely not acquired by understanding a linguistic production. Part of the point here is that we were not yet capable of understanding the elements of what we know through language when we started to acquire them. The body of sentences we accepted from our elders needs to have become quite comprehensive before any of them were comprehended. "Light dawns gradually over the whole." ("On Certainty" ss141) But the image of dawning light does not apply only to coming to understand the members of a stock of sentences accepted from one's elders. The image also fits a general sense in which growing into a language is growing into being in possession of the world, as opposed to having a mere animal ability to cope with a habitat. [Here McDowell footnotes "Truth and Method" p.443: "Language is not just one of man's possessions in the world, but on it depends the fact that man has a world at all."] And much of the knowledge that enters into our possession of the world, even though we have it through language, is not something we have been told. It need never have been enunciated in our hearing; rather, we find it implicit in the cognitive-practical ways of proceeding into which we were initiated when we learned our language.

Now, read in one way, I have no problem with any of this. Knowing something because one has been handed down the knowledge by one of the traditions one has been initiated into is a real way of knowing things. It's unwise to assimilate it to knowledge gained via testimony, for reasons McDowell explores in "Hearsay": being able to learn something via testimony requires having a conception of oneself as a hearer, and the other fellow as trying to impart knowledge. This sort of self-conception is necessary if one is to be capable of judging whether or not accepting a particular bit of testimony is doxastically responsible. And this sort of self-conception is only available downstream of picking up one's first language, being initially led into the space of reasons. So the sorts of things one knows because one has been initiated into a tradition aren't known by testimony. (I think this is a stronger way of putting the point than McDowell offers here -- from the fact that what is known hasn't been enunciated in one's hearing it remains an open question whether or not what one knows here mightn't be something gained via inference from what one learned via testimony. This is one sense in which something can be "implicit in the cognitive-practical ways of proceeding" in which we proceed as rational animals: the way of proceeding includes knowledge gained by experience or by testimony (because the way of proceeding involves communicating with others and taking in one's surroundings), and what is "implicit" is just what follows inferentially from this knowledge. This clearly isn't what McDowell wants to draw attention to.)

One neat benefit of drawing this distinction: We can rehabilitate the idea that two people can disagree with one another because of differing background commitments (or even "conceptual schemes") while agreeing on "empirical matters". For they can agree in what experience discloses to them while disagreeing about something each of them has been handed down by their tradition (one can be handed down P, the other ~P). This would be akin to two people disagreeing over whether or not a certain bird is an emu because one of them recalls the bird-book wrong (and so wants to call it an ostrich, and wants to say it lives in Africa and lays the largest egg of any bird etc.). Belief in the possibility of incommensurable conceptual schemes (in the relativistic sense) would then follow if one held that what one had been handed down by one's tradition was invulnerable to revision by experience or testimony; the sort of scheme-content dualism Davidson attributes to Kant (where there's only one scheme) would follow from believing that there's only one possible set of beliefs one can be handed down by one's tradition. (Both of these further claims, I hasten to add, seem implausible. And it would only be in certain narrow circumstances that two people could agree on what experience discloses while disagreeing on what inferences experience licenses them to draw. And narrower still cases where the disagreement about inferential licenses follows from a background difference in beliefs acquired via tradition, rather than differing in other beliefs picked up via experience or testimony.)

Where I want to differ with McDowell, then, is not on the very idea of knowing things via "the teachings of the elders" or things like that. One can simply have a belief because of how one was raised, and if it's true I have no problem with counting it as knowledge. (If one insists, you can add: and provided one has the belief due to being raised in the right way, so that it counts as justified in the right way to be knowledge.) And placing this sort of knowledge alongside learning a language seems right. Learning to cope with a novel vocabulary involves coming to know things through, so to speak, seeing that they're in the air around the practice. I don't think Davidson would reject this sort of thing, either -- when he denies that it's necessary that a speaker has ever spoken the same language as anyone else, he affirms that a speaker can only pick up what language they have by interacting with other speakers. So a child who doesn't learn to speak just as his teachers aimed at might still pick things up from their attempts, and this could be the same sort of knowledge by tradition that he would've gained if he had learned to speak just as his teachers wished. (He might have missed some of the things they aimed to teach, or he might have grasped some things they didn't think they were imparting, or even that they would reject. But I don't think any of this is a threat to the general Gadamerian idea McDowell is keen to defend.)

If this is all McDowell wants out of "the endogenous given", then the endogenous given is harmless. Where I think McDowell goes wrong is in linking this good Gadamerian idea about tradition to the good Wittgensteinian idea about a distinction between hinge propositions and others: McDowell assimilates the two, and further identifies them with "necessary forms of mindedness" and with analytic propositions (all in some very dense paragraphs at the end of the first appendix to "Mind and World"). Setting aside the further identifications, the first one seems to me to be wrong.

I think Wittgenstein was right to include "man has never been on the moon" among his examples of a "hinge proposition". It's something that (in the 50's) one would be right to hold fast as one went about in the world. If something implied that a man had been on the moon, then this would be sufficient to show it false (by modus tollens). Once the "space race" began, it would've gradually shifted from hinge to door (so to speak). And the way in which it could so shift would not be a matter of, say, experience simply revealing that it was no longer true: for hinge propositions are the standard by which we manage experience, by which we judge whether to accept or reject a particular case of things seeming to be thus-and-so. Experience would then not disprove a hinge proposition for the same reason that thermometers don't have a line that reads "this thermometer is broken". How one accounts for changing hinge propositions is just going to be a different sort of thing in epistemology. One which, as far as I can tell, McDowell doesn't give us any help in coping with.

It might be thought that McDowell was right to identify hinge propositions with analytic propositions and "necessary forms of mindedness", if experience can't threaten them. But here I think my presentation suffers from the fact that I don't have a clear grip on what I want to offer as an account of change in hinge propositions. (Barring unhappy surprises, I aim to just crib from Isaac Levi on the matter.) For I think that, in another sense, experience can lead one to reject a hinge proposition. Continuing the analogy with the thermometer, it would be similar to trashing a thermometer which read -20 degrees on a summer day, when one had intended to use the thermometer to measure the temperature outside. One had further ancillary commitments which lead one to reject the standard one was using, because of something in the way that standard had functioned in its use as a standard. It can't be "standards all the way down", so it might seem that McDowell must be right: there's a bedrock of absolutely firm standards, and these are the necessary forms any possible mindedness must take. But I think this is too quick. Levi gives an account of something he calls routine contraction, in which beliefs are rejected simply because they form a contradictory pair (P and ~P), and such things are unfit for use in the way beliefs are used (that is, as standards in inquiry). For anything is compatible with them -- anything which conflicts with P agrees with ~P, and vice-versa. The reason this is called "routine" is because it is parallel to routine expansion, in which beliefs are gained via an operating habit (as opposed to explicitly deciding to take what the map says as right, or to believe what one's mother says about how to treat a cold, or whatever). The set of beliefs one uses as a standard in inquiry function as a background against which such habits can be intelligible to have, but routine expansion is distinguished from expansion due to inquiry. I omit the details because I am not entirely firm on them; hopefully Duck can correct me if I've messed up any of this so far. But the upshot is: it is the case that taking one's experience at face value can lead to a routine contraction which eliminates a hinge proposition from one's set of beliefs. Or, more concretely, one might cease to hold as a hinge proposition the claim that Man has never been on the moon because of what one read on the front page of the New York Times. Though if one had been trying to make sense of an arbitrary stranger who was talking about NASA landing on the moon, one would have ruled out of court at the outset that he might be right that man had been on the moon -- the stranger would be taken to be a crank, as it were a priori. Like I said: the manner in which hinge propositions can be revised is tricky. (One can just say "one revises them as one judges best" but this says nothing, for they are the standard by which one judges what is best.)

Hinge propositions, I then want to say, are corrigible. This doesn't distinguish them from beliefs gained by tradition: here, too, I want to say they're corrigible. And here McDowell has to agree with me, or else his rhetoric about the "standing duty to reflect" on what one's traditions have handed one down, as what guarantees the rationality of taking the Gadamerian line on traditions, is just empty gassing.

What, then, prevents identification of hinge propositions with propositions held true because of how one was raised?

It is this: one can pick up hinge propositions other ways, too. It's easily thinkable that some children in Wittgenstein's day did not learn that man had never been on the moon via their tradition, but rather via reading about it in astronomy books, or by asking an adult whether or not there were men on the moon, as there were men in distant countries. And there's no reason to think that Wittgenstein gained this particular belief in any special way. Who knows when he first realized that men had never gone to the moon?

Now, it might seem that I'm stacking the deck against McDowell by my choice of example. But I think that the more standard examples of "hinge propositions" are not relevantly different. For in each case, the proposition's status as a "hinge" is contingent on how things fall out as life goes on. It might end up retracted due to the commitments one gained via habitual expansion. (And this would include cases such as accepting the conclusion of a skeptical argument, where it's the sort of thing one finds compelling.)

As a conclusion, I want to say: "Hinge" is a status, not a kind. A proposition which one holds as a hinge might later be rejected as simply false. And I want to say exactly the same thing about "invulnerability to experience" -- which is just to repeat C.I. Lewis's position on the issue from A Pragmatic Conception of the A Priori. And if I say the same thing about analyticity, then this is close to Quine's mature position: For late Quine, "a bachelor is an unmarried male" is analytic for a speaker because that speaker learns that this is a true sentence at the same time that the speaker learns to use the word "bachelor". For non-native speakers, it is not analytic, nor is it analytic for the odd native speaker who learns the word in some way other than learning that "a bachelor is an unmarried male" is true.

"Necessary forms of mindedness" are a different issue: here I don't want to hold on to the notion at all. If I can't make sense of someone holding that ~P where I hold that P, then I want to say that this is a failure of imagination on my part. (Which isn't to say it's blameworthy. Unlimited imaginative power is no duty, which is good because it's clearly impossible for we mortals. And of course it says nothing about the truth or falsity of P.) And where I want to talk about conceptual relations -- say, "belief is intrinsically veridical" -- it seems to me silly to claim to be limning the "necessary forms any mindedness must take" -- unless this be said with a keen awareness that philosophy is hard, and philosophers are often wrong. Rather, I want to just say: this is true, and the modality attached to it can go hang. (To deny "necessity" to a claim is not to say that it's only possible instead.) For the sorts of claims made here are as shaky as any (and so as firm as any). Rationality thus seems to demand that we recognize a standing duty to reflect on them. Which means not ruling out serious reflection a priori, by lumping them into a pile labeled "analytic" or "necessary" or "a priori".

As a final caveat, another of the few places where McDowell mentions "On Certainty". From "Knowledge and the Internal Revisited":

I recognize my own authority as a reporter of greenness. But I would be at a loss if pressed for premises for an argument that would have my reliability about greenness as a conclusion. My reliability about that kind of thing has for me, rather, a sort of status Wittgenstein considers in "On Certainty". It is held firm for me by my whole conception of the world with myself in touch with it, and not as the conclusion from an inference from some part of it.

I take it that this status is that of a hinge proposition. I also take it that there is no temptation whatsoever to claim that "McDowell can recognize green things, in normal lighting conditions" is analytic, or necessary, or anything of the kind. I also take it that it would be uncontentious to speculate that McDowell picked up his capacity to recognize green things when he learned to use the word "green", as taught by his elders. This would then be a case of an endogenously given hinge proposition which is neither analytic nor necessary, and which is further plainly in danger of being made false by experience -- if McDowell goes blind, for example (Heaven forbid). So it's not clear to me how much I'm trying to distance myself from McDowell, and how much I'm just trying to get clear on what his view is.

I can make up an interpretation on which it's reasonable to talk about rehabilitating "interesting analytic judgements" and an "endogenously given" conceptual scheme, but I can't both do this and claim to be disagreeing with "the familiar tenants of Quinean philosophy". And the necessity-talk (and the kind words for Lear's "Leaving the World Alone") just strike me as bad moves. Lear's piece tries to argue for an a priori refutation of Dummett's claims that our logic needs an intuitionistic revision, as in he doesn't deal with Dummett's arguments in reaching the conclusion that Dummett is wrong. This just seems to me to be as wrong as wrong can be. And McDowell shouldn't be so hard on Quine.

This post is an attempt to work things out that I'm not entirely settled on. What could be a better tribute to "On Certainty"?