Not at all. I’m thinking of Piaget and the stages of childhood development. A newborn’s consciousness is barely articulated at all. She has barely any sense of her body or location in space. The overwhelming emotional and cognitive orientation is towards Mother. The sense of being a self with motor skills and an idea of location develops over the first few years of life. But humans (unlike deer or horses) then undergo a long period of extra-somatic enculturation, usually deemed at 18 years, before adulthood properly. So that is the laying down of the basic structure of consciousness, isn’t it?
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It’s good that you emphasize that we aren’t born with conceptually rich experience but must personally “construct” it, with help from others. The articulation of the world “emerges” in the first-person sense. This gets us into Hegel etc and the idea of communal conceptual schemes that we enter via training.
It’s not necessarily only personal. The individual has a role of course but there’s considerable influence from sorrounding others and the environment, obviously. There really are stories of children raised by wolves who act in accordance. (ref)
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Ah, the light dawns! Thanks, that’s a good and relevant point. So can you tie it back to my question about what sort of sentence the McDowell example is?
Yes, good image.
Yes, and the context is absolutely Kantian. It’s a long story, but as briefly as I can: McDowell is challenging what appears to be a dilemma between 1) accepting the “Myth of the Given” thesis, which seems to result in our rational wheels spinning without connection to an empirical world, or 2) drawing a line between our spontaneity (Kantian for rational freedom) and the input we do receive – but then this input can explain our experience but not justify what we believe about it. Neither of these horns is satisfactory to him. He argues that we can find a story to tell that rejects the Given but locates concepts within all human experience (understood as including things that are normally not considered conceptual, such as perceptions). The end result is rational justification for empirical statements, not merely an account of why we make them.
Sorry, that’s probably not even close to helpful, but it’s a dense, complicated discussion. I’m not persuaded, among other reasons because McDowell thinks “the mind brings concepts to experience” is wrong. He believes concepts are part of experience – there is no borderline – but IMO he finds it very difficult to cash out this idea.
But anyway, granted this context, what should we say about these kinds of sentences, whether written by Kant, Sellars, McDowell, or any other philosopher? How do you understand what they refer to? To whom should we turn if we want to examine their validity?
I’d try to think of some examples. Say a very experienced scientist or technician. Let’s put them in the LHC, reviewing the traces in the cloud chamber following some collision experiments. They point at the graphic and say ‘see’?, looking at me. Of course, I don’t ‘see’ anything other than various squiggly lines. ‘So this is what that trace means,’ she says, pointing to one of them with a laser-pointer. ‘The trajectory tells you that…’, and gives the explanation.
Of course, this example can be multiplied to an endless number of possible examples — the point being that she and I have the same ‘experiential data’, but she, due to training and expertise, will be able to interpret what she sees against a highly elaborated conceptual background. Whereas I just see squiggles.
I don’t know if that’s helpful, but it seems relevant.
We might call it a risky “formal indication.”
[A]s soon as philosophizing is committed to words, it is exposed to an “essential misinterpretation of its content.” That essential misinterpretation is precisely the view that everything, insofar as it has been articulated, has to be taken for something present-at-hand. Heidegger sets for himself the goal of “being able, at least relatively, to elude” that misinterpretation; “to this end,” he observes, "it is necessary to reflect on the general character of philosophical concepts, that they are all formally indicating or signalling [formal anzeigend].’
What is thereby indicated is not given “in any complete and actual sense” but only “in principle.” A philosophical concept is accordingly “empty” in a certain sense and hence purely “formal”, “formal” because it points in the direction of some thing that must be performed or gone through and even fulfilled or perfected by the philosopher, a direction, moreover, that springs from the philosophical “object” or “theme” itself.
McDowell, I surmise, is trying to “bring the phenomenon into view.” This (indicative) is my topic or topos. Instead of a representation that squeezes the phenomenon into language-as-vessel that captures it by mirroring it (in its presumed “content”), it is a poetic pointing that depends on its hearers to follow the finger to the world itself. McDowell speaks in a helplessly blind but heroic faith that others also have the world as “conceptual” or “intelligible.” Once the phenomenon is “seen,” even in just an initial blurriness, the investigation can proceed.
I have only briefly looked in McDowell’s work, but I’m inclined to agree that the world itself is “conceptual” in a sense of “conceptual” that is prior to the mind/world separation, which is indeed itself conceptual. “Concepts” aren’t essentially “mental.” Rather “mentality” is a questionable attempt to account for the “articulation” of the world.
I realize though that you didn’t want to focus on the meaning of his assertion. So I can drop it if you like.
My intuitive approach to this was to ask, “Well, how would I read this sentence?” Then I realised that, not being familiar with Mind and World, I read this sentence de-contextualised and - as I tend to default - as if it was an opening sentnece. And realising this led me to ask: Wouldn’t I read this sentence differently if it’s an opening sentence, and if it comes after a paragraph about experience and another about concepts?
I tend to use early sentences to construct the text’s theory. So if the text were to start with (maybe after some sort of introduction) this sentence, I’d assume the truth of this sentence, and then look at what sort of restrictions to defining “experience” and “concept” theoretically would result from assuming the truth of such a sentence: it would be some sort of anchoring sentence.
On the other hand, if we get a lot of talk about experiences and concepts and then get the sentence as a result, I couldn’t be doing this. I’d be examining the terms and see if the connections lead, for me, to where the author says it does. Rather than an anchoring sentence, I’d have a summary of some sort - and I’d ask: does the summary make sense?
In both cases, the sentence is part of the building block of a theory: it’s not something you can check empirically - you need to resolve the sentence before you have anything resembling operationalisation.
If, on the other hand, the sentence occurs in an “open” slot in the text: we’ve heard a lot about “experience” and “concepts”, but the way this connects leads to a question, then you don’t have a building block sentence of either kind; you’d either have a logical implication or an opportunity for empirical enquiry. We’d also have theory, where experience and concept are not intrinsically linked.
(I’ve studied sociology at university, so I’m used to reading texts with the same words connecting differently to form different theory and thus having subtly different restrictions to their definitions.)
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We’re talking about the objects of the experiences (e.g. what they are, what they’re like).
Introspection can be a valid method to study consciousness and experience scientifically. By calling it “phenomenology” you seem to mean it can’t be subject to formal and rigorous evaluation. As I understand it, you’re right to think that many people see it that way. I don’t get it.
Your selection of this particular sentence is interesting, and it makes it a little difficult to answer your question about it while being agnostic about (or abstracting away from) its truth. That’s because McDowell’s claim is made precisely in the context of a dispute about requirements for sentences (or judgements) to be empirically contentful. So, when I’m thinking about how it is that we could know whether this sentence, or other sentences of the same kind (where “of the same kind” needs to be explicated in some way, and you’ve offered minimal gestures towards specifying how you intend this feature to be understood, though I sympathize with your reservation about using established jargon with already built-in connotations) I keep circling back towards the sort of gesture McDowell purports to make with the use of this sentence. And since I agree with McDowell, I tend to view the general requirements for sentence meaningfulness (or judgement contentfulness) to be precisely such as to make this sentence true.
To be clear, the sentence doesn’t purport to express an empirical judgement, and hence its truth isn’t settled by an experiment, observation, perceptual experience (or other “act of receptivity” in the Kantian sense). So, it may be better understood as the explicitation of a material rule of inference in the Sellarsian or Brandomian sense, or, we may equivalently say, as a means for making explicit a norm for the use of the constituent vocabulary. Hence, we might say that in the context of the language game being played by McDowell (in Mind and World), the assertive use of the sentence is meant to signify the warrantedness of inferring that X has conceptual content from the judgement that I am experiencing X. But, I should also mention, this is done in a context where McDowell doesn’t merely mean to locate “experience” as an item among others in an empirical domain (which it is, in part, construed as an act of a cognitive ability of an embodied rational animal), but purports to make explicit also the principle that an experience that p can stand as a warrant for judging p, thereby highlighting that the passage from receptivity to judgment is rational and not merely causal.
Since this is an offshoot of your thread on Price, maybe I could comment briefly on how I view Price’s subject naturalism to contrast with McDowell’s relaxed (or liberal) naturalism in accounting for the alleged “placement” problem for such contentful sentences (or the judgements they express) in the case where they purportedly express material rules of inference. In short, the salient contrast, from my perspective, is that Price appears to feel the need for making room in a respectably naturalist picture of the world (and of our place within it), and for locating our practices of assertion-making into our nature qua social animals, in ways that are (at least initially) agnostic regarding the existence of the items (to use the excellently general term you recommended in the other thread) we’re talking about, and cash out their referential contents (thereby enabling non-vacuous semantic descent), in pragmatic terms, by appeal to those practices’ effectiveness in coping with each other, and in enabling effective adjustments/coordination of our individual norms of language use.
I think the problem with this, as McDowell might diagnose it, is that it still constitutes an attempt to account for empirical content (or meaningfulness more generally) from sideways-on, as it were, albeit in a manner that is distinctive from, say, Quine’s “external” tribunal of experience. It’s true that in Price’s global-expressivist account, the “external world” isn’t construed as impinging on humans, their sense organs, or their linguistic practices, from outside of us. But something like a God’s-eye-view, sideways-on perspective (or the viewpoint of a Martian anthropologist watching humans from space) is retained by pushing content into the naturalized realm of “coping” with one another and coordinating practices that are described in abstraction from the items that those practices purportedly (as construed in the Manifest Image) are about. It’s as if our Martian anthropologist/genealogist could have an unproblematic “naturalistic” access to the human activity of chess playing, say, as an emotionally rewarding game that humans come to agree on sets of rules for playing it, while the chess phenomena that they talk about (e.g. my king is in check) only earn their ontological status from their contribution to making a game playable (and rewarding) rather than their contribution to them making the game of chess, specifically, real as a locus for ontological commitments. The McDowellian corrective to Price’s picture would just be the reminder that when the Martian anthropologist comes to make sense of the rules of a specific human rule-governed practice, they come to disclose its ontology at the same time as they also learn to properly talk about its phenomena (or empirical items). More would need to be said in the way of caveat regarding the contrast (and alleged dichotomy) between empirical domains that are disclosed (e.g. natural sciences) and those that are constituted (e.g. chess, politics) but that may (or may not) be a side issue.
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We’ve finally gotten around to figuring out what the sentence in question means, which wasn’t the goal of the OP. That being said, I think this interpretation makes sense. My first impulse is to say “Experiences have conceptual content” has it backwards. It is possible to experience the world directly without concepts, it’s just not possible to talk about it. I think that’s something like what Kant means when he says “Percepts without concepts are blind”—keeping in mind the other half of that aphorism is “Thoughts without content are empty.” As I see it, experience comes first.
I think I see what you mean. What would be the “experiential data” in the case of a sentence like “Experiences have conceptual content”? Is there someone who is an expert at analyzing such data, and who would be able to tell us whether such content is indeed present in experiences? Perhaps a very knowledgeable phenomenologist? Whereas the average introspector only sees the experiential equivalent of squiggles?
Or perhaps this isn’t what you mean, but please do elaborate.
I can see how much fun you have with this type of description, but does it really speak to the philosophical point? Charitable interpretation again . . .
Well, since you haven’t read him, perhaps that’s best. And as you say, my question isn’t really about McDowell. It’s about what sort of sentence “Experiences have conceptual content” is. You offer the quote, “A philosophical concept is accordingly ‘empty’ in a certain sense and hence purely ‘formal’,” but the question here is whether the target sentence does refer to a philosophical concept, rather than making an empirical statement – or some blend of the two.
I really like what you’re saying here. Offering a sample sentence, as I did, and asking how we should understand it makes it sound as if the whole thing is context-free somehow. You show clearly why it isn’t. That makes me wonder if my OP question was as sensible as I thought it was.
Do you recognize the feeling of a direct experience of the world without words intervening? I do and I think it’s a common experience. As I noted, it’s only that we can’t talk about it.
Mebee so, mebee not, but it makes no sense to think about the statement without keeping in mind we are talking about a matter of fact—people think and they think in particular ways. If the philosophy gets too far from the psychology, it becomes empty.
In his discussion in Mind and World, McDowell singles out experiences in a very specific role. He would not deny (and on the contrary would positively affirm) that, for instance, the experiences of dogs and frogs lack conceptual content. And he would not deny either that, in our ordinary unthinking coping with unreflexive tasks, we likewise experience affordances of the world (e.g. see where to place our feet as we walk) merely through competently coping with them. The debate rather takes place in the context of crediting experiences with their justificatory role such that beliefs about the world, say, can be justified with appeals to them. The question is: must experiences, in order to play such a role, have conceptual content.
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But then, arguably, the two cases where you do or don’t bring concepts to an experience aren’t the same experience. For instance, you may look at a duck-rabbit picture and not yet see it as either a duck or as a rabbit. When you see it as a duck, the concept of a duck, McDowell would say, is passively drawn into your experience. That’s because the ability to visually experience ducks is a learned/cultivated general way to see things and it is exercised passively when you recognize something as a duck. (It could be very hard, or impossible, to actively see an actual rabbit as a duck). Seeing the rabbit-duck picture as a duck, as a rabbit, or not yet recognizing it as anything in particular (as when, say, your eyes merely glaze over it while you’re thinking about something else entirely, or about nothing in particular) arguably are different experiences.
I am praising McDowell here. We all speak, if we have the courage to speak, with the same blind heroism. Vision is also blindness, in the sense that heading North is not-heading South.
Recall that I said that I agree with McDowell’s claims as reported by you so far. That you took me to be aggressive toward McDowell is an example of the “thrown projection” that I mentioned. You encounter my signs in the world and they initially indicate this rather than that. This initial fore-having is elaborated rather than questioned, until a further collision with the object — these very signs — transforms the always-already-“conceptual” world —from your POV, which tempts us to call it “mental”, as I see it. If meaning “radiates” from objects as “significance” rather than “internal mind-stuff conceptuality” — and if signs are perceptual objects in the world, then ?
If that’s what he means to say, then I agree. As I noted, I can experience without words, but I can’t talk about it.
As is my wont, I’ll bring in Lao Tzu—The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. When you put things into words, they become something different. By which I mean, I agree.
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It’s a very sensible question. I do think context adds more in some cases than others (maybe because some sentences tend to not lend themselves to as many purposes as others: how often do you find occasion of saying “Circles are 2-dimensional figures,” during your daily life?)
For example:
My first impulse was to nodd at a banality. So what does that say about our different reactions. Can we say, based on them, that I agree with McDowell more than T_Clark? Just from one sentence?
I don’t think so. There are three people involved, here (including McDowell), and we each, presumably, order our terms differently to some degree or other.
For instance, my intuition is that concepts are part of the partitioning of experience. Concepts are literally what experience is made of. But then I read this:
And I feel that my intuitive scope of the term “concept” is much wider than McDowell’s. We could still be compatible, mind you. But me agreeing, intuitively, with a sentence could be an artifact of chance, here. Meanwhile, @T_Clark disagreeing intuitively could be based on less familiarity with the context, but a closer alignment of the semantics of the words involved.
That’s why it’s important to read the texts, before deciding on a sentence. Does the sentence set-up word meanings, or do word-meanings (set-up elsewhere in the text, or the author’s oeuvre) determine the meaning of the sentence? And this is just one question.
A sentence has many aspects: grammatical form, usage distribution, function in text… Not all require context to answer.