McDowell on action and intention #1

As I described in the previous chapter, in Mind and World McDowell offers an account of perceptual experience as both an application of conceptual capacities and so, by a standard he rejects, an apparently non-natural state but at the same time informed by our second nature, and hence natural on the more relaxed conception of nature he outlines [McDowell 1994]. Such is the rapprochement between denying that the space of reasons can be reduced to the realm of law – and hence be naturalised in the manner preferred by reductionist naturalists – whilst at the same time denying that conceptual capacities (and their governing faculty of spontaneity) are non-natural. They are natural in that we, rational animals, can be educated to see the rational demands that the space of concepts or reasons makes upon us. Whilst a subject may not take a perceptual appearance at face value, if they do then the connections between the world, experience and judgement even though seamless are nevertheless conceptually mediated. They are expressions of the subject’s rationality even when there is no conscious deliberation.

Mind and World also offers a thumbnail sketch of the corresponding ‘output’ to reasoning: action. McDowell first highlights the source of the philosophical resistance to the account of perceptual ‘input’ he has sketched:

Now the difficulty concerns not the passivity of experience as such, but its naturalness. The problem is that operations of sensibility are actualizations of a potentiality that is part of our nature. When we take sensing to be a way of being acted on by the world, we are thinking of it as a natural phenomenon, and then we have trouble seeing how a sui generis spontaneity could be anything but externally related to it. But passivity is not part of the very idea of what it is for a natural potentiality to be actualized. So we should be able to construct a train of thought about actualization of active natural powers, duplicating the difficulties I have exploited in the case of passive natural powers. [McDowell 1994: 89]

According to McDowell, philosophical resistance to his account does not concern the potentially problematic idea that conceptual capacities can be passively drawn on in perception but rather the idea that concepts can form part of the natural world on the assumption that they cannot be reduced to a more basic scientific view of the world (abbreviated to the ‘realm of law’). And hence there should be both the same resistance to, but also logical space for, a corresponding picture of how concepts are, rather than passively actualised in perception, actively deployed in action.

He motivates this corresponding account by invoking the same Kantian slogan that he used, at the start of Mind and World, to motivate his account of perception, which weaves together a more obviously natural element of receptivity with an apparently non-natural element of spontaneity.

Kant says ‘Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind’. Similarly, intentions without overt activity are idle, and movements of limbs without concepts are mere happenings, not expressions of agency. I have urged that we can accommodate the point of Kant’s remark if we accept this claim: experiences are actualizations of our sentient nature in which conceptual capacities are inextricably implicated. The parallel is this: intentional bodily actions are actualizations of our active nature in which conceptual capacities are inextricably implicated. [McDowell 1994: 89-90.]

The final sentence suggests a key idea for understanding McDowell’s subsequent development of an account of action. Actions are not merely the brute causal bodily consequences of inner conceptual activity, they are themselves saturated with concepts. Thus the reworking of the Kantian slogan is supposed to head off a mistaken assumption that divides the mental and conceptual, on the one hand, from the merely bodily, on the other: a dualism of rationality and merely bodily animal nature. McDowell characterises this division as follows:

[S]hut out from the realm of happenings constituted by movements of ordinary natural stuff, the spontaneity of agency typically tries to take up residence in a specially conceived interior realm… [T]his style of thinking gives spontaneity a role in bodily action only in the guise of inner items, pictured as initiating bodily goings-on from within, and taken on that ground to be recognisable as intentions or volitions. [ibid: 90]

In reacting against this picture, McDowell is reacting against the account of action and intentionality popularised in the final decades of the twentieth century by Donald Davidson in papers such as ‘Actions, reasons and causes’ and ‘Intending’ [Davidson 1980: 3-19, 83-102]. According to Davidson, actions are events which are both caused and rationalised by suitable mental states. (More strictly, they are caused by events related to mental states.) In stressing a causal connection, Davidson argued counter to Wittgensteinian arguments that the reasons for actions could not be causes. Thus whilst claiming to be building on the work of the Wittgensteinian philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe in her book Intention, his picture of action is fundamentally different [Anscombe 2000].

This difference between the world-pictures of Davidson and Anscombe is set out by Rederick Stoutland in the following outline.

In the Davidsonian picture, the fundamental relations human beings as such— as knowing the world and acting intentionally in it— have to the world are causal… Our acting in the world is… indirect. We act when our beliefs and desires cause bodily movements that cause events outside our body. The movement of our fingers causes the switch to flip, which causes the light to go on, and so on. Whatever we do in the world is the causal result of moving our bodies and limbs, and hence we might intentionally move them without intentionally doing anything in the world beyond our bodies… The Davidsonian picture has its roots in the Cartesian revolution, which conceived of the physical world as consisting only of what plays a role in the new physics, a physics purified of the teleological, intentional, and normative terms of Aristotelian physics. [Stoutland 2011: 19]

That final description reflects the version of naturalism described by McDowell in Mind and World as disenchanting nature. Stoutland summarises Anscombe’s rival pre-modern approach thus:

Anscombe’s picture is different… Action is… direct. To act is not to have one’s bodily movements caused by one’s beliefs and desires; it is to exercise the power to move one’s body directly and intentionally. Further, to exercise that power is not primarily to cause events outside one’s body; it is to perform actions that extend beyond one’s body and its movements. Walking, running, eating, drinking, pounding, skiing, greeting, writing — ordinary bodily activities all — do not consist of bodily movements plus events they cause; they are our moving our bodies in ways that extend beyond them… [Stoutland 2011: 19]

Although there is a significant different in style, to which I will return, McDowell’s account returns to Ansombe’s tradition. The earlier quotation from Mind and World continues:

Here too, we can return to sanity if we can recapture the Aristotelian idea that a normal mature human being is a rational animal, with its rationality part of its animal, and so natural, being, not a mysterious foothold in another realm. [ibid: 91]

Thus the agenda for his subsequent account of action is to set out just such an Aristotelian picture in which concepts are realised not just in prior deliberation about action, as in Davidson’s picture, but in the actions themselves.

This helps to motivate a further choice McDowell makes. In her book Intention, Anscombe writes:

Very often, when a man says, ‘I am going to do such and such’, we should say that this was an expression of intention. We also sometimes speak of an action as intentional, and we may also ask with what intention the thing was done… [I]f we set out to describe this concept, and took only one of these three kinds of statement as containing our whole topic, we might very likely say things about what ‘intention’ means which it would be false to say in one of the other cases... Realising this might lead us to say that there are various senses of ‘intention’, and perhaps that it is thoroughly misleading that the word ‘intentional’ should be connected with the word ‘intention’... Where we are tempted to speak of ‘different senses’ of a word which is clearly not equivocal, we may infer that we are in fact pretty much in the dark about the character of the concept it represents. [Anscombe 2000: 1]

Anscombe thus sets herself the target of shedding light on the concept of ‘intention’ so as to show the complex pattern of usage underlying a univocal concept. Neglecting her emphasis on expression, subsequent philosophy of action has also taken unification to be a challenge. What is the connection between an intention for the future, a ‘prior intention’, intentional action and the interlocking structure of intentions with or for which an action is done? One difficulty is that a prior intention may not lead to an action. The action may be stopped by environmental factors or the agent may change her mind. On one approach, such as Davidson’s, prior intention is taken to be a pure form of intention with its connection to intention in action a secondary task. Given his aim of showing how concepts can structure actions themselves rather than just mental antecedents, McDowell takes intentional action or intentions in action as his starting point. As well as Anscombe and Davidson, he draws on John Searle, Brian 1991, 2003; Searle 1983; Sellars 1966].

One key element of the emerging picture is that it is able to resist at least the first moves of an objection raised by Dreyfus that McDowell falsifies the phenomenology of skilful absorbed behaviour or ‘skilled coping’ [Dreyfus 2005]. Dreyfus objects that McDowell over intellectualises skilful activity by arguing that it is an exercise of conceptually structured rationality. That, according to Dreyfus, presupposes an unengaged, contemplative perspective. As I will describe, McDowell’s central claim is that action, like experience on his account of perception, can be engaged and unreflective whilst nevertheless expressing a conceptually structured rationality.

In the final chapter of this book, I will return to the issue of whether McDowell is right to downplay the distinction between passive actualisations of conceptual rationality in experience and active expressions in action in favour, simply, of the natural or otherwise status of concepts in both cases under the faculty of spontaneity. I will argue, instead, that the account of action looks more philosophically innocent than the developing account of perceptual experience because of this difference between active and passive.

Intention in action

McDowell offers a three-part account of intentions and intentional action comprising:

·         an account of the nature of intentions.

·         a discussion of the connection between intentions, practical reasoning and self-knowledge of intentional action.

·         a discussion of the (right way to express the) content of an intention.

But starting, in this section, with his discussion of the nature of intentions and intention in action is a good way to highlight the parallels with his account of perception. I will describe the second and third element together in the next section.

Intentions in action are a mark of the deliberateness of actions but they can be the result of prior deliberation or practical reasoning or they can be spontaneous. Thus, as Searle comments:

All intentional actions have intentions in action but not all intentional actions have prior intentions. I can do something intentionally without having formed a prior intention to do it, and I can have a prior intention to do something and yet not act on that intention. Still, in cases where the agent is acting on his prior intention there must be a close connection between the prior intention and the intention in action, and we will also have to explain this connection. [Searle 1980: 52-3]

McDowell’s starting point is to aim to give an account of intention in action. But this then generalised into an ‘image of intentions as a kind of continuant whose instances change their shape as time passes’ [McDowell 2011: 16]. Once he has clarified the nature of intentions in action he will connect prior intentions to them through the notion of changes in shape. To shed light on his account, McDowell contrasts it with Searle’s. Taking the example of someone who is standing on a kerb with the prior intention to cross the street when the lights turn green, McDowell summarises Searle’s account thus:

[W]hen she sees the light turn green, that intention – a prior intention, an intention for the future – starts to generate intentions in action. The object of the intention for the future is crossing the street; the objects of the intentions in action that it generates are the limb movements that need to happen if the person is to cross the street. As those limb movements begin, she begins crossing the street. If all goes well, she gets to the other side, thereby completing an action of crossing the street. On Searle’s account, the action is a causally structured complex: its components are, first, the intentions in action that the prior intention began to generate when the agent saw the light turn green, and, second, the limb movements on which the intentions in action are targeted, which the intentions in action will have caused. [ibid: 2]

When one realizes that the time determined for acting by the original prior intention has come (when one sees the light turn green, in my example), the intention that was the prior intention starts to generate, directly, suitable intentions in action, and thereby indirectly to generate suitable limb movements. [ibid: 4]

On this account, the prior intention and the intention in action are distinct psychological entities with the former generating the latter when the time is right. Further, they have distinct contents. The prior intention has as its object or content a future action such as getting to the other side of the road. By contrast, according to Searle, the intention in action concerns subsidiary components of such an action: in this case, limb movements.

McDowell stresses that his own account is simpler and more natural. The key idea is that, rather than there being (at least: see below) two distinct intentions, a prior intention simply becomes an intention in action when the time is right. It changes its shape. Of course, cases of changing one’s mind between forming the prior intention and having the opportunity to execute it have to be excluded. Thus he adds the qualifications ‘provided the agent does not forget the intention, knows the time has come, is not prevented from acting accordingly, and does not change her mind’ [ibid: 3].

To help to make the idea that the same intention changes shape from prior intention to intention in action, McDowell invokes Gareth Evans’ discussion of the changing shape of de re thoughts [Evans 1980]. With the passing of time, the same piece of knowledge can be expressed at one time as: ‘the light is turning green’ and then later as ‘the light just turned green’ and then ‘the light turned green a while ago’. These differences require that the subject keeps track of time, whether informally or with a clock. Such keeping track of events across time mirrors similar structures in keeping track of objects across space reflected in the difference between the thought that ‘this object…’ and the thought, about the same object, expressed as ‘that object…’. If the combination of sameness and difference can be accommodated in those cases (within a neo-Fregean account of singular thought) then the idea of a prior intention simply becoming an intention in action is so much more familiar.

Furthermore, it seems natural to think that the idea of keeping track of things is a feature of an intention in action in another way. In the example of crossing the street, the intention in action remains future directed until the action is complete. At any given point in street crossing, one still intends to get from that point to the far side. Thus, the very idea of acting requires an ability to track the progress of one’s action. ‘Unless one is keeping track of how far one has come, one cannot intelligibly intend to go on from there to the other side of the street’ [ibid: 5]. And hence, the idea of an intention that changes its shape as events are tracked through time seems natural. And hence, again, the idea that the connection between prior intention and intention in action might simply be a matter of the same entity, the same continuant, changing its shape as events are tracked.

Given that McDowell invokes Evans’ analysis of singular thought in order to shed light on the role that tracking plays in action, one might think that the future directed quality of an intention in action is itself a form of de re thought as George Wilson (and to a lesser extent Robert Brandom) suggests [Wilson 1989, Brandom 1994]. But as McDowell argues, this cannot be right because an ongoing action is not yet the sort of particular to which a de re thought can attach. Crossing a street can be interrupted. And thus the intention in action of street crossing can be frustrated. But that does not make it false to say that the intention was to cross the street even if no such crossing actually comes to pass because, for example, blocked by traffic in the second lane. Since actions only become the particulars aimed at on completion, they cannot be the targets of intentions in the way that de re thoughts single out objects. (I will ignore the contrasting case McDowell discusses of activities, by contrast with actions, such as walking where as soon as one is walking, one has walked and hence a de re form of intentionality is possible).

Michael Thompson makes a similar point:

[T]hough the truth of, say, “I baked a loaf of bread” or “I have baked a loaf of bread” entails the existence of an act of baking a loaf of bread with myself as agent, yet, I want to say, the truth of “I am baking a loaf of bread” does not. The situation with the supposed event, or act, of bread-baking is just as it is with the would-be loaf itself: if it is true to say that I have baked a loaf, then it is true to say that there is a loaf that I have baked. We might give it, or each of them, if there are several, a name. But the truth of “I am baking a loaf” does not entail anything of the sort. [Thompson 2008: 134-5]

Both Searle and O’Shaughnessy propose accounts of intention in action which are in one sense more fine grained than McDowell’s. Of the latter’s account, he says:

Now O’Shaughnessy also envisages another set of intentions that would figure in some­one’s crossing a street: intentions directed at moving one’s limbs in the necessary ways. The idea is that these intentions reflect motor skills – not just the ability to make the movements needed for the routine exercise of a skill such as walking, but sometimes a more finely-tuned responsiveness to circumstances, as when one puts a foot down carefully to compensate for an unevenness in the surface. [McDowell 2011: 10]

Rather than multiplying intentions or the components of intentions, McDowell again suggests a role for the notion of changing shape to accommodate the fine grained details of the limb movements, or motor-intentionality that underpins the execution of action. Motor intentions are the shapes taken by the overarching intentions in actions as they realise themselves. One reason for thinking this is that, in general, one does not intend to move one’s limbs as the means to an end of an overall action. One intends the action and then the subsidiary limb movements take care of themselves as a matter of ordinary competence. They are presupposed, just as the tracking of time and the tracking of the progress of actions are presupposed by intentional agency. But the specific movements of limbs are only intentional in so far as they underpin an overall intended action such as crossing the road by walking.

One’s limb movements in walking are surely not intentional under descriptions that involve the specifics of what one does at a given moment with one’s hips and knees. Normally competent walkers do not know what they do when they walk at that level of description. What we can say is, perhaps, that one’s movements are intentional under specifications like “moving as walking requires,” or perhaps “moving as stepping over that obstacle requires.” Ordinary competence in walking determines which movements, described in terms of what one does at the relevant joints, conform to such specifications; that determination is not a task for the practical thinking that intention belongs to. [ibid: 11]

In cases where one adjusts one’s footfall to compensate for an unevenness in the surface, one’s competence in walking further determines the shape of the somewhat indeterminate intention to cross the street. That is not to say that the further determination requires standing back and taking further thought. Nevertheless, the accommodations made are things one intentionally does. This helps to emphasise the way in which intentions are not distinct from actions and hence the unfolding action determines with greater specificity the shape of the overall intention.

Whilst rejecting the need for a multiplicity of intentions marks a contrast between his account and both those of Searle and

Acting physically is exercising motor capacities. And exercising a motor capacity is as such a bodily phenomenon. But according to the dual aspect conception, it is also psychological, and not just in an isolable component but through and through. A psychological concept, expressible by “willing,” applies not to some supposed psychic initiating occurrence, but to the relevant bodily goings-on, those describable as a subject’s exercising a motor capacity, in their entirety. Willing is not something that causally initiates bodily acting and perhaps supervises it from outside. Willing is in the acting, not in the sense that willing is part of an action, but in the sense that “willing” is a characterization of the acting itself, apt for capturing its psychological aspect. [McDowell 2011: 13]

O’Shaughnessy thinks that willing, so understood, is widespread in animal life. By contrast, intending is more restricted, although it does apply outside rational animals. The fine grained apparently purposive behaviour of a cat, for example, merits the description that it is intentionally stalking a bird [cf Anscombe 2000: 86]. Where it exists, such intending is a distinct addition to willing, itself understood as acting viewed psychologically. O’Shaughnessy suggests that it causes the willing. For this reason, he thinks that intentions do not ‘actually enter the precincts of the action itself’ [O’Shaughnessy 1991: 282].

McDowell compares this account of the relation of intention and action with the case of sawing through a tree trunk with the aim of causing the tree to fall. In such a case, the intention remains external to the tree’s actually falling. But surely that cannot be an apt model of the connection between an intention in action and, say, crossing the street?

Instead, McDowell extends the dual aspect theory from willing to intention in action.

Why not conceive intention in action as a special form taken by willing, in animals that are at least, as we might put it, proto-rational?... If intention in action is a species of willing, then, like the willing plain and simple… it can be in action… in an O’Shaughnessy-like sense, that it just is acting, characterized in a way that captures a now more sophisticated psychological aspect that this kind of acting has. [McDowell 2011: 14]

Such a move is akin to the way that the picture of perceptual experience in Mind and World is made to accommodate non-rational (rather than proto-rational as here) animal experience. Rationality structures the perceptual experiences of rational animals. Non-rational animals can also have perceptual experiences. But McDowell argues that the experiences of non-rational animals does not form a pre-conceptual component of the conceptually structured experience of a rational animal. Rather, experience can take these two distinct forms, as distinct species of the same genus. The same goes for sensations such as pain which are conceptually structured for rational, linguistic animals (see chapter 2).

There is an obvious difficulty with this suggestion, however. Whilst ‘proto-rational’ animals such as cats may be describable as acting intentionally, it is rather less plausible to ascribe to them prior intentions such as the intention to stalk the bird when the light turns green. Does not the existence of prior intentions block the idea that intentions in action can be regarded simply as actions themselves under a partly sophisticated psychological – mental – description?

McDowell concedes that such an objection would be difficult to accommodate if the order for accounting for intentions had to start with prior intentions and offer an independent account of them before then connecting that to intention in action, now construed as just a way of thinking about acting. Such an approach would have difficulty with merely proto-rational animals capable of intention in action but not prior intention.

But his alternative is to start with intention in action, now understood as action construed either rationally or proto-rationally, and then build an account of prior intentions, or intentions for the future, for rational animals on its basis. The worry is that because an intention for the future cannot be a redescription of an actual action then, because of the link between the two, neither can intention in action just be an action. But holding onto the idea that an intention in action is an action then a prior intention or intention for the future can be thought of as a ‘potential action biding its time’ [ibid: 15]. Just as a prior intention becomes an intention in action when the time is right (given the qualifications set out earlier) so a potential action becomes an action when its time has come (given the same qualifications).

If rationality can be in bodily activity as opposed to behind it, we have a vivid contrast with a familiar picture according to which a person’s mind occupies a more or less mysterious inner realm, concealed from the view of others. If physical activity can be rationality in action, as opposed to a mere result of exercises of rationality, we have a vivid contrast with the tendency to distance a person’s body from the mind that is the seat of her rationality. [McDowell 2011: 17]

This then is McDowell’s account of intentions: as a species of continuant, which changes its shape through time and the course of an action. As I have suggested, it is broadly in the tradition of Anscombe’s account in Intention of a direct expression of a rational, or proto-rational animal’s power to move its body in a way that manifests conceptual structure. It differs from views in which conceptual activity take place merely in an interior realm leaving actions as mere causal outputs.

But it varies in one significant respect from the way Anscombe sets out her account. As has been argued by Richard Moran and Martin Stone and also by Rachel Wiseman, the emphasis on expression in Anscombe’s account is not an accident [Moran and Stone 2011; Wiseman 2016]. Rather it marks the importance of the linguistic expression of intentions to exemplify their role in iterated rationalising explanations that Anscombe stresses and to which I will turn in the next section. As a result, she approaches intentions not via an investigation of the nature of a particular type of mental state but rather through the use of the concept of intention in a particular style of rational explanation of events.

If one simply attends to the fact that many actions can be either intentional or unintentional, it can be quite natural to think that events which are characterisable as intentional are a certain natural class, ‘intentional’ being an extra property which a philosopher must try to describe. In fact the term ‘intentional’ has reference to a form of description of events. What is essential to this form is displayed by the results of our enquiries into the question ‘Why?’ Events are typically described in this form when ‘in order to’ or ‘because’ (in one sense) is attached to their descriptions… [Anscombe 2000: 84–85].

As Wiseman says: ‘The concept of intention applies in each case to the description and assigns it to a calculative order; it does not apply to some state or property, mental or physical, of a human being.’ [Wiseman 2016: 161]. In accord with this approach, Anscombe argues that expressions of prior intentions should not be understood to report a present tense mental state but rather a species of prediction for the future but made, as I will discuss in the next section, on the basis of practical rather than theoretical reasoning.

Michael Thompson also warns against construing intentions as mental states [Thompson 2008]. His argument depends on two key claims. The first is the priority of a naïve action theory of the form: I am doing A because I am doing B over the sophisticated form: I am doing A because I want (or intend or am trying) to do B. The second has a move to the interior and is generally (and wrongly) supposed to be explanatorily prior. The second is the importance of the imperfective aspect of: I am doing A. As noted earlier in this section, it does not follow from the fact that I am doing A that there is any completed or perfected act of doing A to which to refer. Thompson argues that this imperfective form is the basic form of action explanation and, as I will describe in the next section, this fits McDowell’s account of the content of intention (eg. I am crossing the road). From this, however, Thompson argues that intentions are hardly mental states.

Intention and wanting are states only in the thinnest possible sense, the sense in which a thing’s falling under any predicate, or at least any tensible predicate, might be characterized as its “being in a state”. Though the distinction between “The tree is falling over” and “The tree was falling over” is one of tense, yet we resist thinking of these propositions as representations of states in any emphatic sense, for the simple reason that they are internally related to a third, “The tree fell over,” in which their content is, as I put it, uncoiled; this places our thoughts in a radically different categorical space, the space of kinēsis, if you like, and not of stasis. But “He was doing A intentionally,” “He is doing A intentionally” and “He did A intentionally” evidently constitute a triad of just that type (though its elements fit it especially to the representation of rational life), and so also, on the present conception, do “He intended to do A,” “He intends to do A” and “He did A intentionally”. [Thompson 2008: 133-4]

The fact that both Anscombe and Thompson develop accounts of intention both similar to and influential on McDowell’s but both pitch them in a formal rather than material mode – talking of the concept of intention and its patterns of explanation rather than the nature of intentions – may form the grounds of a kind of ad hominem worry about McDowell’s own talk of intentions as continuants that change their shape. This might buttress an antecedent worry about the ontological status of prior intentions as actions waiting to happen. What sort of thing is such a still waiting action?

But this connection to Anscombe and Thompson can be taken the other way. Without the assumption that mental particulars are states of inner space, a view McDowell has done much to undermine (see chapters 1 and 4 in particular), there is no intrinsic danger in speaking of the nature of intentions as a species of continuant, a process described under a rational aspect, resisting any temptation then to think of this as a mental state. Characterising them further, however, requires looking in more detail at the kind of reasoning involved in forming prior intentions and in intentional action.

Dreyfus vs McDowell on skilled coping and the myth of the (pervasiveness of the) mental.

McDowell stresses the parallels between his account of intention in action and the account of perception in Mind and World. In both there is a central role to the idea of something – an experience or an action – being permeated with rationality and conceptual structure.

This view has, however, been subject to sustained criticism from a specifically phenomenological perspective in a number of papers, following his American Philosophical Association presidential address in 2005, by Hubert Dreyfus which collectively form a dialogue with McDowell’s various replies [Dreyfus 2005, 2007a, 2007b, 2013; McDowell 2007a, 2007b, 2013]. Dreyfus accuses McDowell of subscribing to a Myth of the Mental, or, later, refined to a Myth of the Pervasiveness of the Mental in his, McDowell’s, attempt to reject the Myth of the Given. McDowell replies in kind by accusing Dreyfus of falling prey to a Myth of the Mind as Detached.

Dreyfus’ initial criticism stems from a summary of McDowell that runs as follows.

To suggest how impingements received from nature can be conceptual through and through without the mind imposing meaning on a meaningless Given, McDowell introduces an account of Aristotle’s idea of second nature:
Human beings are...initiated into...the space of reasons by ethical upbringing, which instils the appropriate shape into their lives. The resulting habits of thought and action are second nature. [McDowell 1994: 84]
McDowell then generalizes Aristotle’s account of the production of second nature:
[i]mposing a specific shape on the practical intellect, is a particular case of a general phenomenon: initiation into conceptual capacities, which include responsiveness to other rational demands besides those of ethics. [ibid: 84]
The phenomenon McDowell has in mind is clearest in phronesis, usually translated ‘practical wisdom’. [Dreyfus 2005: 50]

Dreyfus agrees that phronesis is a paradigm case of human perception and action. But he suggests that, on a proper understanding of it, it cannot fit McDowell’s conceptualised account. In the exercise of phronesis or practical wisdom in making ethical judgements, for example, one simply sees what to do, without deliberation.

As Aristotle says: Phronesis… involves knowledge of the ultimate particular thing, which cannot be attained by systematic knowledge but only by ‘perception’… Aristotle’s account of phronesis does not assume, as McDowell does, that, ethical expertise can be conceptually articulated. On the contrary, phronesis shows that socialization can produce a kind of master whose actions do not rely on habits based on reasons to guide him. Indeed, thanks to socialization, a person’s perceptions and actions at their best would be so responsive to the specific situation that they could not be captured in general concepts. [Dreyfus 2005: 51]

Instead, Dreyfus suggests that phronesis is an instance of skilled, embodied coping which runs counter to what he takes to be McDowell’s commitment to detached, conceptually articulated rule following. Furthermore, he suggests that McDowell’s claim that perception is conceptual runs counter to the fact that we share perceptual capacities with prelinguistic infants and animals and that he cannot account for how the ‘ground floor of pure perception and receptive coping supports the conceptual upper stories of the edifice of knowledge’ [Dreyfus 2005: 61].

McDowell summarises the challenge that Dreyfus raises as centring on how the existence of apparently nonconceptual embodied coping can be reconciled with McDowell’s claims about there being nothing beyond the limits of the conceptual.

It would follow that if conceptual rationality is everywhere, there is no room anywhere for embodied coping skills. And our perceptual experience needs to be understood in the context of our embodied coping skills. But why should we accept that embodied coping skills are, just as such, nonconceptual? [McDowell 2007a: 339]

In his first reply to Dreyfus in the paper ‘What myth?’, McDowell offers three responses [McDowell 2007a].

·         reasons can be situation specific

·         one can acquire new conceptual capacities from particular situations

·         there can be continuity with animals

First, McDowell denies that his account of either Aristotle’s phronesis, or of ethical judgement more generally, can be couched in situation-independent terms.

I reject the idea that the content of practical wisdom, as Aristotle understands it, can be captured in general prescriptions for conduct, determinately expressible independently of the concrete situations in which the phronimos [the subject or agent possessing phronesis] is called on to act. [McDowell 2007a: 340]

McDowell concedes that, in a passage of his that Dreyfus quotes, he describes phronesis as involving ‘habits of thought and action’. And he concedes that ‘habit’ implies some sort of generality. But (as described in chapter 2, above) this does not imply that practical wisdom can be encoded in situation-independent, general terms.

But conceiving phronesis as a habit, or a set of habits, is consistent with holding that the only way one can register the generality of phronesis is by a description on these lines: ‘the habit of responding to situations as phronesis requires’. And that leaves what response a particular situation calls for from the phronimos still needing to be determined by situation-specific discernment. [McDowell 2007a: 341

In other words, he denies the forced choice between either situation-independent, general and conceptual judgement or situation-dependent and nonconceptual coping. As a paradigm of human perception and action, phronesis can be both situation-dependent and nevertheless a conceptually structured ability. For rational subjects such as mature human beings, ‘embodied coping is permeated with mindedness’ [McDowell 2007a: 339].

Second, in line with this, and with the idea mentioned above that perceptual experience needs to be understood in the context of embodied coping skills, McDowell offers the following thumbnail sketch of the perceptual experience of a rational subject:

[I]f an experience is world-disclosing, which implies that it is categorially unified, all its content is present in a form in which, as I put it before, it is suitable to constitute contents of conceptual capacities. All that would be needed for a bit of it to come to constitute the content of a conceptual capacity, if it is not already the content of a conceptual capacity, is for it to be focused on and made to be the meaning of a linguistic expression. [McDowell 2007a: 346]

This reflects the account in Mind and World of demonstrative concepts (described in chapter 5, above). It disarms the objection that perceptual content cannot be conceptually structured because it is too fine grained. Instead, concepts can be as fine grained as perceptual discriminations allow.

Third, he attempts to disarm Dreyfus’ objection that because perceptual capacities are shared with prelinguistic infants and non-linguistic animals they cannot be conceptually structured.

The claim that the capacities and skills are shared comes to no more than this: there are descriptions of things we can do that apply also to things other animals can do. For instance: any animal—rational or not— with suitable sensory equipment, engaged in getting from one place to another, can be expected, other things being equal, to respond to the affordance constituted by a sufficiently large opening, in a wall that otherwise blocks its path, by going through the opening. But the truth about a human being’s exercise of competence in making her way around, in a performance that can be described like that, need not be exhausted by the match with what can be said about, say, a cat’s correspondingly describable response to a corresponding affordance. The human being’s response is, if you like, indistinguishable from the cat’s response qua response to an affordance describable in those terms. But it does not follow that the human being’s response cannot be unlike the cat’s response in being the human being’s rationality at work. [McDowell 2007a: 343]

This, again, fits an idea in Mind and World but also in the paper ‘One strand in the private language argument’ (discussed in chapter 1) that there can be conceptual and non-conceptual species variants of the same genus.

In his reply to McDowell’s paper ‘What myth?’, Dreyfus concedes that he had wrongly assumed that McDowell understood rationality and conceptuality to be general in the sense of situation-independent and hence assumed that McDowell could not think of phronesis as situation-specific skilful coping. Nevertheless, he argues that:

McDowell’s view that ‘in mature human beings, embodied coping is permeated with mindedness’, suggests a new version of the mentalist myth which, like the others, is untrue to the phenomenon…. Where I differ from McDowell is that I hold that situation-specific mindedness, far from being a pervasive and essential feature of human being, is the result of a specific transformation of our pervasive mindless absorbed coping. [Dreyfus 2007a: 355]

According to Dreyfus, mindedness – whether tied to specific situations or not – is based on a form of skilled, absorbed coping which is itself mindless. Further, mindedness is a mark of mere competence. Mastery, by contrast, requires the retreat of explicit guidelines, rules and even reasons to leave a form of coping that is nonconceptual and nonminded.

When we are following the advice of a coach, for example, our behavior regresses to mere competence. It is only after much practice, and after abandoning monitoring and letting ourselves be drawn back into full involvement in our activity, that we can regain our expertise. The resulting expert coping returns to being direct and unreflective, which I take to be the same as being nonconceptual and nonminded. [Dreyfus 2007a: 355]

Thus, phenomenology suggests that, although many forms of expertise pass through a stage in which one needs reasons to guide action, after much involved experience, the learner develops a way of coping in which reasons play no role. [Dreyfus 2005: 53]

To highlight the incompatibility he sees between the expertise and the exercise of conceptual rationality, he gives the example of the baseball player Chuck Knoblauch who turned from being a masterful player when relying on absorbed skilled coping to being a bad player when he tried to follow explicit procedures for catching and throwing the ball.

As second baseman for the New York Yankees, Knoblauch was so successful he was voted best infielder of the year, but one day, rather than simply fielding a hit and throwing the ball to first base, it seems he stepped back and took up a ‘free, distanced orientation’ towards the ball and how he was throwing it — to the mechanics of it, as he put it. After that, he couldn’t recover his former absorption and often—though not always — threw the ball to first base erratically — once into the face of a spectator. [Dreyfus 2007a: 354]

The point of the example is supposed to be that Knoblauch turned from being a Dreyfusian agent to a McDowellian agent, from someone who can engage in masterful nonconceptual mindless activity to conceptually structured acting for reasons but now hopelessly distanced from the game and his prior skill. Since Knoblauch is obviously exceptional and since skilled performance is possible, then McDowell’s account cannot be generally true or so runs Dreyfus’ implication. But such an example relies on an assumption that McDowell rejects: that a mindful or conceptually articulated response must be a reflective exercise of disengaged ratiocination.

McDowell accepts the transcendental argument that the conditions of the possibility of the mind relating its content to the world requires conceptual capacities, and these capacities must always be everywhere operative in human experience. Phenomenologists, on the contrary, contend that this argument is based on the phenomenologically unjustified assumption that we are basically minds distanced from the world, so that the mind has to be related to the world by mental activity, whereas, when one is fully absorbed in coping the mind/world dichotomy disappears. The assumption that there is an essential distance between mind and world that must be bridged by concepts, thoughts, and reasons is what I have been calling the Myth of the Pervasiveness of the Mental. [Dreyfus 2013: 36]

In this passage, Dreyfus connects together the idea of conceptual activity with distance from the world and hence a need to bridge the gap between mind and world with concepts, thoughts, and reasons. But whether or not McDowell’s account of perceptual experience and action is, in the end, plausible, Dreyfus seems simply to ignore, rather than argue against, a key element of McDowell’s picture. Specifically, whilst action is sometimes the result of the formation of a prior intention, or intention for the future, through a reflective and deliberative exercise of practical reasoning, it need not be. It can be a spontaneous response to the situation.

Further, extending O’Shaughnessy’s dual aspect account of willing discussed in the first part of this chapter, McDowell stresses the idea that the action itself just is the intention in action when construed mentally. The action is not distinct from the exercise of conceptual capacities. Intentions do not merely instigate actions from outside the ‘precincts of action’ (in O’Shaughnessy’s phrase) in the way that an intention to topple a tree may take the form of sawing through the trunk with the expectation that that will lead, causally to the tree’s toppling. Intention can be present in the action of crossing the road, for example. So Dreyfus’ assumption that when McDowell claims that actions and perceptual experiences must be conceptual then that introduces an essential gap between mind and world should sound alarm bells. McDowell’s explicit aim is precisely the opposite. The claim that experiences are conceptually structured is supposed to show how it can be the case that experience is a form of direct openness to the world. Actions are supposed to be directly expressive of conceptual ability, not its action at a distance. If a gap is introduced by either of these claims about conceptual structure then Dreyfus needs to show why that is the case rather than simply assume it.

McDowell considers the case of a woman who, whilst walking across a park, spontaneously catches a Frisbee as it flies towards her.

When a rational agent catches a frisbee, she is realizing a concept of a thing to do. In the case of a skilled agent, she does not do that by realizing other concepts of things to do. She does not realize concepts of contributory things to do, in play for her as concepts of what she is to do by virtue of her means-end rationality in a context in which her overarching project is to catch the frisbee. But she does realize a concept of, say, catching this… The point of saying that the rational agent, unlike the dog, is realizing a concept in doing what she does is that her doing, under a specification that captures the content of the practical concept that she is realizing, comes within the scope of her practical rationality — even if only in that, if asked why she caught the frisbee, she would answer ‘No particular reason; I just felt like it’. [McDowell 2007b: 369]

Elsewhere, he calls the prospective answer a ‘limiting case of practical rationality at work’ and a ‘null response’ [McDowell 2013: 49]. This because whilst such a response does not reject the ‘why?’ question that Anscombe claims marks out the intentional realm it does report that there is no informative or interesting answer as to why catching a frisbee was thought to be a good idea, no further, distinct purpose behind it, no broader further structure of means-end rationality [Anscombe 2000: 84-5]. But it does accept the attribution of intentionality. It accepts ‘catching the frisbee’ as a correct description of the intentional action and hence as a reason for what she did in, for example, stretching out her arm. The details of her motor-intentionality are, as described earlier, the shape taken by her intention in action as it becomes determined.

Dreyfus offers his example of someone acting without deliberation and in flow. In lightning chess, the whole game has to be played in less than two minutes. Hence grandmasters must make moves as fast as they can move their arms and yet are still able to play with great expertise.

Fortunately, the expert usually does not need to calculate. If he has had enough experience and stays involved, he will find himself responding in a masterful way before he has time to think. Just as Aristotle, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty saw, such mastery requires a rich perceptual repertoire — the ability to respond to subtle differences in the appearance of perhaps hundreds of thousands of situations — but it requires no conceptual repertoire at all. This holds true for such refined skills as chess, jazz improvisation, sports, martial arts, etc., but also for everyday skills such as cooking dinner, crossing a busy street, carrying on a conversation, or just getting around in the world. [Dreyfus 2005: 58]

Returning to this example more recently, he runs the case of lightning chess and the Frisbee catcher together:

The woman’s inability to provide a rational motivation and the master’s inability to provide a rational explanation of why a certain move worked are examples of the limitation of rationality. In both cases rationality is not pervasive. [Dreyfus 2013: 35]

He goes on to distinguish them in that frisbee catcher is a ‘genuine null case’ because she cannot give an account of her account even though, he suggests, she should. By contrast in the lightnight chess player’s case there is a ‘positive absence of a reason’ where the lack of a reason is not disturbing but a sign of a more direct response to the possibilities of moves suggested by the configuration of the chess board.

This first account seems to distort the phenomenology. Not every act needs to be embedded in a hierarchy of further reasons. And not being so embedded does not mean that, as a deliberate if spontaneous act, it is not an expression of the agent’s rationality. On McDowell’s picture, the fisbee catcher is realising a concept practically which she could, given time, put into the words that describe both action and intention in action: “I am catching this”. There is no need for embarrassment that there is no further reason than that she wished to.

The chess master, by contrast, expresses a non-limiting and non-null form of rationality. Given time, though not when in flow, he can answer a question as to why he did what he did. Dreyfus argues, to the contrary, that he is merely mindlessly and non-conceptually responding to the forces of the pieces on the chess board. But as McDowell points out, even if all he can say is, somewhat abstractly, that he is responding to them, then that is sufficient to show his is not a limiting or null case. The exercise of conceptual rationality that would be expressed in a reconstruction, after the fact, of his thinking is also expressed practically when acting, rapidly and in flow, in response to the different configurations of pieces. And as McDowell argues:

[I]f he really is a master, it must be within his powers to be more specific. We can expect him to be able to say such things as this: ‘It’s a good move because, it threatens my opponent’s queen’… [W]e cannot compel him to talk about his move without breaking the flow. But… that does not matter. He will be saying things he already knew whilst acting in flow. [McDowell 2013: 47]

Both the chess master and the frisbee catcher are able to do something that Chuck Knoblauch could not do. This suggests an aspect of the phenomenology of absorbed coping: that it is incompatible with simultaneously taking a more distanced and reflective view. But on McDowell’s view, the same conceptual understanding is in play in these two different ways. Dreyfus offers no compelling argument against the claim that conceptual abilities are manifested in both experience and action, even if the mark of this is not an occurrent phenomenon at the time but a standing ability or power to take part in the game of giving and asking for reasons.

References

Anscombe, E. (2000) Intention, Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press

Brandom, R. (1994) Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

Davidson, D. (1980) Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Dreyfus, H. (2005) ‘Overcoming the Myth of the Mental: How Philosophers Can Profit from the Phenomenology of Everyday Expertise’ Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 79: 47-65

Dreyfus, H. (2007a) ‘The Return of the Myth of the Mental’. Inquiry 50, 4: 352–365.

Dreyfus, H. (2007b) ‘Response to McDowell’. Inquiry 50, 4: 371–377.

Dreyfus, H. (2013) ‘The myth of the pervasiveness of the mental’ in Schear, J.K. (ed) Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World, London: Routledge pp15-40

Haddock, A. (2011) ‘The knowledge that a man has of his intentional actions’ in Ford, A., Hornsby, J. & Stoutland, F. (eds.) Essays on Anscombe’s Intention, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press pp147-69

McDowell, J. (1994) Mind and World, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press

McDowell, J (2007a) ‘What Myth?’ Inquiry 50: 338–351.

McDowell, J. (2007b) ‘Response to Dreyfus’ Inquiry, 50: 366-370

McDowell, J. (2010) ‘What is the content of an intention in action?’ Ratio 23: 415-432.

McDowell, J. (2011) ‘Some remarks on intention in action’ Amherst Lecture in Philosophy. http://www.amherstlecture.org/mcdowell2011/index.html (accessed January 2, 2012).

McDowell, J. (2013) ‘The myth of mind as detached’ in Schear, J.K. (ed) Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World, London: Routledge pp41-58

O’Shaughnessy, B. (1991) ‘Searle’s Theory of Action’ in Lepore, E. and Van Gulick, R. (eds) John Searle and His Critics, Cambridge, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell pp

O’Shaughnessy, B. (2003) ‘The Epistemology of Physical Action’ in Johannes Roessler, J. and Eilan, N (eds) Agency and Self-Awareness, Oxford: Clarendon Press pp345-57

Searle, J. (1983) Intentionality. New York: Cambridge University Press

Stoutland, F. (2011) ‘Introduction: Anscombe’s Intention in Context’ in Ford, A., Hornsby, J. & Stoutland, F. (eds.) Essays on Anscombe’s Intention, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press pp1-22

Tanney, J. (2013) Rules, Reason and Self Knowledge, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press

Thompson, M. (2008) Life and Action: Elementary Structures of Practice and Practical Thought, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press pp147-69

Thompson, M. (2011) ‘Anscombe’s Intention and Practical Knowledge’ in Ford, A., Hornsby, J. & Stoutland, F. (eds.) Essays on Anscombe’s Intention, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press pp198-210

Wilson, G. M. (1989) The Intentionality of Human Action. Stanford: Stanford University Press

Writers' block

Asked by an ex-student why I was no longer writing a blog, I realised that the pat answer I offered – writers’ block – failed to shed any light on the phenomenon. For me the key phenomenon isn’t this. It isn’t primarily that I don’t know about what to write. At the level of a fallible glad start, I can suggest a variety of intriguing subjects. I say ‘fallible glad start’ because like the Wittgensteinian exclamation “Now I can go on!” it may be that the confidence proves misplaced when actually sitting down to write. But that is always the way. Nothing has changed.

Nor is it that I cannot or could not write anything. Under pressure, I’ve written many thousands of words on university business over the last six months. The issue, I think, is one of quality control. Concerning the things about which I want to write, I fear nothing I could write would be worth writing.

And at this point, a blindingly obvious thought strikes me. Why did I ever think, given the ridiculous amount of academic text produced every year, that I had anything worth adding to say? On this score, the current writers’ block isn’t the pathology. Rather, it was my previous garrulousness that looks suspect.

Reflecting a little more I realise that there is one further factor. I use the web as a way of thinking through the things that I am writing. I never assume that anyone reads it even though I do get emails of criticisms, objections, further thoughts etc. But one such regular interlocutor was a delightfully polite and thoughtful correspondent, an independent scholar and, where philosophy was concerned, something of an autodidact.

Sadly, he emailed and then later talked to me on the phone in Autumn to tell me he was dying and to give me his books. Before I had chance to visit him himself, he died. I realised, afterwards, that having had a particular audience in mind, even one I never met or talked to, gave even anonymous publishing on the web a more concrete purpose. Without it, it seemed less worth the candle. Goodbye and thanks, David Yates.

Philosophers at the fair #2

Language and the first-person perspective

On Wednesday, May 31st 2017

At: The Collaborating Centre for Values-Based Practice, St Catherine’s College University of Oxford, Manor Road OX 1 3UJ.

This one-day Advanced Seminar examines the theme of language and the first-person perspective from a number of disciplinary perspectives, with a particular focus upon the significance of these debates for people with people with mental health conditions. The seminar is the third annual meeting of the Values-Based Theory Network hosted by the St Catherine Collaborating Centre for Values-Based Practice, in collaboration with Manchester Metropolitan University.

How does it feel to be you acting in the world through the use of language or actively entertaining your own cognitions? And what happens when such a feeling is disrupted, ascribed to you by someone else or conferred upon something else?

Our experience of the surrounding world and of our own selves in thought and language is tightly linked to the first-personal sense of agency. As such, its loss, disruption or misattribution can severely affect all aspects of our conscious life. How we describe the experiences of mental illness also goes hand-in-hand with dignity and respect, and thus something that everyone working in mental health contexts needs to think carefully about.

In bringing together philosophers, psychologists, linguists and lay representatives, the Advanced Seminar strategically responds to the BSA (2015) Guidelines on the use of language in relation to functional psychiatric diagnosis platform statement that the profession needs to move towards a system which is no longer based on a ‘disease’ model, yielding public affirmation of the large and growing emerging evidence that experiences hitherto described in functional diagnostic terms may be better understood in psychosocial terms.

Our aim is to open up a co-creative multi-disciplinary dialogue between practitioners, academics and lay representatives about the ways we might think and argue differently about the benefit of re-appraising the first-person standpoint in understanding the experience of mental illness and self-knowledge through the use of language, with a view to identify creative techniques for patient empowerment, education and clinical treatment, in shaping future direction of the research and innovation collaboration.

Confirmed speakers:

Anna Bergqvist (Philosophy, Manchester Metropolitan University).

Eleanor Chatburn (Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford).

David Crepaz-Keay (Head of Empowerment and Social Inclusion, Mental Health Foundation).

Edward Harcourt (Philosophy, University of Oxford).

Veryan Richards (Lay participant and patient/carer representative, Royal College of Psychiatrists/The Collaborating Centre for Values-Based Practice).

Léa Salje (Philosophy, University of Leeds).

Elena Semino (Linguistics, Lancaster) and Zsófia Demjén (Linguistics, UCL).

Tim Thornton (Philosophy and Mental Health, University of Central Lancashire).

Contact and registration: Dr Anna Bergqvist. Email: a.bergqvist@mmu.ac.uk

Welcome!

An introduction to Wittgenstein on the agreement or harmony between thought and reality

I was lucky enough to be invited to talk to my local U3A philosophy group on Wittgenstein today. Sadly I made the schoolboy error of trying to cover too much and so didn't let discussion develop properly and fully. Many years ago, I was able to spend a weekend introducing Wittgenstein at an adult education centre. A whole weekend, with time for discussion over a coffee or beer, may have contributed to my foolish thoughts about timing today. Anyway, here is a prose introduction to Wittgenstein on the harmony of thought and reality.

Background: what are ‘propositional attitudes’?

Propositional attitudes are mental states about things, states of affairs, events etc.

Suppose I am in my office in Preston and am asked where my cat is likely to be. I say, and think, Sootica is in the airing cupboard in my house in Kendal. So I have a thought or belief that Sootica is in the airing cupboard in my house in Kendal.

We can generate other examples of different kinds of thoughts. If asked where she will be later I can say, and think, I expect that she will be waiting by the door in Kendal when I get home. Or if asked where I last saw her I might say: I remember that she was waiting for a third breakfast by her bowl.

All of these cases are ‘propositional attitudes’, a posh phrase for a mental state about something, some state of affairs or possible fact.

Attitudes are expressed by verbs such as believe, hope, expect, fear, remember.

Propositions are express by the phrase after the word ‘that’ which describes a possible fact. Hence various propositional attitudes given by different attitudes taken towards different propositions.

·         I expect that Sootica will be waiting by the door in Kendal when I get home.

·         I believe that Sootica is in the airing cupboard in my house in Kendal.

·         I remember that Sootica was waiting for a third breakfast by her bowl.

The problem

If I am in Preston and I believe that Sootica is in the airing cupboard in my house in Kendal then I am in a mental state in Preston which concerns a possible state of affairs in Kendal. My mental state is about that possible fact. It represents it. It concerns her and the cupboard and her being in it.

What could such a mental state possibly consist in? How is it – so much as - possible to be in such a mental state? What is such aboutness? (In philosophy, the technical word for this is ‘intentionality’.)

What the problem isn’t

This isn’t the question of how one can be justified in thinking such a thing. Perhaps experience or others’ testimony is an answer to that. Nor is it a question of why one believes or expects something. Perhaps after a run of heads it is natural to expect the next coin toss is more likely to be tails. That is irrational but a natural expectation. Still that isn’t the problem. The problem is how one thinks it.

So not: what justifies the belief that Sootica is in the cupboard, nor why does one think it, but what sort of state is that?

There are many relational states but none seems right for explaining aboutness (in the way my thought is about Sootica). It is not, for example, a state of ‘being on top of’ (as a cat on a mat). Nor is it a state of ‘being 50 miles from’ (as Preston is from Kendal, that doesn’t make Preston about Kendal). Nor does it seem to be a state of ‘being caused by’. The airing cupboard temperature may be warmer because Sootica is in there breathing. Or she may be there because it is warmer than the house. But neither of those causes is ‘about’ Sootica being in the cupboard. So the attempt to shed light on how a mental state can be about something is not helped by most of the familiar relations that hold between things.

The aim of answering this is not armchair biology but rather to find a way that such a state doesn’t seem utterly mysterious and impossible.

Two possible solutions sadly fail

1: Thoughts as pictures

Perhaps having a mental state about something is explained by having a mental picture of that state of affairs? In other words, since pictures are familiar and unmysterious, we can use them to shed light on belief and other propositional attitudes.

What’s good about this suggestion?

Pictures are both about, but also independent of, what they depict. A picture can be of Sootica in the airing cupboard and it can still exist even if she is not in the cupboard. (Obviously!) So if a thought is a picture then that may explain how thought can be both about but also independent of what it concerns. In other words, it can be true or false, as thought obviously can be. (Similarly, an expectation can come true or not.)

What’s bad?

But a picture is utterly unlike what it depicts. It only represents it to someone who understands its rules of projection. A two dimensional picture only represents a three dimensional cat in a cupboard given the right rules of projection.

Now one may try to fix this problem by saying that thought is explained as having both a mental picture and a grasp of its rules of projection.

But if we take seriously the idea that thought is explained by pictures, thinking about the rules of projection (understanding them) will also have to be a matter of having a mental picture of them.

Perhaps we have a mental picture which is modelled on the following possible actual picture. A picture of both a real cat and also a person painting a picture of a cat with dotted lines connecting the former to the latter. (Such a picture might be in a book on the history of perspective in art.) The problem is that this too is a picture (of a cat and a picture of a cat) and it will only be understood by someone who understands its rules of projection.

So begins an infinite regress (when one calls for a picture of a picture of a picture of a cat…)

Thus thoughts cannot consist of pictures. We can explain pictures by invoking thoughts of what they are about but not the other way round. Even those people who ‘think in pictures’ think either about pictures or have pictures in their minds when also thinking. But pictures cannot explain thoughts.

2: Thoughts as (sort-of) perceptions

When I see (by contrast with think about from afar) that Sootica is in her cupboard, I am in a complicated state that involves me, Sootica, the cupboard and me being awake and alert to this fact. It is a relational state. Sootica herself is part of me seeing her. Seeing is not merely an inner event. I cannot see what is not there (evidence might be given in court to show I could not have seen the suspect, eg. Even if I thought I saw her if she was not there). Of course, I can think I see things that are not there but let’s focus on actual seeing. Could believing be a matter of sort-of-seeing, in some spooky way at a distance?

What’s good about this suggestion?

Because seeing is a relational state that involves, in this case, Sootica herself, that explains how my state of seeing can be about Sootica. She is part of the state. It would not count as a case of my seeing Sootica if she were not about to be seen. So unlike the picture explanation, this solves the problem of how propositional attitudes can be about actual states of affairs.

What’s bad?

But what happens if unbeknownst to me in Preston, Sootica isn’t in the cupboard in Kendal? If so, there isn’t a fact for me to sort-of-see. If my belief (that she is in the cupboard) is false, there isn’t a fact to explain what it is for me to have the belief (namely to sort-of-see, in a spooky way, from 50 miles distance, her in the cupboard).

Roughly: the picture explanation solves for false thought but not true thought and the sort-of-seeing theory solves for true thought but not false thought.

Are there any other accounts?

(One might say that computers and the web has aboutness. A Google inquiry yields truths about the world. But the inquiry yields patterns on screens which we interpret as about the world. In the background, much software and hardware engineering ensures ultimately through physics that the right patterns are displayed on the screen for a given use of the keyboard.)

Wittgenstein’s attempt to ease the tension

The above dilemma plays out in this passage:

442. I see someone aiming a gun and say “I expect a bang”. The shot is fired. - What! – was that what you expected? So did that bang somehow already exist in your expectation? Or is it just that your expectation agrees in some other respect with what occurred; that that noise was not contained in your expectation, and merely supervened as an accidental property when the expectation was being fulfilled? a But no, if the noise had not occurred, my expectation would not have been fulfilled; the noise fulfilled it; it was not an accompaniment of the fulfilment like a second guest accompanying the one I expected. Was the feature of the event that was not also in the expectation something accidental, an extra provided by fate? – But then, what was not an extra? Did something of the shot already occur in my expectation? –
Then what was extra? for wasn’t I expecting the whole shot.
“The bang was not as loud as I had expected.” – “Then was there a louder bang in your expectation?”

It seems that the actual event in the future, in all its later detail, cannot actually exist earlier in my mental state (I could not sort-of-see it in the future). And yet: that bang is what I did expect.

This is the bind of the dilemma described above. Wittgenstein sidesteps it.

443. “The red which you imagine is surely not the same (not the same thing) as the red which you see in front of you; so how can you say that it is what you imagined?” – But haven’t we an analogous case with the sentences “Here is a red patch” and “Here there isn’t a red patch”. The word “red” occurs in both; so this word can’t indicate the presence of something red.

The interlocutor stresses the apparent distinction between an object of thought and a worldly feature; Wittgenstein replies with a baffling analogy with two contrasting assertions. So why should one think that colours in the imagination must be different to physical coloured samples? In this kind of case there is a plausible motivation. Imagining the colour red might be assumed to involve having a red mental image before the mind’s eye. If so, the question of whether the red mental image is the same colour as a worldly sample of redness is pressing.

The response, however – the suggested ‘analogous case’ – looks to concern something quite different, the meaning of the word ‘red’ in two contrasting sentences. But the second sentence - “Here there isn’t a red patch” – functions no less well than the previous sentence even without the presence of anything red. And hence the suggested diagnosis: if imagining something red is modelled on a sentence about redness rather than a red mental image, the problem of comparing inner and outer reds can be sidestepped. This line of thought is clearer in the next pair of remarks.

444. One may have the feeling that in the sentence “I expect he is coming” one is using the words “he is coming” in a different sense from the one they have in the assertion “He is coming”. But if that were so, how could I say that my expectation had been fulfilled? If I wanted to explain the words “he” and “is coming”, say by means of ostensive explanations, the same explanations of these words would go for both sentences. But now one might ask: what does his coming look like? - The door opens, someone walks in, and so on. - What does my expecting him |131| to come look like? - I walk up and down the room, look at the clock now and then, and so on. - But the one sequence of events has not the slightest similarity to the other! So how can one use the same words in describing them? - But then perhaps I say, as I walk up and down: “I expect he’ll come in.” - Now there is a similarity here. But of what kind?!

Again the passage concerns the connection between a mental state and a worldly event that satisfies or fulfils it. This time, the initial worry is with the content of a first person linguistic expression of an expectation and a description of an event that satisfies it. But why might one think that the phrase ‘he is coming’ has two different senses depending on whether it is part of the former or an assertion concerning the latter? One reason would be if one thought that in the two uses, it stood for two different things: a merely mental object and a worldly event. This would echo the previous difference between colour as imagined and actual sample.

Again Wittgenstein switches to language. The connection between a mental state and worldly event holds in virtue of our use of the same linguistic phrase. ‘He is coming’ can be used both to individuate the expectation and to report the event or fact that satisfies it. Hence the climax:

445. It is in language that an expectation and its fulfilment make contact.

And hence the official Wittgensteinian line:

429. The agreement, the harmony, between thought and reality consists in this: that if I say falsely that something is red, then all the same, it is red that it isn’t. |128| And in this: that if I want to explain the word “red” to someone, in the sentence “That is not red”, I do so by pointing to something that is red.

Answers to homework questions

1.      What general notion does McDowell invoke in Mind and World to explain (or rather to make un-mysterious) thought’s bearing on the world? What ‘-ism’ applies to this (though generally familiar in a slightly different area of philosophy)?

Experience and empiricism. In other words, he tries to show how thought is possible by comparing it to perception. Light enters the mind via experience. That may be true but what of false thought?

2.       Does McDowell offer a symmetric account of the cases of truth and falsity?

No. He only directly addresses the case of true thought. This makes false thought mysterious.

3.       Does McDowell’s explanatory notion play any role in Wittgenstein’s discussion (here)?

No. Wittgenstein does not mention experience. His key idea is language.

4.       Is there reason to think that Wittgenstein treats cases of truth and falsity (satisfaction or not) differently?

No especially since he attempts to account for the harmony of thought and reality through the case of falsehood: ‘if I say falsely that something is red, then all the same, it is red that it isn’t’.

5.       With what other phenomena does Wittgenstein compare intentional mental states (ie states that are about possible events / facts)?

As well as a range of mental states (expectations, imaginings, wishes, plans), he invokes orders and descriptive sentences.

6.       In a nutshell, what is Wittgenstein’s account of the connection between mental states and what they are about?

We use the same language to describe both facts and mental states. It is merely truistic that the expectation that he is coming is satisfied by him coming.

7.       What follow up questions does that raise?

So if mental states hook up to the world by descriptions, how does language hook up to the world? How do we know what mental state we are in? Does the linguistic connection between a mental state and what fulfils it create that connection or report one that was already there? If the latter, in what fact does that connection consist? Wasn’t that the connection we started with? (I think progress has been made!)