"The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy": some criticisms

As I mentioned in my previous post, I really like "The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy", which I have now finished. It gives the clearest accounts I've seen of big chunks of German Idealism, and I think Förster is especially good at laying out what the post-Kantians took to be the problems Kant had left them with. My high praise of those parts of the book remains. Where I think he's less successful is in showing that those problems do in fact get resolved by the post-Kantians. This post will be about those less successful parts.

To give an example: One of the clear issues in Kant that the post-Kantians tried to get past is Kant's conviction that out finite intellect is a special sort of finite intellect, and that others are possible (or at least thinkable); this aspect of Kant's thought means that when Kant proves that such-and-such is a condition on reality's being an object of cognition for us, we must not infer that such-and-such is a condition on the object's being an object of cognition as such. If our intellect was the only possible sort of intellect, then we could infer from "Such-and-such must be the case if reality is to be cognizable by us" to "Such-and-such must be the case if reality is to be cognizable" -- and then skepticism about such-and-such would refute itself, for it would cognize reality in trying to deny that such-and-such was true of the reality it cognized.

(If skepticism tried to back up and say that it merely wanted to say of reality as such that it might not be such-and-such, abstracting from whether or not we can cognize it that way, then skepticism can state a truth only at the cost of reducing itself to a tautology: apart from the conditions under which we can think of things/know things, we cannot think of things/know things. This is no real limitation on our knowledge, and so no real skepticism; this is the place to bring in Kant's discussion of the "noumenon in the negative sense".)

But, since Kant thinks that our intellect is of a special sort (finite as opposed to infinite, discursive as opposed to intellectual, sensibly intuitive as opposed to intellectually intuitive, spatiotemporal as opposed to having some other forms of intuition), it remains the case that anything Kant can show about the conditions for objects to be cognizable by us will leave open that there might be other sorts of intellects (even finite, discursive, sensible ones) that could cognize the objects which we can cognize only under those conditions outside of them: the objects of our cognition might not in themselves be as we (must) cognize them to be, and our forms of cognition might distort their objects. At this level, as opposed to an empirical level, Kant thinks that skepticism is true: things-in-themselves are not knowable by us, because of the distinctive form of our intellect. (Again, I think Förster is very good at explaining this stuff, though his account in the first two chapters of the book is admittedly compressed.)

Kant thinks we can entertain the (merely logical) possibility of other forms of finite discursive sensible intellects than our spatiotemporal one, and so the fact that he (takes himself to have) proved that our synthetic a priori knowledge is limited to spatiotemporal objects gives us transcendental idealism in its familiar form: we can know a priori only objects of possible experience, and this is not to know objects as things-in-themselves. Our understanding is not bound by the forms of our intuition, and so we can think objects in ways that we cannot cognize them; this is what makes transcendental idealism coherently formulatable, and simultaneously what makes transcendent metaphysics possible (it thinks erroneously of objects which are not given in space and time as being cognizable). Kant is explicit that we cannot know why we have the forms of intuition we have: "This peculiarity of our understanding, that it can produce a priori unity of apperception solely by means of the categories, and only by such and so many, is as little capable of further explanation as why we have just these and no other functions of judgement, or why space and time are the only forms of our possible intuition." (B146, section 21 of the B-Deduction). The earlier parts of the paragraph which this sentence closes makes clear that Kant is here calling "incapable of further explanation" the facts that our intellect is discursive, sensible, and has spatiotemporal forms of intuition.

Förster spends a good deal of time on the first two of these qualifications: he thinks that Fichte showed that our intellect is not (solely) sensible, but that the I knows itself via an intellectual intuition (it knows only its own act/product, and that is what the pure I is), and that Goethe showed that our intellect is not solely discursive, but that in scientia intuitiva (such as Förster and Goethe say was behind Goethe's theories of morphology and color) we know objects as a whole prior to knowing their parts. He also spends some time at least sketching how Fichte tried to address the issue of our having "such and so many" categories and "just these and no other functions of judgement", in chapter 8, "Fichte's "Complete Revolution of the Mode of Thought"". I didn't find this account satisfying, but it was clearly not meant to be fully rigorous or complete: Förster doesn't even try to tell us how Fichte derives the categories of Quantity or Modality, nor does he try to tell us how Fichte proceeds from his deductions of the logical laws of identity and non-contradiction to Kant's table of judgements.

But one major issue in Kant, the question of whether our spatiotemporal forms of intuition are the only ones possible (for a finite, discursive, sensitive intellect) is only addressed in a single footnote, number 13 on page 201. Förster partly excuses himself here by noting that Ficthe himself skimmed over this point in Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre: "Kant demonstrates the ideality of objects from the presupposed ideality of space and time: we, on the contrary, shall prove the ideality of space and time from the demonstrated ideality of objects. He required ideal objects to fill up space and time; we require space and time in order to locate the ideal objects." But Förster says that Fichte gives a "deduction of space and time" in Outline of the Distinctive Character of the Wissenschaftslehre, and that "in strict terms such a deduction is indeed required at this point in order to explain how it is possible for the image and the thing to correspond or agree with each other." It would've been nice to see more discussion of this, but then one can only ask so much of a 400 page book.

But another issue in Kant, the discursive nature of our intellect, gets a great deal of treatment by Förster, and he clearly means for the reality of non-discursive knowledge to be one of the main results of his book. To quote the last sentences of the final chapter: "The path of scientia intuitiva [non-discursive knowledge] alone is still open". Chapter 11, "The Methodology of the Intuitive Understanding", is supposed to show how we can achieve scientia intuitiva of natural objects. (As a reminder, Spinoza's examples of scientia intuitiva in the Ethics are always mathematical; it is unclear how much he believed we could really have scientia intuitiva of non-mathematical finite objects, though the general thrust of part five of the Ethics suggests that acquiring this is in fact within our power, and also important for us to achieve.)

I think that a summary version of my complaint about Förster here can be put by looking at a conclusion Förster takes himself to have demonstrated in his methological discussion of Goethe's botanical studies: "In summary, then, we can say that if an idea lies at the basis of a set of phenomena and is operative in all its parts, then that fact can only be recognized by the method described here. Whether or not an idea in this sense lies at the foundation of a set of phenomena can also only be determined in this way." (p.264) -- By "idea" here Förster means something peculiar, and it's probably best to read the book yourself to get the details. But the gist of what an "idea" is here can, I think, be appreciated by looking at the example that Kant originally uses in section 77 of the Critique of the Power of Judgement, and that inspired Goethe et al: a plant. In thinking of a plant as a plant, we are thinking of it as a certain sort of organism. Thus, following Kant's account of organisms in the third Critique (which, as Förster notes in a footnote on p.138, is similar to Hume's in the Treatise), we are thinking of it as having parts which are both the cause and effect of its whole: a tree has roots and limbs and flowering buds because it is the sort of tree it is, and its having roots and limbs and flowering buds are how it is able to be that sort of tree.

Kant thinks that we are unable to know anything in nature in this way, because of the discursive nature of our intellect: "Our understanding, namely, has the property that in its cognition, e.g., of the cause of a product, it must go from the analytical universal (of concepts) to the particular (of the given empirical intuition), in which it determines nothing with regard to the manifoldness of the latter, but must expect this determination for the power of judgment from the subsumption of the empirical intuition (when the object is a product of nature) under the concept. Now, however, we can also conceive of an understanding which, since it is not discursive like ours but is intuitive, goes from the synthetically universal (of the intuition of a whole as such) to the particular, i.e., from the whole to the parts, in which, therefore, and in whose representation of the whole, there is no contingency in the combination of the parts, in order to make possible a determinate form of the whole, which is needed by our understanding, which must progress from the parts, as universally conceived grounds, to the different possible forms, as consequences, that can be subsumed under it. In accordance with the constitution of our understanding, by contrast, a real whole of nature is to be regarded only as the effect of the concurrent moving forces of the parts." (AK 5:407, section 77 of the third Critique) In other words: to know an organism as a product of nature, we would have to know it as having its parts produced by its whole (and vice-versa, in reciprocal fashion). But we can only know products of nature as having their parts produced by forces, and of all natural "wholes" as aggregates of such parts. For our thought is (thinks Kant) always discursive: we are first given particulars, and then bring those under universals; we are never given particulars as already "under" universals, such as would be the case in an organism whose particular parts are caused by the universal which is its whole.

This is a jarringly skeptical result: it certainly seems as if we can have knowledge of organisms in nature. So the post-Kantians unite in thinking that Kant has made an error in thinking that our understanding is (always) discursive, for they all agree that Kant has given a correct account of what would have to be the case if we could have knowledge of organisms, but reject his skepticism about knowledge of organisms: so our understanding must also be "intuitive", and sometimes proceed from cognition of wholes to cognition of parts. The sort of cognition of a whole involved here is what Goethe calls knowledge of an "idea", and identifies with scientia intuitiva: we know the "synthetic universal" or "idea" of a particular kind of tree, and so know its parts as being those sorts of parts because it is that sort of tree.

I think there's something to this line of thought, when we are dealing with living things: organisms do have a sort of whole, the knowledge of which is (in a sense) prior to the knowledge of their parts. You need to have some notion of an object in nature as having a whole of that sort to grasp it as an organism, because you need to have some notion of how its parts can be parts of an organic whole. And the account Förster gives of Goethe's methodology seems to me to have a plausible claim to being how we come to know organisms as the organisms they are: we have to recognize the ways in which each part functions to produce and maintain the whole, and the ways in which the whole is nothing but this activity of its parts. Only when we have grasped all of these "transitions" can we fully know an object in nature as an organism. As Förster says, "if an idea lies at the basis of a set of phenomena and is operative in all its parts, then this can only be recognized by the method described here." If this is false, then I think it is at least in the vicinity of the truth. But I'm not sure how to tell whether the antecedent of this conditional is satisfied. It looks like organisms satisfy it, if there are any, as Kant's analysis of what it is to think of something as an organic whole is. Apart from that, I don't see how to tell whether learning about a bunch of connections between natural happenings can constitute coming to know the moments of an idea or not: Förster needs for us to grasp ideas, to come to have scientia intuitiva, by observing transitions, but I don't see how he gets from observing a number of transitions which we take to be the moments of an idea to actually knowing that they are just the moments of an idea. Goethe thought that he had achieved knowledge of the idea of color, but Lichtenberg convinced him he was wrong (as Förster discusses). How are we supposed to tell whether or not we've really grasped an idea, then?

I think Förster's suggestion is that we can know we have an idea on our hands when we have a plurality of moments and all of the transitions between them: the idea is then the totality of those moments/transitions, and is "at the basis of the set of phenomena and operative in all its parts". But how do we know if we have all of the relevant moments? Do ideas have smaller ideas as the parts, which are at the basis of subsets of their moments, so that any plurality which has transitions between its moments will do? Where does Förster get his conviction that ideas are at the basis of all reality, as opposed to being what gives unity to organisms?

If I can find an answer to this, then I will also have an answer to my biggest complaint about the book, which is how Förster shows that Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (or something very close to it) in fact brings an end to the twenty-five years of philosophy and resolves all of the problems Kant left for the post-Kantians. On the penultimate page of the epilogue, he considers the following objection to the claim that Hegel really did solve it all: "it is not convincing that a specific transition [between shapes of consciousness in the Phenomenology] is supposed to be necessary for consciousness at its given level. And such an objection may, in any given case, be justified. Then the question becomes: Is the transition itself not necessary, or has its necessity simply not been convincingly presented? As long as we find that some of the other transitions are necessary, we can always be sure that the problem is one of presentation. That is the crucial point! If a whole makes its parts possible and gives them their shape, then it must be active in all the parts and in all their transitions, not only in some. If that activity (necessity) has been recognized in some of the transitions but not in others, all this implies is that the latter have not yet been adequately grasped and presented." (p.376, my bolding)

As a matter of fact, I find the transitions between the shapes of "Self-Consciousness" very convincing, and have ever since reading McDowell's "Towards a Heterodox Reading of Lordship and Bondage". I also find parts of the "Consciousness" chapters more or less clear. (I can see what is wrong with "Sense-Certainty", but what is going on in the "Perception" chapter always fades in and out of view for me, and "Force and the Understanding" is a very hard piece of Hegeling.) And most of the "Reason" chapter is pretty clear, for Hegel (it helps that the phrenology jokes are funny). So, if I know that these transitions are between moments of an idea (the Absolute Idea that Hegel tells us about in the Science of Logic, as it will happen), then I can be sure that Förster is right: the transitions which look to me to fail are just not convincingly presented. As they are parts of the Absolute Idea, there must be transitions between all of its moments which follow simply from the essence of those moments; this is analytic of what being moments of an idea comes to. But, as Förster presented it, the project of "The Science of the Experience of Consciousness" as originally conceived was just to demonstrate that there is in fact an Absolute Idea for a "Science of Logic" to lay out the moments of! And as this "Science of the Experience of Consciousness" is what became the Phenomenology of Spirit, I cannot simply grant to Hegel that there is in fact an Absoute Idea: this is what he needed to show me by presenting a total account of the plurality of the forms of knowledge-claims and the transitions between them. So Förster's defense of the result of the Phenomenology begs the question: I can be sure that the transitions between the shapes of "Self-Consciousness" are parts of a totality of transitions between moments of the Absolute Idea only if I already know that they are transitions between moments of an idea, which the Phenomenology was meant to show by exhibiting all of the moments of an idea. Förster has not shown that there are not problems with Hegel's approach in principle: that there might not be any idea for a "Science of Logic" to lay out for us, and that Kant's scattershot approach to our forms of thinking might not be where we have to rest, skeptical results and all.

"The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy"

This book is the best book on German Idealism I've ever read. Engaging, clear, and deep.

I'm usually really bad about starting books and then putting them down, but I haven't been tempted to read any other books since starting "The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy". (Watch "Game of Thrones" instead of read philosophy, yes. Read any other books, no.) I'm in the part about Schelling's Naturphilosophie now, and it's still remarkably clear. I've always wondered how Kantianism somehow lead to that stuff, and Förster is actually making that move seem intelligible. He's already made everything from Kant's first realization that there's a problem about how thought of objects which are not sensibly given can be possible to the Wissenschaftslehre clearer to me than they've ever been, and I am excited to get to the Hegel chapters (and find out what the weird swirly diagram on the cover is about).

I really have nothing to say about this book right now other than that I love it and you should read it immediately. I'm going to go back to reading it now.

"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?"

The Endogenous given: a possible breakthrough on my part?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Was Heidegger an Analytic Philosopher?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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