In
the earlier picture, both a partial respect for the coherentism in Davidson's
slogan that nothing can count as a reason for a belief except another belief
(whilst trying to reject mere frictionless spinning in the void that
coherentism might otherwise suggest) and a kind of Sellarsian innocence go hand
in hand. The innocence is that, following Sellars' Myth of Jones, it is
unproblematic to think of mental states as carrying - because modelled on - the
same kind of claims as judgements. In Mind
and World, the very same contents can be asserted in judgement, can be
carried in the experiences that invite such judgement and can make up part of
the world itself, understood as the totality of true Fregean Thoughts. A key
passage runs:
In
a particular experience in which one is not misled, what one takes in is that
things are thus and so. That things are thus and so is the content
of the experience, and it can also be the content of a judgement: it becomes
the content of a judgement if the subject decides to take the experience at
face value. So it is conceptual content. But that things are thus and so
is also, if one is not misled, an aspect of the layout of the world: it is how
things are. Thus the idea of conceptually structured operations of receptivity
puts us in a position to speak of experience as openness to the layout of
reality. Experience enables the layout of reality itself to exert a rational
influence on what a subject thinks. [McDowell 1994: 26].
The
twofold retreat in AMG (and there is a third more recent retreat with the idea
that the content of good and bad disjuncts in the underlying disjunctivism is
the same; it is merely the way such content is had that differs) runs thus.
I
used to assume that to conceive experiences as actualisations of conceptual
capacities, we would need to credit experiences with propositional content, the
sort of content judgements have. And I used to assume that the content of an
experience would need to include everything the experiences enables its subject
to know noninferentially.
But both these assumptions now strike me as wrong. [Lindgaard 2008: 3]
But both these assumptions now strike me as wrong. [Lindgaard 2008: 3]
This
helps illustrate the previous Sellarsian innocence. In response to the question:
which concepts structure experience?, the Mind
and World McDowell would have replied: all the concepts that the experience
non-inferentially warrants. Not any longer.
But,
now, there is no longer an easy transition from world, via experience to
judgement. The middle step in that chain is mediated by an entirely different
kind of content: intuitional rather than propositional. So there is no longer a
simple appeal to experience carrying the same kind of content. (This makes his
appeal to a Sellarsian thought in his response in the Lindgaard collection to
Bill Brewer's objection from the Muller Lyer lines odder, I have to confess.)
Further,
the partial role for the Davidsonian slogan is further reduced since
experiences no longer share even the form of beliefs. If the world imposes
rational friction on judgement in such a way that preserves a common form
(since the world is made up of true Thoughts) the connection via two further
links - true Thought to intuitional content, and from intuitional content to
true Thought - is no longer clear. In the latter case, we are told that bits of
intuitional content can be carved up and reassembled as propositional content
but since the concepts articulating intuitional content are a subset of those
available non-inferentially, many judgments are based on intuitional content
only via recognition.
Gosh
that is still too long a summary. But my key thought was this. If the
assumptions that hold all this in place, that need to be balanced in such a way
to reduce felt tensions, can tolerate the double deployment of carving of and
recognition from intuitional content, why not cut out the middle man? Carve up
and recognise worldly states of affairs. Why, in other words, isn't McDowell
Charles Travis? He has already given up the kind of clarity about rational
relations that insisting that the relata are conceptual seemed designed to
underpin. Who is to say, a priori, therapeutically, how the same concepts in
different forms licence rational transitions in the space of reasons?
(No
one who wants a theory of experiential content will be tempted by Travis'
minimalist work. But McDowell does not explicitly want any such thing. He just
wants to reconcile the felt tensions surrounding judgement's responsibility to
its subject matter with something like a partial respect for Davidson so that
one seeks justificatory links not mere exculpating.)
In
questions, Rachael Wiseman suggested that McDowell and Wittgenstein have a
different attitude to the first move in philosophy, the one Wittgenstein
characterises thus:
How
does the philosophical problem about mental processes and states and about
behaviourism arise?——The first step is the one that altogether escapes notice.
We talk of processes and states and leave their nature undecided. Sometime
perhaps we shall know more about them—we think. But that is just what commits
us to a particular way of looking at the matter. For we have a definite concept
of what it means to learn to know a process better. (The decisive movement in
the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that we thought
quite innocent.)—And now the analogy which was to make us understand our
thoughts falls to pieces. So we have to deny the yet uncomprehended process in
the yet unexplored medium. And now it looks as if we had denied mental
processes. And naturally we don't want to deny them. [Wittgenstein 1953 §308]
(PS: There is a development of some of these thoughts here.)
