McDowell on Cognitive Science and Epistemology

University College Dublin has put online two lectures (and an interview) McDowell gave there recently; kudos to them for doing this. It is all the to better that more talks are going online these days, so that it's easier for those who want to hear them to do so.

I just finished listening to the first one, "Can cognitive science determine epistemology?" Its topic is familiar for anyone who's read McDowell very much, and its content replicates some material available elsewhere recently: McDowell is here replying to Burge's recent attacks on him, just as he was in a talk he gave when visiting IU three years ago.

It's actually interesting to listen to McDowell's views on cognitive science while at IU: he is sanguine throughout on the current state of representationalist cognitive science, and explicitly doesn't want to make any waves or raise complaints against it. This is not exactly the attitude one finds most often at IU. (B.F. Skinner was at IU for nine years, and reportedly designed the psychology building; his influence is still felt here.) It's especially surprising to hear him speak of "representations" so blithely, though I suppose this is in accord with the "representations without representationalism" slogan he urged on Rorty back in "Rehabilitating Objectivity".

But I think that, even if he does harbor secret doubts about the current state of the science (which I have no reason to believe he does, but which I think is the horse he should bet on), it makes sense to be ameliorist in a lecture like this: there's no reason to fan the flames of people who, like Burge, see self-standing epistemology as just an armchair form of psychology by running together such a self-standing epistemology with a rival vision of psychology. This is especially true because of the claim he concludes his talk with, which I think might represent a genuine shift in his thinking: he claims that cognitive science needs epistemology (as a self-standing enterprise) to be able to identify contentful states in the way that it does.

I know McDowell has long claimed that alternative accounts of perceptual knowledge make the very idea of perceptual knowledge unintelligible (this is a central claim of "Knowledge and the Internal", and is tied to the central arguments against Davidson in "Mind and World"), but I can't think of another place where he so straightforwardly says that an empirical science (as opposed to a (discardable) alternative account in philosophy) relies on something that his sort of account of perceptual knowledge provides. I think that's a stronger claim than anything he made up through the 90s, at least; I would need to reread the exchange with Dreyfus to see if there's a similar claim made there, given how Dreyfus views his own relation to psychology. If this sort of thing is true, then philosophy can't be a purely therapeutic enterprise: the sciences need it to do something else in addition to showing flies the ways out of flybottles, in order that they may be sciences. A certain sort of constructive work (in some sense of the term "constructive") is needed from philosophy to allow a properly empirical science to proceed. I don't think that McDowell would have been willing (or happy, at least) to say this at all points in his career, but he seems to have said it explicitly here. I have to wonder whether he thinks claims of this sort generalize beyond the field of representationalist cognitive psychology -- might physics rest on principles like the analogies of experience, or biology on a logical account of the lifeform? If there are some dependencies between empirical sciences and accounts of rational self-consciousness, how deep (far?) do these dependencies go? (This way lies Naturphilosophie, which is worrying and at least a little heady.)

Side-note: Michael Friedman argues for something like the claim McDowell made in his "The Dynamics of Reason", that philosophy needs to provide (and has, in the past, provided) the sciences with something they need in transitions between paradigms during periods of revolutionary science. I was unconvinced that Friedman had shown anything stronger than the claim that, in fact, work done in philosophy was instrumental in making turn-of-the-century revolutions in physics possible; I'm not sure how strong of a case can be made for the usefulness of philosophy in the other scientific revolutions he briefly discusses, and am skeptical of a general claim he argues for, that philosophy in general provides the connections between mathematics and mathematical physics that physics needs. He clearly wants to put forward a vision of scientists and philosophers working in tandem in a certain way, but I came away from the book with the impression that he's too weak to a nostalgia for logical positivism in its heyday. I couldn't see a future for that sort of thing, because I couldn't see how his account generalized beyond the weird combination of Neokantianism and crises in physics that lead to the syntheses he spent so much time looking at. On the authority of Einstein, work in philosophy really was important in certain reformulations of physics -- but it's in the nature of revolutionary science that we can't tell in advance what sorts of reformulating will be called for, and so I don't see how philosophers could intentionally try to provide it. It was just a happy accident that it did in that case, it seems to me. But it was a fun little book regardless.

"Unclear statements don't get a bit clearer by being repeated!"

Wittgenstein's crack about Principia Ethica came to mind while reading this interview with Kit Fine:

Part of the problem here is that terms like ‘exists’ and ‘real’ are used in many different ways, especially in philosophy. For me, the fundamental question of ontology is not ‘what is there?’ but ‘what is real?’. But what do I mean by ‘real’?

As a first stab, I would say that what is real is what one must make reference to in giving a description of reality. Thus suppose you were a platonist and thought that reality included facts about numbers, such as that 2 + 2 = 4. Then numbers for you would be real. This is to explain the real in terms of reality. But what is reality? Here perhaps the best I can do is to explain the role of reality in metaphysical thinking.

Reality is what accounts, in the most perfect way possible, for everything that is the case. Suppose, for example, that I thought that the existence of a chair consisted in nothing more than certain atoms arranged in the shape of a chair. Then this would strongly suggest that reality did not include the existence of a chairs, since I could account for their existence in other terms.

I am impressed by how resolutely unclear this is: Every sentence seems like it might be the worst of the bunch.

3AM's interviews are odd. I don't know what determines their selection of subjects. The Setiya and Teichmann interviews were both pretty good, though.

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?"

McDowell and Phenomenologists

This NDPR piece was a very enjoyable read.

I suspect the actual book would annoy me, though; McDowell is almost always misread when his position is assimilated to other analytic philosophers. When he says that all perceptual content is conceptual, he doesn't mean this to be contentious; "non-conceptual perceptual content" is not supposed to be intelligibly a sort of content rational animals could be given, so saying that our perceptual content is conceptual is not meant to be asserting a thesis. "Conceptual" is supposed to be pleonastic -- it has a use in a slogan, but not in any thesis. But when people find something awkward in McDowell (usually the McDowell of "Mind and World", in isolation from his later ~20 years of writings), they often want to articulate what bothers them as being that McDowell was "wrong" to "deny" non-perceptual content: so they find some thesis they would articular by means of the form of words "All perceptual content is conceptual", attribute it to McDowell, and then argue against it as if they were arguing against something McDowell had said. (Sean Kelly comes to mind as someone else who has done exactly this, but I know I'm forgetting others.)

This seems to be what has happened in the book under review: the author treats "All perceptual content is conceptual" as if it were saying that there is no way to distinguish the content of a judgement from the content of an experience, and then his points about percepts being accompanied by "empty intentions" lets him argue against it: for a perceptual content is always accompanied by empty intentions, and a judgemental content is not. But McDowell has no reason to deny this; he never pretended to have given an exhaustive phenomenology of perception, and he never wanted to say that perception just is a sort of judgement (indeed, this is basically the view of Davidson's he wanted to argue against). His later shift to talking of perceptual content as "not propositional" because merely "articulable", as opposed to judgemental content which "is propositional" because "articulated", marks this difference more clearly than he did in "Mind and World". But when he shifts to talking in this new way in "Avoiding the Myth of the Given", he's clear that he still wants to say "All perceptual content is conceptual" because he never meant this to say anything more than he now says: it's a reminder that our judgement and our perception belong together. Attacking that slogan is not a place to productively argue with McDowell.

A Better Sort of Reader: therapy

I think this is my favorite passage from Monk's paper:

One reason (not mentioned by Hacker) for being suspicious of the tendency to regard Wittgenstein's later philosophy as a kind of therapy is that, although in this context, the word "therapy" is used as the opposite of "theory," in almost all other contexts it is assumed that a form of therapy is founded upon and shaped by a particular theory. To psychoanalytic therapy, there corresponds Freudian theory, to Gestalt therapy there corresponds Gestalt theory, to "primal therapy" there corresponds Janov's theory of repressed pain, and so on. To call Wittgenstein's later work "therapy" is not, therefore, necessarily to assume that it does not express a theory; on the contrary, it might well invite the question of what theory this therapy is based on.

I suspect I have not been as attentive to this point as I should have been. It misses Wittgenstein's point to approach all philosophy as "sick" and in need of treatment, for one can rightly take up such a position only if one comes in already knowing a great deal about philosophy -- so that one can recognize illness for illness and not health. But one can't have this sort of knowledge; philosophy doesn't have the sort of unity a species of animal does, so there cannot be the same sort of distinction between illness and health you can draw in medicine. And anything a philosopher can do, they can do; it is not the Wittgensteinian's place to forbid them anything. It is important not to take the position of a doctor treating a patient when trying to "lead words from their metaphysical back to their everyday use"; doctors have knowledge that justifies their taking the stance they take. There is nothing analogous that could allow a Wittgensteinian to identify a "metaphysical use" of a word. All that there is to be done is to either learn what sense they attach to their words, and then proceed from there (beyond philosophy), or to come to a shared recognition that their words have no clear sense to them.

I think this is the irony of TLP 6.53

The right method of philosophy would be this: To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions.

when considered beside TLP 4.11

The totality of true propositions is the total natural science (or the totality of the natural sciences).

Reading 6.53 by itself, it might appear that Wittgenstein is advocating a sort of naturalism or positivism: we should take the natural sciences as a model for all thinking, and avoid philosophizing. This is a sort of perspective which it isn't hard to find proponents of; Dawkins comes to mind. But when a Dawkins praises science, he has in mind things like physics, chemistry, and biology. You can identify something as a science (in this sense) by its content. It is opposed to things like mathematics, history, and philosophy. (To say that life should be approached in a "mathematical spirit" or a "historical spirit" is very different from saying, with the naturalist, that life should be handled scientifically.) But this isn't how the Tractatus delimits "natural science": 4.11 tells us that by "the totality of natural science" Wittgenstein means merely "the totality of true propositions". You can't tell from the content of a proposition whether or not it's a scientific one; the mere fact of it having content settles all that one is concerned with, if one is trying to follow the advice of 6.53. To say nothing but the propositions of natural science is just to not talk nonsense.

But "Don't talk nonsense" isn't something one can accomplish by deciding to do it; it is a key thought of Wittgenstein's, both early and late, that it is easy to start speaking nonsense without realizing one has begun doing so. Even if one is aware that this is easy to do, one still slips into it from time to time. One can't follow "the right method of philosophy" because of this.

An analogous problem affects the other half of 6.53. It might seem that we can recognize someone's wish "to say something metaphysical" by the content of what they're trying to say. A "metaphysical" statement would be something about God, the soul, the nature of Reality, Being -- the sorts of things one finds badly handled in the "Metaphysics" section of a bookstore, and handled not much better in philosophy departments. But this isn't how the Tractatus thinks of metaphysics, either. Wittgenstein doesn't give us an account of what metaphysics is in the Tractatus (which is worth noting by itself), but the method he prescribes for dealing with it in 6.53 is clearly an echo of 5.4733:

Every possible proposition is legitimately constructed, and if it has no sense this can only be because we have given no meaning to some of its constituent parts. (Even if we believe that we have done so.)

which is a comment on 5.473, where we find

A possible sign must also be able to signify. Everything which is possible in logic is also permitted. (“Socrates is identical” means nothing because there is no property which is called “identical”. The proposition is senseless because we have not made some arbitrary determination, not because the symbol is in itself unpermissible.)

-- and looking at these passages together, it seems clear that "metaphysics" is just a label for nonsense.

So to follow the advice of 6.53, we would need to be able to tell when someone wanted to say something nonsensical. But we cannot tell when this is happening, as a rule: nonsense can slip us by. Nor are there any particular topics which we can know a priori will constitute a slide into "metaphysics" if they come up. TLP 5.557:

The application of logic decides what elementary propositions there are. What lies in its application logic cannot anticipate.

-- and since, in the Tractatus, all propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions, logic cannot anticipate what propositions there are. And as a proposition is just what has sense, we cannot anticipate what will have sense. How, then, are we to tell whether something has a sense or not?

To answer this, I think it helps to look at TLP 3.326:

In order to recognize the symbol in the sign we must consider the significant use.

and 3.227

The sign determines a logical form only together with its logical syntactic application.

and 3.363

What does not get expressed in the sign is shown by its application. What the signs conceal, their application declares.

and, as a terminological reminder, 3.2:

The sign is the part of the symbol perceptible by the senses.

Our trouble, in trying to follow the advice of 6.53, is to determine from the signs (sounds, ink-marks) someone has given us whether or not we are dealing with "metaphysics". But nothing in a sign tells us what symbol we are to recognize in it: 3.21

Two different symbols can therefore have the sign (the written sign or the sound sign) in common—they then signify in different ways.

and 3.22 (my emphasis)

It can never indicate the common characteristic of two objects that we symbolize them with the same signs but by different methods of symbolizing. For the sign is arbitrary. We could therefore equally well choose two different signs and where then would be what was common in the symbolization?

So what we need to know, when presented with some signs, cannot be "read off" from the signs themselves. The sign does not tell us whether it is being used metaphysically, and neither does logic.

Consider now 4.002:

Colloquial language is a part of the human organism and is not less complicated than it. From it it is humanly impossible to gather immediately the logic of language.... The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated.

which is followed by 4.003

Most propositions and questions, that have been written about philosophical matters, are not false, but senseless. We cannot, therefore, answer questions of this kind at all, but only state their nonsensicality. Most questions and propositions of the philosophers result from the fact that we do not understand the logic of our language.

It seems that here we get another version of the advice of 6.53: we are to state the nonsensicality of propositions which philosophers have often tried to put forth (which are, one presumes, "metaphysics"). But there is no temptation to think that this can simply be taken up as a "method" here: we are told that understanding colloquial language is "enormously complicated" and that it is humanly impossible to immediately gather the logic of such language.

To recognize nonsense as nonsense, we need to consider the significant use (sinnvollen Gebrauch) of a sign and recognize the symbol in it (recognize its application). If this is impossible, then we're dealing with nonsense -- but a verdict that this is impossible can only be a pessimistic induction over failed attempts to "consider its signifcant use". Logic always leaves open that we have simply, thus far, missed how the sign is being used.

So if we try to take 6.53's advice and follow "the only strictly correct method" in philosophy, we will quickly find that "there easily arise the most fundamental confusions (of which the whole of philosophy is full)": we treat as nonsense what is not, and as not nonsense what is; we take ourselves to be in possession of a method where there cannot be one. For we do not understand ourselves or each other as well as 6.53 makes it seem like we can: 5.5563

(Our problems are not abstract but perhaps the most concrete that there are.)

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.)

Counterfactual Wittgenstein

From section 3 of the epilogue to Brandom's Between Saying and Doing:

"One constant in Wittgenstein's thought, early and late, is his denial of methodologically monistic scientism[, the idea that the only way knowledge can be gotten is the way the natural sciences, especially physics, give us knowledge]. "Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences," he says in the Tractatus, and this view seems to be part of what lies behind the theoretical quietism of the later work. In fact, I think Wittgenstein thinks that if systematic philosophical theorizing were possible, it would mean that philosophy is an empirical science. Since it is not, philosophers must eschew theorizing, restricting themselves instead to light, local descriptions of discursive practices, where such descriptions might provide helpful reminders in freeing ourselves from the sorts of misunderstandings and puzzlements that arise precisely from the theories implicit in inherited pictures of what is going on when we talk and think. Whether or not Wittgenstein himself reasoned in this way, I take it that it is common for his admirers to see him as presenting us with a forced choice: either embrace scientism about philosophy of the methodologically monistic sort -- that is, take philosophy to be an empirical, scientific discipline -- or give up the idea of systematic philosophical theorizing once and for all.

I think this is a false choice. Rejecting scientism of the methodologically monistic sort does not entail giving up the possibility of systematic philosophical theorizing about discursive practice.... I want to claim that what is objectionable about the methodologically monistic form of scientism is its exclusivity. Rejecting that at least leaves open the question of whether, and which, features of natural scientific investigation, explanation, knowledge, and understanding ought also to be counted among those useful and appropriate in philosophy. After all, description is also a central and essential element of scientific methodology, and even the most rigorous versions of Wittgensteinian quietism allow philosophers to describe features of our linguistic practices.

I've bolded the part that struck me; I've quoted the rest for context, and because I liked the passage.

My initial response to Brandom's hypothetical was to agree: Wittgenstein probably did think something like this. The natural sciences (including the social sciences) are engaged in theory-building, hypothesis testing, etc.; philosophy doesn't do this sort of thing (and when it tries to, it does so out of confusion). But it's a weird counterfactual. You have to imagine that what Wittgenstein took philosophy to be also involved what Wittgenstein categorically thought philosophy was not. Tricky business, if you can manage it at all.

After thinking about it a bit more, I'm inclined to say that Brandom skips over the therapeutic nature of Wittgensteinian philosophy -- therapeutic is opposed to constructive in roughly the way quietistic is opposed to theorizing, after all. It's not just that Wittgenstein doesn't give general accounts with theoretically posited entities as explananda; it's that he's not interested in doing that, even if it is possible. Or rather, stronger than that: even if Wittgensteinian philosophy does provide general accounts, with theoretical posits, the point of doing so is to ease some antecedently felt philosophical tension. To keep us from feeling obliged to answer other sorts of philosophical questions, Wittgensteinian philosophy asks and answers questions of its own. (The questions may be rhetorical, the answers obvious. But they are still posed, and they have right and wrong answers. And the therapy can misfire if the questions become points for debate, when they were supposed to be anodyne.) So he's wrong to think that Wittgenstein thinks there's a forced choice between anti-theoretical "quietism" and scientism. (To be fair, he hedges his claims here. But he seems to do so not because he's unsure that they do justice to his understanding of Wittgenstein, but because he wants to avoid offending those who read him differently.)

In any case, I thought his discussion of the issues was interesting. It's a good epilogue.

Davidson, Monkeys, and McDowell: Trianglers

I got the two new McDowell collections for Christmas. (In case you didn't know they were out already: they are. "The Engaged Intellect" and "Having the World in View" are the titles. Go and buy them!) Lots of delicious essay here.

So far I've only read one essay from them: Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective. (A quick look at my McDowell folder shows that I've had a copy of this essay for some time; I have no idea why I hadn't read it before. I didn't even recognize the name when I saw it in the table of contents for "The Engaged Intellect". Seems to have slipped through the cracks. I must have assumed it was not about the Davidson volume, for some reason.)

McDowell's "Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective" is a lecture on the third volume of Davidson's essays (which I will refer to as “ISO”, to disambiguate it from McDowell’s essay); apparently there was going to be a symposium about his work generally, but Davidson was able to get the topic changed to that volume in particular. McDowell's piece is pretty straightforwardly "Here are places in the volume where I want to poke at." It's a good essay.

Unsurprisingly, he agrees with the conclusion of "Three Varieties of Knowledge" wholeheartedly. Knowledge of one's own mind, of other minds, and of the external world all presuppose each other. His only criticism of the essay is that he dislikes how Davidson seems to "give priority to the intersubjective". He quotes Davidson as saying that "we come to have the belief-truth contrast through having the concept of intersubjective truth", that we "arrive at the concept of objective truth" through the idea of intersubjective truth. (p.105 of ISO – the essay is “Rational Animals”.) McDowell is puzzled by the suggestion that one of the legs of the tripod is somehow giving rise to the other two, and urges Davidson to adopt a more clearly holistic view.

I think McDowell is just misreading Davidson. Davidson's point is not that intersubjective knowledge somehow grounds the other two kinds of knowledge, but that once we have a notion of ourselves as part of "a community of minds" we also understand "the belief-truth contrast" (and the truth which is opposed to belief is "objective truth" –“the concept of an intersubjective world is the concept of an objective world, a world about which each communicator can have beliefs”, p.105 of ISO). There's no priority given to intersubjectivity, because Davidson could just as well have said that "we come to have the idea of intersubjective truth through having the concept of a belief-truth contrast" (after all, the distinction between what people believe and what is the case is just the sort of distinction needed to have an idea of "intersubjective truth"). So, I think Davidson already held the view McDowell urged upon him in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, at least by the time of McDowell’s essay. It's only an infelicitous phrasing that suggests he has an unbalanced tripod. (I should probably hunt down the issue of "Philosophy and Phenomenological Research" this essay was originally printed in, to see if Davidson published a response to the symposium.)

It’s worth noting that the passages McDowell struggles with are from an essay first published in 1982; “Rational Animals” is one of the earliest essays in ISO (tied with “Empirical Content”). “Three Varieties of Reference” comes along almost a decade later

This essay is the most I've ever seen McDowell say about triangulation; he makes it fairly clear why he generally doesn't talk about it. It seems to be tied to his qualms about Davidson on animal minds:

We need more than just the insistence, which I applaud, that our ways of understanding brutes differ crucially from our ways of understanding ourselves and one another. We need a positive line about our ways of understanding brutes [this is an odd thing for a "quietist" to say-D], and it is not satisfying to suggest that crediting them with intelligent engagements with their environment is just a convenience, called for only by the fact that we lack detailed knowledge about their internal control machinery.

That Davidson's discussion of animal minds (cf. "Rational Animals") is unsatisfying is certainly right (cf. Finkelstein's essay in the Cora Diamond Fechtschrift). McDowell tries to tie this unsatisfyingness to the doctrine of triangulation -- to be fair, triangulation features prominently in "Rational Animals" -- and makes some vague gestures towards a view of animal minds which comes closer to viewing them from an interpretive standpoint (though McDowell says he finds Davidson's "human chauvinism" on the point of animal minds "perfectly congenial"). These parts of the article are all pretty high-altitude and not very clearly sketched out, but McDowell’s worry about Davidson on animal minds seems pretty standard, and his suggested repair seems anodyne. But the connection to the doctrine of triangulation isn’t made very clearly at all.

I suspect that McDowell doesn't quite appreciate the role triangulation plays for Davidson. For instance, he writes that "even if we grant that triangulation might be essential for objectivity, that does not warrant the suggestion of a priority for intersubjectivity." (154) I don't think Davidson gives intersubjectivity any such priority, so if McDowell thinks that this "priority" is part of why Davidson talks about triangulation so much in his late works: Well, that seems like a problem.

Though it doesn't prevent many of McDowell's comments in this essay from being insightful, I think he underestimates how holistic Davidson's picture is (especially by the time ISO is published). He admits to finding Davidson's "imagery of exploitation (taking advantage, making use of) [intersubjectivity/triangulation] a bit mysterious" (156); I think it would cease to be mysterious if he just read Davidson as already holding some of the views he urges upon him. McDowell frets about Davidson's claim that rational animals "make use of the triangular situation to form judgements about the world" (p.130 of ISO); I think Davidson simply meant that subjects can be subjects because they're subjects who understand one another in a common world. They can "form judgements about the world" because of the tripod of subjectivity/intersubjectivity/objectivity. Triangulation is just an abstract form of the tripod -- the two reactors and their common cause are the three things the tripod's "varieties of knowledge" are concerned with, after all, not just one of them. (That the remark from p.130 of ISO shouldn’t be a case for stumbling is, I think, made clear by context: Davidson is just trying to express “why language is essential for thought”, and he makes it clear that he could say “much more” on the topic.)

As an aside, I think that a suitable account of animal minds needn't talk about triangulation at all (nor do I think Davidson thought it did, though he may have thought that a suitable account of "animal minds" would just show them to be really unmindlike after all -- sometimes Davidson just starts to sound like Descartes when talking about animals). A lot of animals don't react to others of their kind in any particular way (though of course social animals do), and I don't see that there's any reason to think an animal mind would have to have any notion of itself as anything like "one mind among others". Supposing sharks don't need any educating, but act only on instinct, and never work in concert with other sharks, I can't see why a shark mind couldn't be considered to be a perfectly good solipsist: it could treat all objects it encountered (apart from itself) as merely moving, not reacting to anything. In which case the shark mind does not triangulate. All of this, of course, needs the caveat that talking about "animal minds" using the terms we normally use for the normal sort of minds might lead to seriously problematic anthropomorphizing of animal minds. Also I suspect that sharks are actually smarter than this. But the point remains: intersubjectivity is clearly a lot less important when you're talking about animal minds.

Also: McDowell worries that Davidson doesn't seem to anywhere acknowledge the special role played by "hinge propositions". (He says similar things, at a bit more length but less clearly, in "Gadamer and Davidson on Understanding and Relativism".) I don't think anything is missing in Davidson here, though I think McDowell is right that he doesn't have anything like what McDowell is looking for. (After my Nth rereading of "Davidson in Context", which is the first appendix to Mind and World, I've become convinced that what McDowell thinks about "hinge propositions" is central to his defense of the analytic/synthetic distinction, the "cutting down to size" of the Quine/Duhem Thesis, the wary glance cast at the indeterminacy of translation, etc. etc. In this essay he identifies propositions which have a "status as hinges" with "fundamental propositions about reality, such as that there were things that happened a very long time ago" (157). It would be nice if I could find someplace where McDowell just talked about hinge propositions as such, rather than in passing. If he has an extended discussion of them anywhere, I really do need to look at that for my thesis. I'm pretty sure I can guess the sort of view McDowell has operating in the background of "Davidson in Context", but I don't have a clear grip on just why he thinks what he does.) Incidentally, I think Davidson does have an essay specifically about these sorts of propositions, and I think he misapplies his own ideas: I recall "Method and Metapyhysics" as being one of Davidson's worst essays. (I should reread it, to make sure, but I recall Davidson trying to use the principle of charity to conclude to a great many of our specifically metaphysical beliefs being true -- he gave examples. I don't think this is the right way to go about things. But, again, I should reread the essay.)

Postscript: Davidson, in a piece from around the same time as Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective seems to commit the same sin I above attribute to McDowell: he fails to realize how much McDowell's views agree with his own. Davidson, from "Quine's Externalism":

The additional force of the social is best brought out by posing two questions to those who have promoted perceptual externalism without linking it to the social (I think here of those who have followed Russell, like Gareth Evans and John McDowell). One question is this: where, in the infinite causal chains that lead to the sense organs, should we locate the elements that give content to our observation sentences and their accompanying perceptual beliefs? The short answer is that the location is given by two or more observers whose simultaneous interactions with each other and the world triangulate the relevant stimulus. This is something one person alone cannot do.

This sort of criticism of McDowell by Davidson makes it a good bit clearer what McDowell is responding to in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective. I can easily see how McDowell could take this sort of criticism as implying that "triangulation" names something that a mere fan of Davidson-style interpretivism like McDowell is ignoring; McDowell's puzzlement at what's going on with triangulation-talk is then easy to grok. I'm not sure why Davidson thinks this sort of question is a problem for McDowell, since you can answer it by just talking about the special way observation sentences figure in interpretation... in exactly the way Davidson does. Which McDowell is happy to do. (Perhaps his criticism hits Evans; I wouldn't know. I suppose it probably does hit some position or other which Russell held at some point. But it’s not as if McDowell was just trying to rehabilitate “knowledge by acquaintance” or something like that.)

That Davidson is being less than charitable in the questions he poses to McDowell is even clearer from the "second question" he poses: "What, in the process of acquiring a first language and propositional thought, gives us the idea of error (and so of truth)?" That Davidson has an answer to this that McDowell can't steal strikes me as highly implausible. (The extremely condensed account he gives later in the paragraph is clearly not his whole story, but, again, I can see how McDowell takes this sort of mode of presentation of Davidson's views to imply that the intersubjective somehow has a "priority".)

Incidentally, I think that “Quine’s Externalism” should’ve been collected someplace, even if it wasn’t something Davidson had a chance to edit for publication. It would’ve fit nicely in the first part of “Truth, Language and History”. There’s another Davidson piece, simply titled “Externalism”, which I mean to read soon; that also looks like something that needed to be more readily accessible. (I have recently begun hunting for Davidson pieces which were unjustly not collected in the five volumes of his papers, as it occurred to me that pretty soon I’m going to run out of Davidson to read.)

PPS: Triangler. Macross Frontier's music is fantastic, as befits a Macross series. Yoko Kanno is still fantastic; "What 'bout my star" is probably my favorite track of the year. Mizuki Nana's "Trickster" is my favorite album though.

In Which I Wonder if I am "Out of Touch"

Because I am free to read and comment on the use that has no link (and because I am putting off reading Von Mises) I reread Hauerwas's article on Macintyre from "First Things". I was particularly struck by this passage early on:

To understand MacIntyre takes work. Indeed, he intends for it to be a daunting and challenging task to understand him. I suspect he assumes most of his readers, possessed as they must be by the reading habits of modernity, cannot help but refuse to do the work necessary to understand him. Which is but another way to say, as he makes explicit in the last chapter of Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, that those who think they must think for themselves will need to undergo a transformation amounting to a conversion if they are to understand “that it is only by participation in a rational practice-based community that one becomes rational.”

I immediately thought "But that's a truism!"

Perhaps I have an inordinate acquaintance with philosophy of the Wittgenstein/Heidegger/Hegel/Haugeland/Brandom/McDowell/Davidson/Rorty/Gadamer/Sellars... sort, where that sort of claim looks totally reasonable and not like the sort of thing anyone would stumble over. (Though "rational practice-based" looks pleonastic to me.) I suppose there are tenured philosophers who would think something like that claim is false.

Hauerwas apparently thinks that "academics" have some problem with this sort of thought, as do people who "think they must think for themselves". (It's not clear to me why he thinks this; I gather it has something to do with "capitalism" and with the ghostly things Yoder got himself so exercised about. Hauerwas seems to have some wacky ideas about "academia" generally; I suspect his own presence might distort how he sees things. I doubt things are as they would be otherwise when Hauerwas is looking around.)

On "thinking for oneself" I side with Hegel: No one else can think for me, as no one else can eat or drink for me, so I don't need to worry about "thinking for myself". If I think at all, I think for myself. Trying to do something above and beyond thinking, so that I might "think for myself", is liable to be a hindrance to thinking. But there's no harm in saying that everyone should think for themself, if all that means is that they should think instead of just parroting what they recall hearing once-upon-a-time. Though even this sort of "unthoughtful" behavior requires that one has become acquainted with thinking, for one must have some facility in discriminating among all the things one might parrot. So the injunction to think (for oneself) is always really just the injunction to think some more. Which is rarely bad advice.

Hauerwas seems to associate "thinking for oneself" with thinking from some Olympian height, removed from other people and from the tawdry affairs of humanity generally. But this is silly. If I am to think for myself, I should do my thinking where I am. Which is down here in the muck of history, with everyone else, enmeshed in all sorts of practices and norms and cultures and language-games and etc. -- if anyone is in a position to think for themself outside of all this, they aren't me. I'm right here.

When I see this sort of rhetoric employed by the likes of Hauerwas, I worry that the denigration of "thinking for oneself" is going to slide into an affirmation of "not thinking for oneself" -- of accepting dogmatically some "base" to "start thinking from". It's not clear to me whether or not Hauerwas (or Barth, or Macintyre) are guilty of this charge (though I have my suspicions). But I think this use of the rhetoric is a real worry in any case. The idea that we need to establish or choose a starting-point for thought strikes me as an egregious error -- if we are in the market for looking at possible "starting points" then we're already thinking, and so we don't need to find a "starting point" to think from, since that point is already in the past. Dame Understanding invites us all to come as we are to the Hermeneutical Circle-Dance, to put the point clumsily.

(The right response to "Whose justice? Which rationality?" is, I think, the same as the answer to "Which conceptual scheme?" -- to quote Putnam, "You want I should use someone else's conceptual scheme?" The joke being, of course, that a "conceptual scheme" is supposed to be something which is Given, and so not something one could pick up or discard. And the same holds for "rationalities" -- I can shift my standards for what's rational or not as it seems just to me to do so, but I can't discard my rationality and take up "something else". Indeed, I was surprised when I found out that Macintyre's book really does seem to take its titular question seriously.)

On not reading Macintyre: I've tried to read several of his works. I don't like his style, so the going is hard. At one point, it occurred to me that Macintyre sounds like he's peddling some doctrine which depends on the scheme/content dogma. So I checked his indexes to see if he'd ever mentioned Davidson. He had, and his discussion of him was so inept that I haven't looked at him since. (I think it was in "Whose Justice? Which Rationality?" but the book's not searchable on Amazon, and I don't own a copy.) I figure if I ever manage to get through "After Virtue" it'll be because I have someone beside me that I can constantly gripe to, to ease the pain. (It was how I got through all the Barth I had to read. Read him the night before class, complain about him during and after class, repeat. The trick is to have someone to complain to who doesn't dislike whatever you're complaining about -- otherwise the whole game is rather masturbatory.)

On an unrelated thematically relevant point, I've finally started reading Micheal Thompson's stuff. So far I've made it through the introduction of "Life and Action", and about a quarter of the way through "The Representation of Life". Definitely interesting stuff, and definitely wish I'd gotten around to looking at this stuff earlier. I do suspect that Thompson might be the source for some of the odder form/content distinctions McDowell draws in "Avoiding the Myth of the Given"; Thompson stresses in the introduction the formal nature of his project. Though it's a formality which doesn't "disregard the particular characteristics of objects". Which is an odd sort of formality. (I doubt that the success of Thompson's work actually hinges on its being "formal" -- certainly nothing he's said so far has struck me as wrong, apart from his self-characterization of his project. I'll need to read more to get a grip on what's going on, I'm sure; these are early impressions.)

P.S.: Haugeland opened up registration for the "Being and Time" course again, so I am a formality away from enrollment in the course. Hooray~

P.P.S.: The syllabus for Finkelstein's "Later Wittgenstein" seminar is online (in the Chicago system). They read chunks of PI, chunks of The Claim of Reason, two McDowell essays, Diamond's "Realistic Spirit" essay, and various things from Zettel. Didn't look too world-shaking. But they read a lot more Cavell then I would've guessed.

a puzzle about McDowell's most recent position

In "Avoiding the Myth of the Given", McDowell revises the position he'd laid out in Mind and World. Here is how he puts it in "Avoiding":

Suppose I have a bird in plain view, and that puts me in a position to know noninferentially that it is a cardinal. It is not that I infer that what I see is a cardinal from the way it looks, as when I identify a bird’s species by comparing what I see with a photograph in a field guide. I can immediately recognize cardinals if the viewing conditions are good enough.
...On my old assumption, since my experience puts me in a position to know noninferentially that what I see is a cardinal, its content would have to include a proposition in which the concept of a cardinal figures: perhaps one expressible, on the occasion, by saying “That’s a cardinal”. But what seems right is this: my experience makes the bird visually present to me, and my recognitional capacity enables me to know noninferentially that what I see is a cardinal. Even if we go on assuming my experience has content, there is no need to suppose that the concept under which my recognitional capacity enables me to bring what I see figures in that content.

Does this not remove the possibility of "grounding" many of my noninferential judgements in how experience reveals things to me to be? If having an experience with a particular content in no way involves my concept "cardinal" being drawn on, then how can that experience justify the noninferential judgement "That's a cardinal"? It seems that with regard to such judgements, experience functions merely as an exculpation, not a justification. Which is just the sort of predicament Mind and World is supposed to help us avoid.

Note how McDowell expresses himself here:

Consider an experience had, in matching circumstances, by someone who cannot immediately identify what she sees as a cardinal. Perhaps she has never heard of cardinals. Her experience might be just like mine in how it makes the bird visually present to her. It is true that in an obvious sense things look different to me and to her. To me what I see looks like (looks to be) a cardinal, and to her it does not. But that is just to say that my experience inclines me, and her similar experience does not incline her, to say it is a cardinal.

How McDowell's experience makes the bird present to him is identical to the way it makes the bird present to him to someone who is not able to recognize cardinals. But it inclines him to judge "That's a cardinal" of the bird, whereas it does not cause her to want to judge thusly.

This looks an awful lot like McDowell is saying that experience functions as a cause, but not a reason, for most of the noninferential judgements I am inclined to make. This seems like A Bad Thing -- an awful lot of what I regard as "perceptive" in my cognitive life show up as my mind "spinning frictionlessly". The bird I am given in experience is a cardinal, and I am inclined to judge that it is a cardinal, but the former is not the reason for the latter: I am inclined to judge that it is a cardinal merely because that is how I react on this occasion. McDowell speaks here of "recognitional" capacities, but that seems like a smokescreen: what I cognize by the exercise of such a capacity does not "capture" part of the content of what I am given in experience, but functions autonomously, without the world having a rational grip on the capacity. Experience cannot even be providing criteria for my judgement that what I see is a cardinal, for when I judge noninferentially I do not judge "from the way it looks, as when I identify a bird’s species by comparing what I see with a photograph in a field guide". It thus seems that, on McDowell's most recent view, experience simply drops out of the picture as a justificatory element (in many cases, not all).

Now, McDowell does allow that the content of an experience involves concepts of "proper sensibles" and "common sensibles" (he says "of sight", but presumably there are "proper" and "common" sensibles for each modality of sensation).

As a first problem, I don't know how these concepts are supposed to be distinguished from the rest of our concepts. Perhaps he means concepts such as color-words, which he doesn't think can be made intelligible without reference to how things look to a subject. I can see how these might be "proper" sensibles, since they can't be made intelligible without reference to how things can appear to a subject. But, this doesn't seem to be the case. Sayeth McDowell: "The common sensibles accessible to sight are modes of space occupancy: shape, size, position, movement or its absence." All of these strike me as being unlike color-words; if memory serves, they're also the properties that ancient Atomism took to be exhaustive of What Things Are Really Like. I suspect there might be a Kant-inspired* argument for the priority of these concepts in experience; I doubt that there's a sound argument for such a priority.

"We might think of common sensibles [in an intuition unified by the intuitional form "animal"] as including, for instance, postures such as perching and modes of locomotion such as hopping or flying." I am skeptical of the notion that I can identify something as "perching" apart from recognizing it as an animal of a fairly specific type: to say that a creature is "perched" is to distinguish its posture from others it might have, and to be able to do this I have to know a fair bit about how the animal gets around in its environment. The same holds for "hopping" and "flying", as distinguished from "bouncing" and "falling" and "being carried along by the wind" So I'm not sure what makes these "common sensibles" as opposed to being things I can know of an animal noninferentially, such as that the thing perched above the door is a raven, not a crow -- or that it's an ominous bird.

But as a more serious problem: At best, McDowell's most recent position can make it clear how judgements of a certain narrow type (those involving only concepts of common and proper sensibles) can be justified by experience. Many noninferential judgements which one is inclined to make "on the basis of" experience are not able to be justified by experience, on McDowell's current position. If he didn't limit the concepts which can be involved in the content of an intuition, then this problem would not come up. I cannot see why he doesn't do this, especially since his position in Mind and World did precisely this. In my earlier attempt to understand McDowell's revised position, I thought he'd done precisely this; looking at the article again, I simply had McDowell wrong. But I can't see why he doesn't hold the view I attributed to him in that earlier attempt.

About the only thing I can think of is that McDowell wants to be able to delineate what is possible and impossible to intuit, in some absolute sense. This doesn't seem like the sort of thing quietist philosophers, especially those who have a fondness for Rorty, are known for. It also doesn't strike me as either possible or desirable. If this isn't what McDowell is trying to do, then maybe he's trying to find a way to cash out saying that two people can have a bird "visually present to them" in "the same way" despite "seeing different things" (in the sense that one sees a cardinal, and one doesn't recognize the bird as a cardinal). I don't see why he couldn't just say that two people can recognize the same things in an experience with a particular content, and so can see "the same thing", while they can also vary in what they recognize, so they can see "differently". An experience can have a content which is richer than a single proposition can express; I take this to be part of what McDowell is trying to do justice to by speaking of "intuitional content" as opposed to "propositional content" now. There is more present to me in experience than I recognize as present; some of the reasons for altering my beliefs which experience provides me with are not reasons I take notice of. So when two people have experiences with the same content, some descriptions of what they recognize will be the same, and some will be different, depending on what each of them notices. I don't see why he needs to distinguish between intuitional form and intuitional content, or between common and proper sensibles and the rest of our concepts, to do justice to this aspect of experience.

All in all, I am puzzled. I should probably read some of Travis's stuff and see if I can make sense of why McDowell has revised his views in such an odd way. The way McDowell presents Travis's position in the article, I can see how it could motivate the move to talk of "intuitional" as opposed to "propositional" content, but I can't see how the other revisions McDowell makes in this article could be motivated.

If McDowell is making the errors I think he's making, that quite surprises me, since his work is what's lead me to see them as errors. If he's not making such errors, then I can't see how his current position allows for our noninferential judgements to be justified by how things appear to us, for most such judgements.

A concise version of what I take to be puzzling: How can intuitions noninferentially entitle us to judgements which go beyond anything discursively articulable in those intuitions, without this entitlement being a Mythical Given?

*Here is the sort of passage that makes me think Black-Hatted Kant might be behind this: "In a visual intuition, an object is visually present to a subject with those of its features that are visible to the subject from her vantage point. It is through the presence of those features that the object is present. How else could an object be visually present to one? [So far, so good.]
The concept of an object here is formal. In Kant’s terms, a category, a pure concept of the understanding, is a concept of an object in general. A formal concept of, as we can naturally say, a kind of object is explained by specifying a form of categorial unity. Perhaps, as I suggested, partly following Thompson, “animal” expresses such a concept." If McDowell thinks that the concepts involved in the content (or form) of an intuition have to be "pure concepts", then I suspect this may be the problem I'm seeing: I don't see how the "pure" concepts are to be distinguished from the "impure" concepts. I suspect that splitting concepts up in this way, if possible, would give you the analytic/synthetic distinction (since judgements only involving pure concepts might be true come-what-may in a way that judgements involving impure concepts need not be).

I am inclined to say that every concept is "the concept of an object in general", of "a kind of object", since it can be applied in multiple instances. "Animal" is a kind of object; "cat" is a kind of object; "kitten" is a kind of object; "my sister's kitten, Milo" is a kind of object. For even this last concept (or bundle of concepts, as it please you) can be used to pick out the cat at various times and in various places. It is always the same cat so picked out (if I don't misidentify cats), but likewise "cat" always picks out the same kind of animal (if I don't misidentify kinds of animals). In good Hegelian fashion, I want to say that singular reference involves general concepts (which are the only kind of concept), and not general concepts plus something else beyond that; general concepts are not "merely" general, but are how we recognize particulars as the particular things they are. I'm sure that category-talk, where categories are a special class of concepts, can still be put to good use, but I don't think we need it here, in giving an account of perception.

As a note, Tom (Grundlegung) has posted on this material recently; this was the efficient cause of my looking at "Avoiding" again. It's a good post. I'd also not yet been aware of In The Space of Reasons, which is a blog which is about several things I like blogs to be about.

Brief notes on various things

I am pretty satisfied with this comment on my previous post.

Paul Redding's "Hegel and Piercean Abduction" (European Journal of Philosophy 22:3) hits a lot of interesting material. It's mostly about the German Idealists' conceptions of the logical structure of judgements and the intuition/concept distinction. Redding, following Brandom, claims that the Idealists adopted an inferentialist approach to conceptual content. Hegel's opposition to Kant's distinction between intuitions (as singular representations) and concepts (as general representations) is shown to flow from his commitment to the notion that empirical judgements have their conceptual content because of their inferential relations; this is related to Hegel's treatment of the syllogism as "the truth of judgement". Empirical judgements are shown to have "syllogistic" structures, with concepts figuring variously as singular, as particular, and as universal, rather than (as on the Kantian account) being combinations of concepts with non-conceptual intuitions. This is related to the Romantic emphases on the authority of "feeling" and of the natural as normative, and Hegel's rejection of both of these, by way of Hegel's treatment of aesthetic judgements as the paradigm of judgements in general. There's also an extended discussion of Pierce's appropriation of Aristotle's syllogistic logic, and a few other lines of thought, all in fourteen pages. It'd be nice to have a more extended treatment of pretty much everything Redding mentions, but what's here is quite nice.

John Divers's "Quinean Skepticism about de re Modality after David Lewis" (European Journal of Philosophy 15:1) is a very nice discussion of Quine's "Reference and Modality", Lewis's response to it, Lewis's use of "On What There Is" to motivate his modal realism, and possible motivations for continued "Quinean" skepticism about de re modalities after all of this is taken into consideration. In the audio interview with Burton Dreben, Quine claims that he rejects Lewisian defenses of de re modality because they are ontologically profligate; "possible worlds" are too high a price to pay to be able to make sense of modal operators. Divers does a good job of showing how this sort of response is in tension with Quine's mathematical platonism: Quine is already willing to allow for unaesthetic extensions to his "desert landscape" ontology to accommodate number-talk, so it's not clear why he can refuse to do the same with modal-talk. Divers ends up offering a suggestion as to how de re modal-talk might still be resisted: Insist that de re modal-talk hasn't been shown to serve any useful purpose, and so there's no immediate reason why we should bother trying to make accomodations for it, rather than just dropping it altogether. I suspect that at least a partial response to this demand might be made by way of the Brandomian-Sellarsian notion that "the language of modality is a transposed language of norms", but this sort of answer would show as unmotivated many "metaphysical" uses of de re modal-talk -- there's no need for a theory of counterparts if "A is necessarily p" and "B is possibly q" can be fully cached out in terms of what moves are and aren't allowed in a language-game.

Haugeland's "The Intentionality All-Stars" (Philosophical Perspectives, volume 4, 1990 pp.383-427) has the best meta-philosophy joke ever. I won't spoil it. The article is good apart from that joke, too.

Huwe Price's Metaphysics After Carnap: The Ghost Who Walks?" is, as the title suggests, a discussion of the queer fact that metaphysics is alive and well nowadays, after so many attempts to kill it. Price focuses on the role Quine's "On What There Is" has (purportedly) played in the rehabilitation of metaphysics, with an eye to reversing the trend. Price notes that appeal to a supposed Quine-Putnam "argument from indispensability" plays a central role in debates about "modal realism", and offers a rebuttal to it: Refusing to either give or deny an "ontological" ground for our mathematical practices is not "intellectually dishonest" in the way Quine claims. Ironically, Putnam himself opposes the argument attributed to him in a variety of places; he thinks the Quinean insistence on a univocal reading of the quantifier is absurd, and so is mathematical platonism.

Price's "One Cheer for Representationalism" is slated to appear in the "Library of Living [sic] Philosophers" volume on Rorty, which is currently in development. Rorty plays almost no role in the paper. It is mostly about Brandom and Blackburn's "quasi-realism", which Price expands to a "global expressivism", as he has previously urged in other places. (Link has powerpoint slides and audio, for maximal "I-don't-feel-like-reading-this"-ness!) Price seems to me to recoil too far away from representation-talk, just as Rorty did, so perhaps the essay is not as inappropriate as it initially seems. Price only wants to rehabilitate talk of "representations" in an expressivist manner, but I can't see any motivation for stopping there, beyond a "naturalism" which makes the causal world seem "sparse" rather than "rich". I don't know how Price reconciles a global expressivism with this scientism; if no language plays the role of "representing how things are", then why are we supposed to take "our best current science" as somehow giving us a picture of "the causal order"? Why are we supposed to think there's any sense to talking about "the" causal order at all?

I have read in various places that Wiggins was influential for both Davidson and McDowell, so I looked him up on JStor. So far all I've read is "On Being in the Same Place at the Same Time", because it was only six pages long, and some book reviews. I can already sense why Wiggins might've been a cool dude. A quote from "On Being in the Same Place at the Same Time", p.92:

If it is a materialistic thesis that T = W [where T=a tree, W=the cellulose molecules that compose the tree], then my denial that T = W is a form of denial of materialism. It is interesting how very uninteresting an obstacle these Leibnizian difficulties-real though they are-put in the way of the reduction of botany and all its primitive terms to organic chemistry or to physics. (If it does not follow from T != W that trees are something over and above their matter, how much the less can it follow that they are immanent or transcendent or supervenient or immaterial beings. This is obviously absurd for trees. A Leibnizian disproof of strict identity could never be enough to show something so intriguing or obscure.) I should expect there to be equally valid, and from the point of view of ontology almost equally unexciting, difficulties in the reduction of persons to flesh and bones, in psychophysical event-materialism, and in the materialisms which one might formulate in other categories (such as the Aristotelian categories property and state or the categories situation and fact). Over and above is one question, identity is another. But of course the only stuff there is is stuff.

That's a pretty elegant way to avoid a bunch of ontological claims that I want to avoid. Is there some particular piece of Wiggins's I need to hunt down ASAP?

I read Derrida's "Signature Event Context"at Barnes&Noble. It was collected along with "limited ink abc...", an afterword where Derrida responded to some criticisms of "limited ink abc...", and a summary of Searle's article; apparently he wouldn't agree to having it reprinted in between the Derrida articles. Derrida's style still strikes me as the opposite of pleasant, but 'd' in "limited ink abc..." was pretty funny. Somewhere partway through 'e' I skipped to the afterword, where (paraphrasing since I didn't buy the book) Derrida is asked if he doesn't assume that concepts must have "rigid" rules for application, such that something is always "A or not-A" (vague or not vague, communicable or not communicable, etc.; he runs through a big list of them). Derrida answers in the affirmative: He does think concepts must be "rigid" in this way, so that one must always say, with the tradition, that (and here he runs through a whole slew of "A or not-A" phrases that I want not to affirm). I am now confident that I'll be fine not reading anything else Derrida wrote. Rorty's "Derrida and the Philosophical Tradition" left me with the strong impression that Rorty only praised Derrida so highly because of his style, and I am now convinced that this is how it is. As a philosopher, Derrida does not seem to have much to recommend him -- he is too caught up with dead projects.

Cavell would be easier to get into if he wasn't so damned erudite. Stop tying your philosophical points in to plays I haven't seen and novels I haven't read, dagnabit!

McDowell has an essay linked here which I can't recall anyone having linked to: "Why Is It Called "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind"?", which is a reading of Sellars as an empiricist, contra Brandom. I still haven't read Brandom's "study guide", and I'm now inclined to keep putting it off; McDowell's reading of Sellars strikes me as so obviously correct that I don't know how Brandom could read it otherwise. (I am of course aware that it is uncharitable to think Brandom is ever writing on something other than his own project. But Brandom's claim to be a Sellarsian is rather more forceful than his claim to be a Hegelian or Kantian, so a misreading here is more irksome.)

I'm slowly getting through "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". The end of Chapter X left me still wondering why Kuhn thinks it's worthwhile to talk of scientists as "operating in different worlds" rather than just "doing different things" or "seeing things differently". Why the "swinging stone" could not have been seen as the same thing by both Aristotelians and Galileans is unclear to me -- the Aristotelians cannot see it as a pendulum, and the Galileans cannot see it as an object which by nature moves "down", but why can't both see it as a swinging stone? Doesn't Kuhn's presentation of the matter actually require this? Doesn't this leave "different worlds"-talk looking too strong? (A more detailed discussion of Kuhn's account would be needed to flesh this out, I realize.)

I suspect that this is tied to a passage that struck me as bizarre: speaking of the duckrabbit picture beloved of gestalt psychology (and the second part of Philosophical Investigations), Kuhn notes that a subject might eventually come to see the picture as neither duck nor rabbit, but as "lines on paper", "and he may then say (what he could not have legitimately said earlier) that it is these lines which he really sees but that he sees them alternately as a duck and as a rabbit." (p.114 in the third edition) -- Isn't it just as legitimate for him to say that he sees the picture of a duck (or of a rabbit) as "mere lines"? I don't get what "really sees" means here. Surely he sees the ink on the paper (or pixels on a screen) as lines; then it is really the ink (or the pixels) that he sees! But both of these strike me as absurd -- the duckrabbit isn't "really" ink or lines or a duck or a rabbit, though it can be seen as all of these. There isn't anything it "really" is, behind all the aspects that one can perceive. The aspects one sees are what it "really is", in the only sense in which it "really is" anything at all. It's not as if the duck-aspect disappears when we don't see it; if someone (at first) can only see the rabbit, or can't see either picture (as happens with some of the worse gestalt images), then it isn't the case that the aspects have yet to come into being (after all, other people might be able to see them already). The fellow simply hasn't noticed them yet. So "perspectival aspects" seem as real as anything has claim to be.

Kuhn claims that the absence of an "external standard" in duckrabbit-like cases distinguishes simple gestalt shifts from scientific revolutions. If the "seeing lines as such-and-such" approach was supposed to be this "external standard", then scientific revolutions seem to revert to "simple" gestalt phenomena if that line was unintelligible. I want to say: One could view phenomena as they were conceived under an obsolete paradigm, it's simply (exceedingly) inconvenient scientifically, and suicidal professionally, for any given scientist to do so. In fact, it's not clear to me why one can't always go back to "pre-paradigm science" talk, if one doesn't mind giving up huge amounts of utility -- one can always talk in terms of "that thingy over there" and "that other thingy", if nothing else. It's liable to be confusing and there's no reason anyone would ever want to do this, but I don't see that it would somehow fail to "get a grip" on the world discussed by our best paradigm-enabled science. There's an awful lot you won't be able to discuss profitably, but what you can talk about, you can talk about. Similarly, I don't see why anything other than psychological limitations prohibit a scientist from working with multiple incompatible paradigms, at different points in time, and suspect that there have been such individuals. Which seems to sap Kuhn of some of his philosophical interest.

Kuhn seems so focused on the theory-ladenness of observation (not his term) that he ignores how much conflicting paradigms can have in common. For instance, both the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems (and our modern systems of astronomy) agree that there are visible stars at some distance from us. There are many other theoretical commitments which incompatible paradigms do not share in common, but they aren't entirely exclusive of one another. There's no "core" of observational data that all theories share among themselves, nor any definite set of observation sentences which are independent of all paradigms. And perhaps there are not sentences shared by all paradigms, since the "is common to these two paradigms" relation needn't be transitive. But I don't see why one can't grant all of this, which seems to be what Kuhn is actually interested in convincing us of, without going to some of the rhetorical extremes that Kuhn does.

But, like I said in an earlier post, I should probably finish the book before thinking about it too much.

And finally, because I do not think I have posted enough random pictures recently: Cirno.

She is the strongest!

Disjunctivism, Skepticism, and Why I Shouldn't Start Writing Things at One AM

McDowell has a new article out, in the collection Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge. The title of the article is "The Disjunctive Conception of Experience as Material for a Transcendental Argument". It was previously delivered as a lecture in 2006. As best I can tell, there's nothing new in this article; McDowell just covers some of the same material he's discussed in his earlier writings about disjunctivism, skepticism, and transcendental arguments.

McDowell has previously been hesitant to endorse any "transcendental arguments" (since there shouldn't be a need for them if we can therapize away the worries instead), and he's generally just as hesitant here; I'm pretty sure all of the material on Stroud and TAs was already covered in "Reading McDowell". The one thing that did leap out at me is p.382, where McDowell claims that Strawson's reading of the Transcendental Deduction, or perhaps the Deduction itself, might serve as a convincing transcendental argument that any potentially self-conscious state or episode is an episode which claims objective purport. So McDowell is slightly less hesitant to endorse "transcendental arguments" than he has been in times past, but only slightly, and he doesn't actually offer any arguments of his own under that banner, but merely points to the work of others.

The meat of the article is devoted to continuing an argument with Crispin Wright about perceptual skepticism. It all read like stuff I've read before.

I've wasted several hours puzzling over Wright's response, rather than sleeping. I now have a headache. 2400 words worth of dreck about Wright and disjunctivism are hidden behind Rena.


I just don't get Crispin Wright's response. It seems to be as wrong as anything can be; he seems to totally miss how the disjunctive view is supposed to answer perceptual skepticism.

What could make someone want to say something like this, from Wright's response to McDowell: "There is surely no plausibility whatever in the thought that the mere perceptual apprehension of the hand in front of my face is all it takes to put me in position rationally to claim knowledge that it is there." (Emphasis his; I'm not sure what the emphasis is there for. Wright seems to have some pretty crazy ideas about what being "rational" demands, or perhaps he means something remarkable by "claim". In any case I don't know why his emphasis stops short of "knowledge"; it doesn't seem like a publisher's error, since I'm going off of the draft, which was presumably from Wright's own fingers.)

Wright doesn't think it's rational to claim that I know I have hands, when I can see my hands in front of me. He claims that Moore's argument is question-begging, but he seems to hold that it isn't even valid.

Wright repeatedly treats the "disjunctive view" as if it meant that the object of one's perception is the disjunction "p or the-mere-appearance-that-p" -- as if this was the information conveyed by a perception that p, on the disjunctive view. But this is just what the disjunctive view denies. On the disjunctive view, the "highest common factor" is not a possible object of perception; only the disjuncts separately are. I can see a barn, or I can see a fake barn; I can't see either-a-barn-or-a-fake-barn. I might, on reflection, withhold judgement about which of the two I saw, but this would not be to judge that I had seen a third thing, the disjunction of the two. I saw the one, or I saw the other; I am warranted in holding that I saw one of them, and have no grounds for holding that I saw the other. To withhold judgement on which is which may or may not be justifiable, depending on what else one holds true. This is unlike the "highest common factor" view, wherein any inference from what I perceive to what is the case is groundless and without warrant.

If I take myself to have seen a barn, then I'm either entitled (non-defeasibly) to the claim that There's a barn over there, or I am wrong about what I take myself to have seen. And the same holds with the fake barn: If I take myself to have seen an illusory barn, then I am either entitled to the claim that I apprehend the mere shade of a barn there or I'm wrong about what I've taken myself to have seen. In either case, if I saw what I took myself to have seen, then it does follow that what I've seen is the case, and Wright's skeptic is refuted. If what I took to be the case is not, in fact, the case, then I was wrong about what I was entitled to hold. But this is not a case of a defeasible claim being abandoned as more information comes to light; if I was wrong about what it was I saw, then I never had any entitlement to the claim I took myself to be entitled to -- not even a defeasible one. If I take myself to have seen a barn, and what I actually saw was something else (or just a hallucination), then I was flat wrong. I never had even defeasible warrant for my claim, and so there's no warrant that I could be abandoning when it comes to light that I was wrong about the barn. But if the skeptic wants to suppose that all of my perceptual judgements are false (and so any entitlements I ascribe to myself are in error), then this clearly begs the question in favor of the skeptic. If I am wrong about practically everything I take myself to know, then I'll grant that I'm also wrong about what I take to be entailed by what I know. But Wright's skeptic gives me no reason to think that I am wrong about everything I take to be the case by way of perception. Hence if I take myself to have seen various things, and I am right about some of them, the skeptic is defeated. If I am wrong about all of them, then the skeptic's conclusion is true, but he has provided no reason to believe that it is so. If I withhold judgement on all of my perceptions, refusing to either believe that they are veridical or that they are illusory, then Wright's skeptic is correct: I don't know if I've ever perceived anything. But this is trivially true, since knowledge that p requires belief that p; if I refuse to believe all my purportedly perceptual claims, then I can't know anything that way, either. But no argument is given for why I oughtn't to trust my senses, since on the disjunctive view my senses provide me with opportunities to gain warranted knowledge of how things stand, in some cases. Thus, on the disjunctive picture of perception, whatever the position I take with respect to my purported percepts, Wright's skeptical argument does not go through.

Wright writes: "Direct awareness of states of affairs that make P true is one thing; warranted belief that P, for one fully apprised of what it takes for P to be true, is something else. One plausible additional necessary condition for the latter..." and then goes on to some blather about "responsibility" and "rationality". But this just shows that he rejects the disjunctive picture of experience. For the disjunctivist, the only additional "necessary condition" for warranted belief that p, if I have been made directly aware that p, is that I believe that what I intuit is actually how things stand in the world.

Wright considers a hypothetical in which there is a 50-50 chance he is hallucinating that there is a cricket match going on, and claims that in this scenario he is neither justified in claiming that there is a cricket match going on, nor does he know same, and neither can he say the opposite. But there seems to simply be no argument for this conclusion; it is simply called "irrational" to reason otherwise. But I am inclined to say that Wright would be perfectly justified in claiming (even claiming to know) that there is a cricket match going on in such a scenario; it is just that there are even odds that he would be wrong about this. And I'd say the same about his right to claim that he's hallucinating that there is a cricket match going on. If he wants to withhold judgement on the matter, this also strikes me as rational, given that nothing great rides on whether or not there is a cricket match going on -- in this case he will have failed to gain some bit of knowledge which he was entitled to, but he has also avoided gaining a false belief that he might have been lead to hold. None of these three options strike me as more or less rational than the others, given only the details Wright gives us; he seems to be afraid of gambling, lest he possibly be in error. Wright claims that only the third option is rational, but I can't find an argument for this conclusion, unless it's simply supposed to be that perception rests on a defeasible inference, and in this situation it is so defeased, and so the inference would be a bad one. Which, again, would simply be to reject the disjunctivist picture without argument; for the disjunctivist there is no inference involved in perceiving that p.

Wright occasionally states the disjunctive position correctly, but then immediately goes on to act as if the "phenomenal state" common to the two disjuncts was all that was actually perceived. Which is just to go back to a "highest common factor" view. From the close of Wright's paper: "It is the supposedly possible phenomenology of subjective indistinguishability, rather than a supposed "highest common factor", that is at the base of the problem." Wright seems unaware that treating this "possible phenomenology of subjective indistinguishability" as an object of perception is just what the disjunctivist calls the "highest common factor view"! No doubt, the disjunctive view is not a helpful way to dissolve skepticism, if it doesn't exclude the view it was designed to oppose.

On the disjunctivist picture, in perception I am either given that this is how things are or I am not given anything. Wright occasionally claims that to be justified in holding that I have been given that p, I must be able to justify that I am able to be given things in the manner I regard myself as having been given the fact that p -- if I hold myself to have sensed that p, I must be warranted in trusting my senses. But this inference is trivially available to the disjunctivist: if I am given an indefeasible reason to hold that I perceive that p, then the inference to I can perceive things is banal. Hence Wright's skeptical arguments fail on this front, too. They give the disjunctivist no reason to doubt that he has perceived that many things are the case which are the case, and that his so perceiving them justifies his beliefs that that is how things are.


Wright's reply in this volume is the first piece of his I've actually forced myself through, all the way to the end. His style grates on me, and his arguments just seem bad. I've never found "fake barn country" scenarios to lead my intuitions in the way they are intended to; if I see one barn and am fooled a hundred times in addition, then I want to say I saw one barn, and was fooled a hundred times in addition. If I am then told that I passed a hundred fakes, along with a solitary real barn, then I would be inclined to suspend judgement on which of my many perceptual beliefs vis-a-vis barns were true, and which false. But I would know that one of them was true, if I thought I'd seen a hundred and one barns, and there were only a hundred fakes. The moral I am supposed to draw from this story is that I didn't know that I saw any barns, including the one that I know that I saw. But I did know (in one of the 101 cases) that I saw a barn, before I distanced myself from the judgement. If I reverse this distancing, and hold that all of the things I saw were barns, then I will be wrong many times, and right once. The many errors do not detract from the one success, though they might make it harder to take advantage of the knowledge.

Wright applies his "I am in position rationally to claim that" operator incorrectly on page 12. Line I should become "I am either in position rationally to claim knowledge that I am perceiving a hand in front of my face or I am in position rationally to claim knowledge that I am in some kind of delusional state of that phenomenal character", if it is to represent something a disjunctivist would take themselves to be entitled to if they (seem to) see a hand in front of their face. If Wright had applied his invented operator in this manner, then it would be easy to see how II followed from I: Depending on how the world is, one or the other of the disjuncts will be true. If it's the first then II follows, if it isn't then it doesn't. This consequence relation is a matter which is independent of whatever I know or take myself to know, and so there is no question of whether or not I am warranted in believing it to hold; if I have a hand in front of my face and I perceive that this is so, then my rational credentials are impeccable.

I suspect that all of the above may be the wrong tack to take in handling this issue.

I am mystified by Wright's "Cartesian Dreaming Argument" in his paper's appendix. The conclusion of the argument does not strike me as more paradoxical than its first premise, so I don't see the point of the formalisms at all.

"To get empirical evidence you have to carry out some empirical procedure." This strikes me as false. I do not carry out any "empirical procedure" to perceive things; I simply see them. I don't do anything to see them; experience is "forced upon me". Wright uses this claim, along with the claim that "it is plausible that the evidence produced by such a procedure may not rationally be regarded as any stronger than one's independent evidence that the procedure was carried out competently and with due diligence — and hence that it was carried out at all" to argue that I'm not warranted in believing that I'm not dreaming. I don't know what it would mean to perceive "competently and with due diligence". But that doesn't seem to matter, for the passage continues

Dreaming excludes the genuine execution of empirical procedures. Hence the strength of warrant generated by executing such a procedure is rationally limited by the strength of one's independent warrant that one did not dream its execution! Hence no such procedure can generate a warrant that one is not (fully lucidly and coherently) dreaming.

Which is to say, if I want to claim that I saw a hand, I need independent warrant for the claim that I can see. Given that this would apply to every other claim I make to being gained through sight, this strikes me as entirely implausible, unless I can bootstrap my way up by using "I see a chair" to warrant trusting the senses that tell me that I see a desk, and then vice-versa. Which doesn't sound like what Wright is demanding claiming is plausible about warrant. I suspect Wright is trying to rule out responses like Putnam's response to brain-in-a-vat stories: I can see that p; I could not see that p if I were dreaming (or otherwise out of touch with reality); ergo I am not dreaming (or otherwise out of touch with reality). Which strikes me as a perfectly fine way to respond to brain-in-a-vat stories.

I suspect that the only points of substance in this post are my response to "fake barn country" scenarios and my attempt to give a disjunctivist's view of Wright's double blind test. These are the parts of the post I like least.