Peter Gilbert (ed) 'Spirituality and Mental Health'

I see that Peter Gilbert, Emeritus Professor of Social Work and Spirituality at Staffordshire University and an excellent dinner companion, has edited a new book called Spirituality and Mental Health. It is described as:

This new work has 23 chapters by a range of distinguished authors in touch with experience , practice and research; and ranges across perspectives from 'the cradle to the grave', and issues around mindfulness, reflective practice, assessing spiritual needs, and a variety of approaches.

Whilst I have some qualms about the recent stress on spirituality in mental health care – I fear a retreat from Enlightenment values but then I am an old atheist – the fact is that many of those involved in this area have interesting, nuanced and sympathetic views of health and illness. The emphasis on spirituality seems to block any temptation towards vulgar reductionism, for example.

The Phenomenology of depression

I spent an interesting three days at a workshop, organised by Matthew Ratcliffe and Achim Stephan, on the Phenomenology (capital P!) of depression at the University Of Durham last week.

The presentations were interesting and helpful for me. I found myself making copious notes but today, looking at them, realise that I can make almost nothing of them But a few ideas stand out (because the handwriting is better or because i simply remember what I was trying to jot down).

Ben Smith sketched out some of the options for understanding the phenomenon of reduced motivation in depression. On a traditional view of action, motivation is driven by a pairing of belief and desire with the latter as the primary motor. The temptation is to think that in a failure of motivation in depression, the belief component remains intact whilst the desire is lacking. But, Ben argued, this picture is held in place by a questionable Humean assumption about psychology in turn held in place by a questionable Humean assumption about metaphysics.

Without that, one can instead develop a richer account of the way the world itself offers reasons for action which fits some accounts of depression in which the world itself seems thin dry mean and grey, or lacking in meaning.

To try to fill this out Ben suggested that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of a space of motivation might helpfully be added to the McDowellian duality of space of reasons and realm of law. Such motivation could crystalise into explicit reason but seemed itself less than that. That seems an interesting idea but I was not sure what a paradigmatic instance of the kind of intelligibility of this third space might be (by contrast the space of reasons is exemplified by comparison with a rational ideal and the realm of law is a matter of subsumption under a law) nor why there is need for something less than the space of reasons to account for motivation

A group from SANE summarised some preliminary research findings from a questionnaire of people who had had suicidal feelings. They began with the claim that being suicidal ‘is a matter of feelings’, that there is something that is like to be suicidal, and that this seemed to be characterised by four features of the way the self was experienced as a unit and a couple for self as part of a whole. They summarised a number of key metaphors that were frequently used.

It is a very interesting bottom up phenomenology and we should await their results with interest. Nevertheless, afterwards, Matthew Ratcliffe asked a question that had bothered me. On the face of it, there is no uniform feeling ‘being about to buy a book’. Indeed, that is not ‘a matter of feeling’ at all. So why assume that there is such a unity when it comes to feelings of suicide? In fact, i fear the issue is worse than Matthew suggested: there seems no reason to assume that an answer to that question could fall out of a phenomenological inquiry. (It is akin to asking what experiences mark reading.)

My notes on a paper by Jennifer Radden stop at the point that she made a powerful appeal to intuition: one cannot imagine being in pain without being in pain. One can, for example, imagine a flying elephant without there being one but not imagine pain without bringing it about. So – to use an example Peter Goldie suggested – if one imagines catching a falling knife, one can have a kind of visceral reaction. I think that that Peter meant this to suggest that one could imagine this, the response being further evidence. But Jennifer took it to work by bringing about a kind of pain. I wonder whether she is in the grip of an assumption about perceptual imagination: that it is carried by a bearer which is ontologically independent of what is imagined (a picture, perhaps) whereas there can be no such carrier for the imagination of pain aside from pain itself. But that seems a bad picture of imagination...

The Drama of Medicine: All the Ward’s a Stage

Humanities Students: Are you studying english, philosophy, history, or any other humanities subject? Have you ever had a topic covering the field of medicine, or just wondered how your subject can relate to medicine?
The Student Association of Medical Humanities is proud to present their 2nd annual conference:

The Drama of Medicine: All the Ward’s a Stage

11th July 2011 University of Leicester

A conference to explore all aspects of medical humanities With keynote speakers, delegates’ papers, and workshops, including:

Workshop from the Society of Medical Writers,

Keynote speakers, including Prof. Bill Fulford.

To register interest, submit an abstract or for any queries please contact s.amh2011@hotmail.com

Some travel and accommodation costs will be subsidised on a first come, first served basis.

Is knowledge like putting?

In ‘Perception as a Capacity for Knowledge’, McDowell responds to Burge’s account of the warrant that perceptual states provide for perceptual beliefs by sketching an alternative minimal deflating account. I find myself agreeing with the thrust of the argument, which feels quite familiar, until a nagging worry, which I should have outgrown, seems to return.

Burge builds an account of perception in which the warrant which a perceptual state provides for a belief can be both external to the subject in the sense of being not fully conceptually accessible, even on reflection, to them and also defeasible: it does not guarantee the truth of a belief (even when the belief, based on the state, is veridical). His objection to the kind of Sellarsian internalist view that McDowell wishes to defend is that the internalism makes the account unrealistically intellectual because accommodating defeasible warrant makes things too complex.

McDowell’s response is not so much to criticise Burge’s account as to sketch an alternative which avoids Burge’s specific concerns. The charge of intellectualism is avoided in two ways. First, McDowell attempts to deflate the worry by suggesting that a Sellarsian account of knowledge as a standing in the space of reasons is an account of the structure of reasons not the inferential transitions actively undertaken.

5. Burge sometimes makes it look as if his objection to the Sellarsian picture depends on an implication he finds in it to the effect that perceptual knowledge in rational subjects is arrived at by taking an inferential step. One of his formulations of what he finds implausibly intellectualistic about the Sellarsian picture is that it “implies that the formation of a perceptual belief is a piece of reasoning — a transition from a reason to what it is a reason for”.

 But a believer can be self-consciously justified in a belief without having formed the belief by a transition to it from whatever she would cite in giving her justification for it. That is so even if the grounds on which the belief counts as knowledgeable are inferential. When I know that my neighbour is at home on the basis that, as I can see, his car is in his driveway, I do not need to have taken an inferential step to the belief that he is at home. It might be perfectly natural co say I can just see, straight off, that he is at home. Even so, my belief that he is at home counts as knowledgeable, if it does, because there is a good enough inference from the fact that his car is in his driveway to the conclusion that he is at home, And my knowledge that he is at home includes self-consciousness about its warrant, so that I can produce a justification, in Burge’s technical sense, for my belief that he is at home. I know not just that my neighbour is at home but that my warrant for believing that he is consists in the goodness of that inference, even if I did not arrive at the belief by inferring it from the knowledge that grounds it for me.

I think this indicates that Burge should not have suggested his objection to the Sellarsian picture is on the score of a supposed commitment, on Sellars’s part, to the idea of a rational transition in the formation of a perceptual belief. The point is not about what happens in the formation of perceptual beliefs, but about the structure that Burge thinks would have to characterize a self-consciously possessed warrant, a ,justification in his sense, for a perceptual belief. Burge thinks there is an unacceptable intellectualism in holding that for any bit of perceptual knowledge possessed by a rational subject, the subject must be in a position to attribute to herself a warrant with the structure in question. The objection does not depend on supposing that where there is such a structure in the subject’s self-consciously possessed warrant for a perceptual belief, it follows that the belief was acquired by a corresponding transition. [McDowell 2011: 25-6]

McDowell’s second response to the charge of intellectualism denies that perceptual warrant is defeasible. Had it been so, then a self-conscious subject who took herself to be warranted in a perceptually based belief would have to be versed in a vocabulary of ‘defeasible warrant, defeating conditions, considerations that warrant one in discounting the possibility that one’s perceptual warrant is defeated in the present circumstances.’

What warrants one in holding the perceptual state to be a seeing, as Burge puts it Burge’s thought is this: to argue that the perceptual state is a seeing—to argue that the warrant it provides is good enough for knowledge—one would need to argue that in the present circumstances the warranting force it has, as the perceptual state it is, is not undermined, though it is warrant of a kind that can be undermined, warrant of a sort that does not guarantee what it warrants. One would need to argue that, though the warrant provided by the perceptual state is defeasible, it is not defeated on this occasion. That would require working with some notably sophisticated concepts: defeasible warrant, defeating conditions, considerations that warrant one in discounting the possibility that one’s perceptual warrant is defeated in the present circumstances. And Burge insists—plausibly enough—that we should not credit ordinary adult human beings, who may be only minimally articulate and reflective, with the ability to deploy conceptual equipment of that level of sophistication. [ibid: 28-9]

McDowell’s positive sketch of how perceptual states warrant perceptual beliefs is so much simpler than this that it can escape the charge of intellectualism.

The key idea is to accept that perceptual capacities are fallible but to deny that this implies that, when things go well, the warrant that a perceptual state provides for a perceptual belief fails to guarantee its truth. There are two aspects to this. The first is the idea that a capacity can be fallible insofar as even when a subject is careful in its operation, still, it can misfire. But when it does not misfire, the warrant it provides is truth-guaranteeing. Success and failure is blurred in its ascription to the capacity as a whole but then apportioned disjunctively to individual circumstances. The second is that this idea is ‘unpacked’ through the idea that a perceptual capacity is a capacity to have objects presented to one.

[W]hen all goes well in the operation of a perceptual capacity of a sort that belongs to its possessor’s rationality, a perceiver enjoys a perceptual state in which some feature of her environment is there for her, perceptually present to her rationally self-conscious awareness. This presence is an actualization of a capacity that belongs to the subject’s reason. Reason is at work, that is, in the perceptual presence to rational subjects of features of their environment. And if a perceptual state can consist in a subject’s having a feature of her environment perceptually present to her, that gives the lie to the assumption that a perceptual stare cannot warrant a belief in a way that guarantees its truth. If a perceptual state makes a feature of the environment present to a perceiver’s rationally self-conscious awareness, there is no possibility, compatibly with someone’s being in that state, that things are not as the state would warrant her in believing that they are, in a belief that would simply register the presence of that feature of the environment. The warrant for belief that the state provides is indefeasible; it cannot be undermined. [ibid: 30-1]

So perceptual states or experiences are divided into two sorts: those where objects really are present as they appear and thus the warrant provided by the state for the corresponding perceptual belief is truth guaranteeing; and those in which the capacity misfires and things are not as they seem. When things do go well, the capacity gives the subject an indefeasible warrant in their perceptual belief.

Think of the capacity to sink eight-foot putts. Even the best golfers do not sink all their eight-foot purrs. The idea I am considering is that there cannot be capacities, acknowledged to be fallible, whose non-defective exercises put their possessors in positions in which they have conclusive warrant for beliefs. One might as well think there cannot be a capacity, of course not guaranteed success in every exercise, in whose non-defective exercises a possessor of it actually sinks eight-foot putts. [ibid: 39]

This line of thought seems attractive and a convincing alternative to Burge’s picture of perception as providing merely an external and defeasible warrant. But the analogy with putting seems odd because, I suspect, sinking the putt seems more like a capacity to get true belief or knowledge-how to get it rather than knowledge (or knowledge-that) itself and thus a familiar worry – a worry I feel I shouldn’t suffer – seems to return. The worry stems from the fact that the moral of the argument of ‘Perception as a Capacity for Knowledge’ seems to replicate the line of thought about justification from ‘Knowledge and the internal’, about criteria from ‘Criteria, defeasibility and knowledge’ and the critique of Rorty and the mundus absconditus from ‘Towards rehabilitating objectivity’. The common line of thought seems to be that if one accommodates the fallibility of our justificatory powers by severing the firm connection between justification and truth (or justification and our world-grasping powers), then justification is never enough. The line of thought seems to be the same as that for disjunctivism rather than a highest common factor in perception carried over to criticise a highest common factor – which stops short of the truth – for justification in general.

The negative argument –spelled out elsewhere – seems to involve the idea that knowledge is not a matter of luck. So if the difference between justified belief which failed to be knowledge and justified belief which amounted to knowledge was a matter external to the justification, that would, impossibly, make knowledge a matter of luck. Hence instead a form of disjunctivism where the ‘good’ disjunct is sufficient for truth and thus the justification in the good disjunct does not need additional luck to underpin knowledge.

In the face of this line of argument, I can never help thinking that since the two disjuncts seem the same, the luck just enters the picture in a different place: getting oneself into the right disjunct. But in this passage, there is a response to just this worry. Here is the summary of the worry:

And now it is tempting to argue like this: even if we grant, perhaps temporarily and for the sake of argument, that a non-defective exercise of a perceptual capacity puts one in a state that consists in having some feature of one’s environment present to one, being in such a state cannot have the epistemological significance I have been claiming for it; it cannot provide one with indefeasible warrant for a belief that registers the presence of that feature. Perhaps a perceptual state would give one indefeasible warrant for a suitably related belief if one knew that the current exercise of one’s perceptual capacity was non-defective. But to accept, as we must, that the capacity is fallible is to accept that defective exercises of it can be indiscriminable, at least at the time, from non-defective exercises. And it can seem to follow that even if the current exercise is not defective, the subject cannot know that it is not defective. It can seem to follow that even on an occasion on which someone is in a perceptual state of the kind I am claiming we can describe in terms of the presence to her of a feature of her environment, her perceptual state is, for all she knows, not of that kind—her current exercise of her perceptual capacity is, for all she knows, defective. So surely she does not know whatever it is about the environment that she takes her perceptual state to enable her to know. [ibid: 40-1]

The worry is that since the two disjuncts seem the same, even if the good disjunct would amount to truthful access to the world (to put it much more roughly than McDowell does, of course), since one cannot tell which of the disjuncts applied in any case, one cannot know which disjunct applies and that in turn undermines one’s ability to have knowledge of the world.

In response to this, we need to emphasize the connection between reason and self-consciousness. A rational perceptual capacity is a capacity not only to know certain kinds of thing about the environment, but, on an occasion on which one knows something of the relevant kind through the exercise of the capacity in question, to know that that is how one knows it. [ibid: 41]

So the first part of the reply suggests a kind of self-consciousness or self-knowledge about the way one comes to know about the world. In the good disjunct, one can not only have knowledge of the world but also knowledge of how one has knowledge of the world. Such is the transparency of experience, perhaps. This is further explained thus:

The capacity—of course fallible—to know, on certain occasions, that one’s experience is revealing to one that things are a certain way, which is a bit of self-knowledge, is just an aspect of the capacity—of course fallible—to know through experience, on those occasions, that things are that way. It is a single capacity, self-consciously possessed and exercised. A bit of rational perceptual knowledge includes knowledge that it is through perception that one knows whatever it is that one knows about the environment. [ibid: 41]

But now McDowell needs to deal with the worry about the bad disjunct. In that case, one will surely have both mistaken views about the world and mistaken views about the source of that apparent knowledge, that false belief, in the way things (merely) appear to be. He says:

And we need to avoid that bad inference from the fallibility of the capacity, not only in connection with its guise as a capacity for knowledge about one’s environment, but also in connection with its guise as a capacity for self-knowledge. Granted, one can mistake a defective exercise of the capacity for a non-defective exercise. But it does not follow that the capacity cannot be correctly described as a capacity to know things about the environment. [ibid: 42]

That seems to go too quickly. What I would like to know is why the fact that one can mistake the bad disjunct for the good one – in the sense of taking oneself to have knowledge of the world when one does not (just an appearance) and hence, given the self-consciousness of such methods, mistake the grounds of one’s apparent knowledge (that is take the mere appearance to be reality) – does not undermine the efficacy of the good disjunct for knowledge. I’m inclined to accept the final sentence about the fallible capacity. But the worry hasn’t been discharged yet. McDowell continues:

And it is just the same point, applied to the same capacity in a different guise, to say this: it does not follow that the capacity cannot be correctly described as a capacity to get into positions in which one knows that it is through one’s perceptual state that one knows something about the environment—and so knows that one’s perceptual state conclusively warrants one in the belief in question. [ibid: 42]

Well yes: if the worry has been eased such that the good disjunct can get on and give me knowledge then also what might have been an appearance on which knowledge was based will turn out to be reality. But has the worry been eased? McDowell continues with a quotation from Rodl the second half of which goes like this:

One might object that this grants me grounds that rule out error at the price of making it impossible for me to know whether my belief is based on such grounds. For, when I am fooled, I do not know that I am fooled. So I can never know whether I am not fooled and my beliefs are based on grounds that [establish] their truth, or whether I am fooled and such grounds are unavailable to me. This objection repeats the mistake: from the fact that, when I am fooled, I do not know that I am, it does not follow that, when I am not fooled, I do not know that I am not. When I know that p as I perceive it to be the case, then I know that I perceive that p. Thus I am in a position to distinguish my situation from any possible situation in which I would be fooled, for, in any such situation, I would not perceive that p, while in the given situation I do. [ibid: 43-4]

What seems odd about this is that the train of thought: if I – perceptually – know that p then I know perceptually that p and thus I can distinguish my position from cases where I do not perceptually know that p, does not seem to address this worry. The worry is not whether someone who perceptually knows that p can know that that is how they know it. The worry isn’t about the modality, but about the knowledge in the face of the realisation that they might have taken themselves to be moving through this set of thoughts when in fact they do not know p in the first place, because, sadly, they occupy the bad disjunct.

The analogy with the capacity for putting seems misleading because there, when all goes well, the thought that it might not have gone well does not seem to call the exercise of the capacity in the successful cases into question. So there would be no need for the kind of insistence rehearsed in the passages I’ve been quoting here. But, in the case of knowledge, unlike mere true belief, those other possible cases do seem, at least, to have implications for the good cases as well: that seems to be the fault of the justification condition.

If one knows how to sink a putt then one has a general capacity. The capacity can be fallible in that not all attempts succeed. But, of a successful putt, there seems no problem in saying that it was the result of the capacity, even though it can fail in other cases. That fact does not seem to undermine the explanation of the success as an instance of the capacity. That is what seems different about knowledge. Knowledge does not seem to be practical know-how applied to true belief formation.

If the putting capacity is fallible it is possible that there are explanations for failures. Perhaps when the wind is thus and so and the grass thus and so, sinking the putt would be mere luck. If so, such a chance sinking under those circumstances does not seem to be the result of the capacity. There are some kinds of putt one does not, after all, know how to sink (even if sometimes they go in). But unless there is an important or salient pattern in this, the fact that one is lucky not to be in such a situation doesn’t seem to me to undermine the idea that sinking other putts is a result of the capacity. That’s what just doesn’t seem the same in the knowledge case. The luck in not being in the sort of case where one gets it wrong just does seem to undermine the status of the true belief as knowledge.

I know I shouldn’t still have this worry. I can, eg. persuade myself that I do know I am not dreaming when I read Michael Williams’ account in Unnatural Doubts. But the nagging worry always seems to return.

McDowell, J. (2011) Perception as a Capacity for Knowledge, Milwaukee: Marquette University Press. 

Short extract from McDowell Perception as a Capacity for Knowledge

I’ve been reading John McDowell’s recent paper ‘Perception as a Capacity for Knowledge’ which is largely a critique of Burge’s view of how perceptual states warrant perceptual beliefs. McDowell, plausibly, argues that it cannot sustain perceptual knowledge. Roughly, its accommodation of fallibility undermines the ability of perception to underwrite knowledge when all goes well. So a key argument in McDowell’s paper consists in outlining a different approach. This passage is by no means the only interesting aspect of the paper but it seems to me to be key.

9. I think this reflects a mistake about the concept of fallibility. And I do not believe the mistake is special to Burge. On the contrary, it is pervasive in epistemology. It is typical for discussions of the epistemology of perceptual knowledge to begin with the assumption I have found in Burge, that experience itself cannot provide better than in-conclusive warrant for belief. Often this is quickly taken for granted. But if a ground is offered, it is typically something on the lines of Burge's appeal to the fallibility of all our perceptual capacities.

Burge thinks a Sellarsian epistemology for perceptual knowledge as enjoyed by rational subjects falls into an unacceptable intellectualism. I have suggested this reflects a blind spot for a conception of perceptual warrant that Sellars enables us to frame. And I think the way Burge exploits considerations about fallibility, to underwrite the view about perceptual warrant that is essential to his accusation against Sellars, is exemplary of a widespread tendency in philosophical thinking about perception as a capacity for knowledge. It should be instructive to think this through.

Fallibility is a property of capacities, or perhaps of cognitive subjects as possessors of capacities. If a capacity is fallible, or if, to speak in chat other way, anyone who has it is fallible in respect of it, that means that there can be exercises of the capacity in which its possessor does not do what the capacity is specified as a capacity to do.

That account of fallibility is completely abstract. It puts no restrictions on what a fallible capacity can be a capacity to do. Certainly Burge is right that all our perceptual capacities are fallible. But we can acknowledge that a capacity is fallible with-out precluding ourselves from saying that what it is a capacity to do is this: to get into states that consist in having a certain feature of the objective environment perceptually present to one's self-consciously rational awareness. If that is what a capacity is a capacity to do, that is what one does in a non-defective exercise of it. And I have urged that if a perceptual state can be described in those terms, there is no possibility, compatibly with a subject's being in such a state, that things are not as she would believe them to be in the beliefs that the stare would warrant. When we acknowledge that a capacity is fallible, we acknowledge that there can be exercises of it that are defective, in that they fail to be cases of what the capacity is specified as a capacity to do. That does not preclude us from holding that in non-defective exercises of a perceptual capacity subjects get into perceptual states that provide indefeasible warrant for perceptual beliefs.

For instance, a capacity to tell whether things in one's field of vision are green is a capacity —fallible, by all means—to get into positions in which the greenness of things is visibly there for one, present to one's rationally self-conscious awareness. If something's greenness is visibly there for one, one has conclusive warrant for believing that it is green. One's perceptual state leaves no pos-sibility that it is not green. That the capacity is fallible means that a possessor of it can be fooled, as Burge puts it; for instance, if the light is unsuitable for telling the colours of things, one can rake something's greenness to be visually present to one when the thing is nor green at all. It is wrong to think it follows that even when one is not fooled in an exercise of this capacity, one's position must fall short of having something's greenness visibly present to one, and thereby having an indefeasible warrant for believing the thing to be green. That is just what one's position is in a non-defective exercise of the capacity.

If we follow the etymology of the word, fallibility is a possibility of being deceived. That is an imperfection in cognitive capacities. But the mistake I am pointing out may be easier to recognize if we consider its analogue in application to imperfection in other sorts of capacities. Think of the capacity to sink eight-foot putts. Even the best golfers do not sink all their eight-foot purrs. The idea I am considering is that there cannot be capacities, acknowledged to be fallible, whose non-defective exercises put their possessors in positions in which they have conclusive warrant for beliefs. One might as well think there cannot be a capacity, of course not guaranteed success in every exercise, in whose non-defective exercises a possessor of it actually sinks eight-foot putts.

10. It might seem that this way of dealing with imperfection in capacities cannot have the kind of significance in epistemology that I am suggesting it does.

To say that a perceptual capacity is fallible, or that anyone who has it is fallible in its exercise, is to say that the capacity does not ensure that its possessor is always in a position to discriminate defective exercises from non-defective exercises. If a capacity did ensure that, it would be in principle infallible; through carelessness or insufficient attention, someone might still mistake defective exercises for non-defective exercises, but the capacity itself wot.dd be perfect. But that sort of perfection is surely nor within our reach. That is the point of saying, nor just that we are not guaranteed to be correct in all our perceptual beliefs, but that our perceptual capacities themselves are fallible. It is not just that we are prone to carelessness and inattentiveness, but that no perceptual capacity excludes all possibility of defective exercises such that, however careful or attentive one was, one would not recognize them as defective, at least at the time.

And now it is tempting to argue like this: even if we grant, perhaps temporarily and for the sake of argument, that a non-defective exercise of a perceptual capacity puts one in a state that consists in having some feature of one's environment present to one, being in such a state cannot have the epistemological significance I have been claiming for it; it cannot provide one with indefeasible warrant for a belief that registers the presence of that feature. Perhaps a perceptual state would give one indefeasible warrant for a suitably related belief if one knew that the current exercise of one's perceptual capacity was non-defective. But to accept, as we must, that the capacity is fallible is co accept that defective exercises of it can be indiscriminable, at least at the time, from non-defective exercises. And it can seem to follow that even if the current exercise is not defective, the subject cannot know that it is not defective. It can seem to follow that even on an occasion on which someone is in a perceptual state of the kind I am claiming we can describe in terms of the presence to her of a feature of her environment, her perceptual state is, for all she knows, not of that kind—her current exercise of her perceptual capacity is, for all she knows, defective. So surely she does not know whatever it is about the environment that she takes her perceptual state to enable her to know.

In response to this, we need to emphasize the connection between reason and self-consciousness. A rational perceptual capacity is a capacity not only to know certain kinds of thing about the environment, but, on an occasion on which one knows something of the relevant kind through the exercise of the capacity in question, to know that that is how one knows it. The capacity—of course fallible—to know, on certain occasions, that one's experience is revealing to one that things are a certain way, which is a bit of self-knowledge, is just an aspect of the capacity—of course fallible—to know through experience, on those occasions, that things are that way. It is a single capacity, self-consciously possessed and exercised. A bit of rational perceptual knowledge includes knowledge that it is through perception that one knows whatever it is that one knows about the environment. And we need to avoid that bad inference from the fallibility of the capacity, not only in connection with its guise as a capacity for knowledge about one's environment, but also in connection with its guise as a capacity for self-knowledge. Granted, one can mistake a defective exercise of the capacity for a non-defective exercise. But it does not follow that the capacity cannot be correctly described as a capacity to know things about the environment. And it is just the same point, applied to the same capacity in a different guise, to say this: it does not follow that the capacity cannot be correctly described as a capacity to get into positions in which one knows that it is through one's perceptual state that one knows something about the environment—and so knows that one's perceptual state conclusively war-rants one in the belief in question.

Defective exercises of a perceptual capacity can be indiscriminable from non-defective exercises. It is a mistake to infer that even on an occasion on which the capacity is working perfectly, the current exercise of it is, for all one knows, defective.

Here is Sebastian Rodl's excellent statement of the point:

The argument (from illusion) is: Whenever I seem to know something (on the basis of perceptual. experience), I might have been fooled. Had I been fooled, I would not have known that I was. I would not have been able to tell my situation apart from one in which I am not fooled. This shows that my grounds do not place me in a position to exclude that I am in such a situation. They do not enable me to exclude that I am fooled.—The argument supposes that, had I been fooled, I would have believed the proposition in question on the same grounds on which I believe it now that I am not fooled. This straightforwardly entails that these grounds do not establish the truth of what I believe and therefore do not provide me with knowledge. But when I know something on the ground that, say, I perceive it to be the case, then I would not, had I been fooled, have believed it on this ground, for, had I been fooled, I would not have perceived it to be the case. Hence, when I am not fooled, my grounds exclude that I am fooled: when I perceive how things are, I am not fooled with regard to how they are. One might object that this grants me grounds chat rule out error at the price of making it impossible for me to know whether my belief is based on such grounds. For, when I am fooled, I do not know that I am fooled. So I can never know whether I am not fooled and my beliefs are based on grounds that [establish] their truth, or whether I am fooled and such grounds are unavailable to me. This objection repeats the mistake: from the fact that, when I am fooled, I do not know that I am, it does not follow that, when I am not fooled, I do not know that I am not. When I know that p as I perceive it to be the case, then I know that I perceive that p. Thus I am in a position to distinguish my situation from any possible situation in which I would be fooled, for, in any such situation, I would not perceive that p, while in the given situation I do.' [Rodl, S. (2007) Self-Consciousness, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press pp 157-8]

McDowell, J. (2011) Perception as a Capacity for Knowledge, Milwaukee: Marquette University Press. pp36-44

I will return to say something about this passage in a couple of days.

I'll teach you differences #2

Lois and I went to see Derek Jacobi’s King Lear in Glasgow over the weekend. By contrast with qualms with the RSC production three years ago, this production seemed wonderfully focussed and poised. But the focus of the production was clearly on Jacobi. I had no sense of a strong ensemble element. Jacobi’s delivery of Lear controlled the whole performance.

One subtle but striking aspect was the way Jacobi’s Lear was perturbing and perturbed and simply elderly and confused from the very beginning. His rage, but also his tears, were constantly breaking through so that his mad initial treatment of Cordelia was just that, and organically linked to all that follows. (McKellen’s Lear was initially in control, if misguided, and slipped more slowly out of control in response it seemed to circumstances.) It was a play about the potential pathology of age and all the more miserably sad because of it.

The production had to be good to make up for something which I thought would colour the experience. I saw it at the Royal Theatre from half way up the gallery and thus the stage was tiny and almost between my feet, and, as a traditional presidium arch design, the space of the action resembled a distant television screen. The previous weekend, by contrast, I saw a couple of productions at the RSC in Stratford: Romeo and Juliet in the newly opened main Royal Shakespeare Theatre and Anthony and Cleopatra at the Swan.

The new theatre is based on the Swan’s shape (and the temporary Courtyard Theatre). That is, it is a thrust stage. I had assumed that mere key-hole surgery had been carried out to retain the original listed exterior. In fact, it was completely demolished within the external walls and a new and fairly wonderful theatre space inserted into it (so that, eg., the furthest seat is now 15m rather than 27m from the stage, and capacity is actually down from 1150 to 1040; the Swan by the way, is 400).

That said, I didn’t think that Romeo and Juliet really worked. It was as though it had half a novel guiding conception (only the leads, eg., in contemporary dress). Anthony and Cleopatra at the Swan the next night was much more enjoyable: an amazingly coherent, fairly straight rendition in modern military style.

The weekend before, I made it down to the Sheffield Crucible to see David Hare’s Racing Demon (a vast, too vast I think, thrust stage; a collection of issue-based speeches rather than a drama) and before that, in January, Quicksand, a locally written play about Morecombe Bay, at the Lancaster Dukes Round (240 seats).

In all those four earlier shows, the space (thrust stage or theatre in the round) of the action presents it as as direct an answer as one could wish for how theatre is distinct from cinema. We are presented with a three dimensional world rather than just an approximation to a sense data picture of vision in general.