I find it hard to understand anything “particulate” as non-conceptual, unless objects as recognizable unities are generalized signs.
Some people (for instance Susan Hurley, whom I otherwise admire) have charged McDowell with over-intellectualizing the mind and they may have had some such sanitized or purified view of concepts in mind that they have ascribed to him. But I think this charge stems not only from a misunderstanding of what it is that McDowell’s project is in Mind and World (and that we’ve begun discussing elsewhere) but also from an overly restrictive view of what it is that acculturation into a rational form of life positively achieves.
Part of the misunderstanding may stem from comparing the richness of one’s lived experience of the world with the simplicity and parsimony of the vocabulary one must make use of to express it in a common language in a limited amount of time. This makes it look like bringing concepts expressible in language to bear on one’s experience only necessitates that one abstract away from most of its content. One corrective to this misunderstanding may be to draw attention to the ways in which an already rich lived experience can be rendered richer by the additional resources that rationally or normatively constraining norms of behavior and communication generate.
Consider how the perceptual content enjoyed by, say, Magnus Carlsen, as he looks at a chess position, differs from the perceptual content of someone who doesn’t know the rules of the game. Carlsen can see immediately if there is a mate-in-two for White, or countless other aspects of the position relevant to the affordances both the Black and the White player have for improving their positions (and hence their prospects of winning or drawing the game), while those features of the board position aren’t visible at all to an observer who doesn’t master the “language of chess”. But this language is also what makes it possible for Carlsen to bring to bear on his interpretation of the board position deep ideas of chess masters from the past, and hence a rich interpretive tradition. Each one of those ideas, that Carlsen could unpack if queried, live in the back of his mind, as it were, and contribute to the conceptual content of his vision of the board. And they are fully expressible in the extremely parsimonious language of chess (as he indeed gathered most of them by reading chess game records).
Chess is a niche activity, but like most other human activities and domains (politics, law, science, arts, literature, etc.) that are norm-governed, the question of the applicability of the general rules or norms to specific cases is discussed and debated with a view of establishing generalizable precedents for specific situations. Bringing particular cases of experience under a common language, with a view of debating the appropriateness of bringing the relevant norms to bear, contributes to the enrichment of our lives within those domains, and of the living traditions that animate them.
What contributes to make one’s singular experience more effable are communicative tools for capturing (and, at the same time, creating) their conceptual content in a more finely differentiated way, in part by deploying the reiterable signs that refer to them against the backdrop of a rich interpretive tradition.
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I am doubtful that Evans’ specific project, here, can so much as be carried through, so I am not overly concerned with understanding how it can, but, read charitably, it seems like what it is that Evans calls “particulate” are bits of non-conceptual contents carried by, for instance, our visual systems as they’ve evolved prior to the involvement of their “outputs” with our linguistic abilities, say. They might signify such things as the affordances animals perceive without being able to reason about them. They are, in a sense, conceptual inasmuch as we (qua ethologists or brain scientists) thus conceptualize them, but those are not concepts that the animal itself brings to bear to their experience as it unreflectively “responds” (causally) to them. Those bits of content are “particulate” precisely inasmuch as they are individuated in their functions independently of their potential role (which is indeed entirely missing, in this case) in a conceptually articulated cognitive economy of mental states that rationally bear on one another.
Great post !
I completely agree that our lives are enriched enriched enriched this way. I wager that we are here, on this forum, stringing together our sign-pearls, for more of the golden goodness of this often ecstatic articulation.
This is a great example of something I’m trying to emphasize. Signs are “transcendent” perceptual objects in the world. Chess pieces are signs. Objects are generally generalized signs. The sign “radiates” its “significance.” The chess board, in its “temporally deep” significance is there as a perceptual object, as a complex sign, for both players. But this complex sign, as perceptual object, is grasped “from a perspective” —with the necessary help from different pairs of eyes. The board “radiates” differently for a master than for a novice. We tend to put this radiance “inside the skulls” of the players, but this betrays what it’s like to share an intensely meaningfully rich world with others. It’s an inherited theoretical prejudice.
But all theory as such is prejudice. As an initial “seeing” of the situation, an initial “taking-as.” To take the situation in any way at all is to not-take it in countless other ways. I add this because I think my talk of “blind faith” came off as critical earlier when I was trying to celebrate the risk of theory —and emphasize the “transcendence” or “infinity” of the world.
Ah, OK. A delicate issue. We seem to have to “project” some reduction of our own “consciousness” on non-human animals. I live with three lovable dogs. One of them, a sweet big girl named Shy, is great at catching tossed pieces of ham in her mouth. I don’t think this will cease to delight me. She enacts what “radiates” as the targeting of an object. She enacts what looks like a living in an articulated world. Why isn’t it “conceptual” ?
Perhaps we could grant some a weaker but genuine version of reasoning ? Where “exactly” does reasoning being or emerge ? I don’t want to detail the thread, but maybe it’s relevant ?
Feuerbach “decodes” monotheism involving creation ex nihilo by word or fiat in terms of the assertion of a gap between humans and the rest of nature. I’m not a human-hater, and there is something peculiar about us, but maybe a certain approach to meaning is still committed to a crystalline trans-natural essence of some kind.
Right. That sets up the entire problem.
Rereading this, I found myself wondering about “available” and “availability.” McDowell presents Evans as saying that the PIS becomes an experience only when, as non-conceptual content, it is “available” to spontaneity. Isn’t this putting it rather backwards? The issue is not that a PIS would be more or less available, but rather that, for a non-human animal without spontaneity, there is nothing for it to be available to. Any PIS is in principle available, on this construal, but different animals, including humans, have different capacities of spontaneity with which to interact with the PIS.
I think you emphasize this as well when you say, of Evans, that a PIS becomes “the content of a perceptual experience in virtue of its 'availability to spontaneity” (and hence only in creatures who have such a faculty).
Yes, and here we would need to bring in the “second nature” discussion. Second nature, for McDowell, is not exactly a background of pre-understanding, but it plays a similar role, I think. It is natural for humans, according to McDowell, to develop “habits of thought and action” that are “initiated” by upbringing and enculturation. (I have reservations about whether “second nature” is a good term to describe this, but that’s a separate issue.). This seems to be what McDowell means by “manifestations of life,” above.
So this continues the role that second nature plays in providing a kind of background framework. But McDowell still sees, correctly, that a problem remains:
In other words, an appeal to second nature is not going to help us here, other than to affirm that the entire discussion takes place within a “liberal naturalism,” to use McDowell’s phrase. McDowell still needs to develop an account of “conceptual content” that erases the supposed borderline between receptivity and spontaneity. I think the fact that he returns over and over to the Kantian thesis about “concepts and intuitions” (their emptiness or blindness) is telling.
I think I agree with this, though I got a bit lost in the grammar of that long sentence. Are the “general sorts of animal abilities”, when transformed through acculturation into a rational form of life, or space of reasons, merely the background or framework against which the problem of justification emerges? That is, do we still require an account of how some specific empirical belief may or may not receive justification from experience?
Excellent. I also see a critical difficulty for Evans here, one that McDowell is trying to amend. You could say that a key theme of Mind and World is precisely this: Does the idea of non-conceptual content doom us to be unable to distinguish causal input from justificatory ground? Are we forced to re-erect the borderline between the space of laws and the space of reasons? McDowell thinks so, and to avoid that we must opt for an irreducibly conceptual content for human experience.
I’m not sure, but the questions about “representational effect” are right on. Aside from this being a huge issue in philosophy overall, it’s relevant to the specific question about how to get from “marks and noises” (causal input) to semantic content (the basis for possible rational input). If I turn my OP sentence into a question – “Do experiences have conceptual content?” – it can be seen as asking the same question.
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I was looking at this again. Chat GPT says My research indicates many cognitive scientists consider non-verbal distinctions to be concepts. As I noted, this is different from the everyday use of the word and how I think of it. So your intuition seems to be similar to theirs.
Yes, it was not just unwieldly but also ungrammatical. Where I wrote “don’t”, I should have written “no to”. Better, I should have split it up, or used parentheses. I’ll be back shortly with a response to your astute comments.
On edit, here is the fix for the bad sentence: “Maybe, then, one way to characterize what it is that distinguishes McDowell, on one side, from Evans, on the other side, and also makes him immune from Taylor’s appeals to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, is that McDowell views the perceptual abilities of non-rational animals — although they are abilities of a general kind that we share with them, and that we can exercise with no active (e.g., with no need for reflection) involvement of spontaneity when, say, we unthinkingly know where to place our feet as we walk around — not to provide an informational ground or content on the basis of which our conceptualized experiences and judgements are justified […]”
It does, though it is one of very many ways for the problem to show up. And since it’s indeed fairly central, I’ll focus on it now and address your other comments separately.
I think this problem shows up in a very similar (and closely related) way in Davidson’s anomalous monism as it specifically applies to his philosophy of action. In this context, the problematic item that is being appealed to for both creating friction with the material/empirical world and locating it in the space of reasons is the “neutral” action construed as a material “event” in the world. Just like, in Evans, the “perceptual informational state” (“PIS” is McDowell’s own short-hand) is individuated fine-grainedly from its functional role in a perceptual system independently of its rational import for the agent’s perceptual judgments, Davidson likewise views the “action” that an event in the material world constitutes, or realizes, as being what it is (the “monism”) independently of its role in the rational life of the agent (the “anomalous”). Construing this event as an intentional action is just a different way of making it intelligible, and not a separate way of individuating it according to Davidson. If we rather (like Elizabeth Anscombe, Michael Thompson, and Jennifer Hornsby, among others) individuate actions as behaviors of rational agents in the world that are driven and individuated in the way that they are because of the rational aims of the agent, we can see that, as Thompson argues most convincingly (in Life and Action), the paradigmatic reason why someone performs action A is another action B that A is a part of (or an appropriate means towards accomplishing it, by their own rational lights). Placing an action in the space of reasons is just placing it (and viewing it as being intelligibly individuated within) an internally organized system of purposive behaviors, we might say. That is true also for non-rational animals, though in their cases the practice of taking (and ability to take) ownership of the rational grounds of their own behaviors, or of their internal teleological organization, isn’t part of the picture.
Back to the case of perceptual content and allegedly neutral (non-conceptual) contents of perceptual informational states, I think Sellars’ discussion of the logic of ‘looks’ (in the third section in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind) is illuminating. Briefly, as you may already know, the story concerns John, a necktie salesman, who has spent his whole life classifying the colors of ties under ordinary daylight conditions. Every evening, while checking his stock, he says things like “This is red,” “That is green,” “This is purple,” and his peers approve of these classifications. Then electric lighting is introduced in the shop (and the business hours extended after sunset, we may assume). Shortly after this happens, a customer named Jim enters to buy a necktie. John points to a tie and says: “Here is a handsome green one.” Jim buys it and later returns to the shop complaining: “It isn’t green.” John takes the tie outside into daylight. There the tie is plainly blue. John, bewildered, says: “Well, it was green in there, but now it is blue.” Jim explains that neckties do not change color merely by being moved from one place to another.
John may briefly entertain the hypothesis that electric lighting might somehow change their colors and that they change back again in daylight. If what it is that John was making reference to as the color of a necktie was what it is that it looks like on specific occasions of looking at them, then he would be right. But there is another, more sophisticated, use of “looks” language according to which a “looks” statement consists in a guarded claim (akin to claims of beliefs in relation to claims of knowledge) about what it is that objects dispositionally look like in normal lighting conditions. On that understanding, the perceptual content expressed by “this necktie looks green” is not merely constructed out of the “raw” content of an “internal” perceptual system, as Evans’ notion of PIS might suggest, and as McDowell might concede is a legitimate story about how our ability to judge is enabled. Rather, when the judgment is interpreted as a claim about a dispositional property manifesting in normal conditions, that content is individuated differently: it is about a persistent object rather than a singular perceptual encounter. When the ties are actually blue, but they look green because the shop switched from daylight to electric light, John uses this discrepancy to shift from making an assertive property claim (“It is…”) to a guarded report of appearance (“It looks…”). What John’s retreat reveals is that his perceptual judgment was, all along, object-directed as a defeasible claim about a persistent thing and the color it has in normal light. This object-directedness of the experience report (and of the experience itself) is not distilled from a prior appearance-content but belongs to it as an actualization of capacities that individuate objects and their standing properties. The “looks” report therefore isn’t the bedrock he was building on (something like Evans’ PIS). It rather is the residue left when, having learned the lighting was abnormal, he withholds the objective claim while keeping its content. Far from showing that a “neutral” sensory given is justifying the judgment, the episode shows that the only content with the answerability a judgment needs was conceptual through and through, which is just to say it was, fallibly, already about the human world.
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You devils got me reading Mind and World ! Beautiful prose.
But if our freedom in empirical thinking is total, in particular if it is not constrained from outside the conceptual sphere, that can seem to threaten the very possibility that judgements of experience might be grounded in a way that relates them to a reality external to thought.
I’m just digging into this book, but I am expecting McDowell to maybe “blow open” the enclosing conceptual sphere by disclosing as optional the deep assumption that conceptuality is internal mindstuff injected with intuition. Basically we can think of signs themselves as objects in the world, whose significance radiates from them to us, along with and inseparable from the intuition-sensation that is given as a mere “moment” of an enduring open enduring “unity” of such moments. Mill was on the edge of this in his dated lingo of “(relatively) permanent ( interpersonal ) possibilities of sensation.”
My perhaps zany misreading of Plato’s ἰδέα — which is found more or less in Nelson Goodman in other terms — generalizes Saussure’s “sound-image” and understands objects in general as “equivalence classes” of their “manifestations.” Rather than speculative and unworldly, this reading is phenomenological, perhaps settling with the brute fact of the articulation of the world into objects always already charged with “temporal depth,” which might be explained by psychology while functioning as the basis for that -ology and any other.
As I understand it, the appeal to second nature indeed isn’t meant to explain how acts of receptivity constrain acts of spontaneity but only to show how the acquisition of this faculty (as well as the inter-dependent conceptual abilities we have to navigate the space of reasons), once elucidated, can be seen to occur, like the training of dogs (or, mutatis mutandis, of LLM-based AI assistants!), mainly through exposure and habituation. This is the idea of upbringing, Bildung, initiation into a (rational) form of life, or the learning of an interconnected set of intelligent capacities, defined by Gilbert Ryle as a class of acquired skills and competences that are entirely distinct from mechanical habits or rote knowledge (and that Victoria McGeer discusses here).
McDowell’s separate way to close the gap between receptivity and spontaneity, in perceptual acts, is, as I remembered, through characterizing experiences as episodes in which conceptual capacities are passively drawn into operation. So, in searching Mind and World (which I had last read many years ago) for the occurrence of the phrase “passively drawn,” I was rather pleased to see him drawing roughly the same picture I had drawn in my previous post:
‘’’
[…]Now I have been urging that experiences in general are states or occurrences in which conceptual capacities are passively drawn into operation. That had better hold for these “inner experiences” of colour as much as for any other
experiences. And I believe we should understand the role of colour concepts in these “inner experiences” derivatively from their role in “outer experience”. The concept of red gets a grip, in characterizing an “inner experience” of “seeing red”, because the experience is in the relevant respect subjectively like the experience of seeing that something — some “outer” thing — is red, or at least seeming to.
It can be tempting to take things the other way round: to suppose that the “inner” role of colour concepts is autonomously intelligible, and to try to explain their “outer” role in terms of the idea that for an “outer” object to fall under a colour concept is for it to be such as to cause the appropriate visual “inner experience” in suitable viewing conditions. We can be encouraged into this by the thought that if being red and looking red are intelligible only in terms of each other, that makes it a mystery how anyone can break into this circle: a mystery we might hope to dissipate by explaining both being red and looking red in terms of the “inner” experience of “seeing red”. But we should resist this temptation. If the “inner” role of colour concepts were a self-standing starting point, “outer experience” of colour would become impossible to comprehend. By what alchemy could an “inner experience” be transmuted into an “outer experience”? If a colour first figures, in the development of our understanding, as a feature of “inner experience”, not an apparent property of objects, how could our understanding contrive to project that out into the world? Starting from there, we might manage to externalize at best a propensity to induce the relevant feature of “inner experience” in us. But it is quite doubtful whether the idea of possessing such a propensity adds up to the idea of being appropriately coloured: that requires precisely that our experience and thought locate something phenomenal in the external world, whereas the “propensity” conception keeps what is phenomenal in the mind.7 And anyway the circle—the mutual dependence of the concepts of being red and looking red—is quite innocent. It is no threat, for instance, to a sane view of how colour concepts are acquired; we simply have to suppose they come only as elements in a bundle of concepts that must be acquired together. 8 So I propose to focus on the role of colour concepts, and more generally concepts of secondary qualities, in “outer experience”, taking it that that is what is fundamental.
‘’’
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Yes, we could also frame it in terms of the space of reasons vs. causal input, and as you say, many others.
Yes.
And it’s at this point that Davidson’s monism can feel like a stretch, without the bolded proviso. He has to say that “being individuated” is an add-on, merely “a different way of making [the item] intelligible”. I agree with the parallel between this view of action, and the view that experience can be “neutral”, not irreducibly informed by “the rational aims [or, in this case, beliefs or concepts] of the agent.”
Sellars’ story about John and Jim is fascinating. It reminds me a bit of Dennett’s tale about Mr. Chase and Mr. Sanborn (in Consciousness Explained), who are trying to decide whether it’s the flavor of a certain brand of coffee that has changed, or their perception of the flavor. 
One question about the Sellars story, before I comment: Where does the term “normal” come from? Does Sellars give any account of how “normal lighting conditions” would be stipulated? Is it a stipulation, or can there be genuine disagreement about what counts as normal?
Thanks for the rewrite. Now I can definitely say that I agree with it (vis a vis the difference between Evans and McDowell)!
Yes, that’s very much part of his thesis. Or maybe not so much that conceptuality isn’t “mindstuff,” but that neither concepts nor intuitions are in a relation with each other such that one could inject (nice term!), or be injected by, the other. This is his hardest sell, for me. As I noted above, McDowell uses the famous Kantian dictum as a touchstone, coming back to it often, as if to check whether he’s managed to remain faithful to the “blindness/emptiness” problem. In my reading, he clearly discovers something important and true in Kant’s formulation, and is trying to modernize it using his own philosophical background, which is deeply distrustful of “intuitions” understood as raw sense data (or mental data).
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Yes, that’s how I see McDowell’s “second nature” as well. It’s not a boots-on-the-ground explanation of how receptivity could constrain spontaneity, but more a genetic story of how we come to be able to do it.
I’d like to understand him better here. I suppose the alternative would be “actively in operation”? Do you think that would refer to me applying a concept, in the somewhat traditional way of thinking about this problem?-- Here’s the raw data, now I apply a concept. Clearly McDowell rejects this picture. But merely switching to “passively drawn into” doesn’t clear the matter up for me. It implies a kind of helplessness before the constraints of what I confront, now understood to include conceptual content. Can that be what he means?
The color example is intriguing. We learn red by deriving it from what we learn about outer experience. But how we learn to do this may not be an explanation of what is going on, in any given experience of color. Now that I know what red is, and can identify it either in outer or inner experience, must I deny that “for an ‘outer’ object to fall under a colour concept is for it to be such as to cause the appropriate visual ‘inner experience’ in suitable viewing conditions”? I can deny that I was able to learn about a color this way, but why deny that this in fact happens, now that I know my colors?
But anyway, I don’t find it a very important problem, any more than McDowell does. The circle he describes gets turned by both learning and doing, remembering and seeing; in fact, this might be a good example of what we receive from Bildung, if we’re fortunate. What remains to be understood is, once again, the specific problem about the conceptual content of experience, especially as it pertains to warranted empirical judgments. In Lecture V.3, McDowell describes a certain received view of Wittgenstein which has the consequence that “how things are . . . cannot be independent of the community’s ratifying the judgment that things are thus and so.” He says, “I think the consequence is intolerable.” That’s the piece of McDowell’s puzzle that we need to fit snugly into place.
Yes, terms tend to come with different meanings in different contexts. Out own impulses let us agree or disagree on our own terms, which is why it’s best, early on it the text, to figure out the “lay of the land”. What sort of theory are they operating under?
And people know that terms are used differently, so they might - especially early on - drop clues on how they use them. I come from sociology, where terms have very different meanings. There’s a history of theoretical bifurcation, though, so secondary literature can give you the lowdown.
Sometimes, a sentence like “Experiences have conceptual content,” might be such a marker. Other markers might include name drops, usage of unique terms, and other things. If you’re reading in a theoretically diverse discipline, it’d be an advantage to spot such markers early on, to get a grip on the text. That’s why a sentence like “Experiences have conceptual content,” can be anything from a theoretical marker to an empirical hypothesis. Out of context, you can’t tell what it does in a text.
(As for my concept of “concept”: I don’t think in words, and when I think with words [which is common], I experience the words as a seperate conceptual stream, with a third conceptual stream trying to keep the two in line. Interestingly, I can only access past thoughts via words, so I’m never quite sure what meant when I thought these words. As you can imagine, it takes a long time and many false starts to write a post, and if you go through my post history, you’ll often find lines like “I hope that made sense” at the end of the post. This usually not only means “I hope I communicated my thoughts well,” but also “I hope I know what I’ve been saying.”)
If there is a problem there, it’s indeed one that attends to a received view that McDowell uses as a foil (and that he ascribes to Crispin Wright), and that purports to be a response to the problem as Kripke specifically framed it (in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language). McDowell goes into more detail in his very substantial paper “Wittgenstein on Following a Rule”, republished in Mind, Value, and Reality. In short, he argues against a thin view on which community ratification does nothing more than extend the scope of a rule to new cases on the occasions when they occur. The deeper trouble is that on such a view there is no genuine norm left at all. If correctness just is whatever the community ratifies, the community’s verdicts aren’t answerable to anything, and the contrast between being right and seeming right to us collectively collapses.
McDowell’s alternative isn’t to find a better arbiter than the community but to refuse the arbiter picture altogether. Shared initiation into a practice (agreement in form of life) is the background against which correctness is intelligible.
It occurred to me while revisiting this debate, though, that the sort of normatively inert “practice” strictly given in another’s (raw) “behavior”, and that would constitute a common factor between one possible “extension” of the rule that this behavior exhibits compliance with (say, the rule for “plus”, in Kripke’s famous example) and another rule (say, the rule for “quus”), looks like the in-the-skin Wittgensteinianism that Gregory McCulloch took as a foil in The Mind and its World, preferring to it an in-the-world Wittgensteinianism.
Instead of the “sideways-on” view of the match, or reference relation, between an in-the-skin (thinly, “behaviorally” described) referential practice and the objects in the “external” world that correspond to it, we should focus on referential practices that have their objects as a constitutive part of them (as Gareth Evans does masterfully throughout The Varieties of Reference, his reflections on non-conceptual content aside, in a way that motivates both his and McDowell’s endorsement of a neo-Fregean conception of object-dependent singular senses). And on that view, the norms for talking about (and thinking about), and identifying in experience, objects, aren’t separable from the (constitutive) rules those objects depend on for existing as precisely the objects that we recognize them to be, and are answerable to in both our perceptual encounters and our embodied interactions with them (including, of course, technical and scientific ones).
This bears on your question about “passively drawn into operation.” One of the main points of the phrase is that the capacities passively actualized in experience are the same capacities that are actively exercised when we judge and reason about objects—capacities that depend, for being the capacities they are, on our grasp of the norms governing concepts of putative objects of experience. Our grasp of those norms accordingly constrains both how (and in what circumstances) such objects can show up in experience (or occasionally merely appear to do so) and how they can intelligibly be conceived to behave. This creates the possibility of mismatches that saddle us with obligations either to scrutinize whether the objects we perceive are what they appear to be, or to reconsider whether our grasp of the norms constituting them is adequate. (1) Our being suitably responsive to those demands of rationality, and (2) our having our eyes open to the existence of those objects in the world (and the ability to referentially reidentify them), are of a piece. I think those last points are most beautifully illustrated in Haugeland’s essay “Truth and Rule-Following”, originally published as the last chapter in his Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind.
These considerations also suggest an answer to your earlier question about “normal” circumstances for observing the colored surfaces of objects. Sellars’s own answer is that knowing which circumstances are the ones in which looks can be trusted is internal to mastery of the color vocabulary itself. Charles Travis adds an occasion-sensitivity twist. Which conditions count as “normal” isn’t fixed once and for all even within the practice, but varies with the point of the perceptual report on the occasion (the lighting that’s normal for sorting ripe tomatoes isn’t what’s normal for matching paint swatches). But the point I’d insist on is that the norms (including what counts as “normal”) are internal to the local practices whereby the color predicates are applied to objects in specific empirical domains.
(As for whether, now that someone like John knows his colors, he must deny that for a necktie to fall under a color concept is for it to be such as to cause the appropriate inner experience in suitable conditions, I don’t think McDowell needs to deny the biconditional at all. In “Values and Secondary Qualities” he endorses a no-priority reading of it. What he rejects, both in the case of colors and in the case of moral values, is only the reductive direction of explanation that treats the “inner” role as a self-standing starting point.)
Yes, well put.
Interesting. I may be nit-picking, or misunderstanding, but isn’t there a difference between “how correctness becomes intelligible” and any given question about whether X is correct? That is, I can grant McDowell’s (and probably Witt’s) point about how the background or framework for the idea of correctness is made intelligible, but dispute whether that same background also tells us when we have warrant to draw the line between being right and seeming right.
A difficult issue. Yes, that’s how I read him too, but what are these capacities? In particular, are they themselves merely expressions of norms, or, in order to “be the capacities they are,” does something else happen?
Let’s say I’ve grasped what it means to claim that something is an object of experience. The apple that I see floating above my desk is therefore, more than likely, not what it appears to be. I agree that, in order to make the latter judgment, if I do, I am actively using a capacity that I also required, passively, to postulate the apple in the first place. But does this get us any closer to being able to say, “Yes, and here is my warrant for believing that these capacities are more than mere expressions of norms”? Aren’t we still just frictionlessly spinning our coherentist wheels, to use his oft-repeated image?
OK. So the “normal” color is, if not stipulated, then at least locally agreed upon. No one is claiming there is one correct “red” apart from that. However, this is good enough to interpret John as saying, not that he had a particular experience at a certain time, and that is what he is referring to by “green”, but rather claiming (guardedly) that the tie really looks green according to community norms. As you say, John is describing a persistent object rather than a singular perceptual encounter.
Yes. “Starting point” understood as starting in time, a genetic explanation rather than a conceptual one – that’s what should be denied. We don’t come equipped with such inner standards, nor are we taught them first, somehow, in the absence of experience.
I agree that the background doesn’t tell us when we have warrant to draw the line in particular cases, and McDowell would insist on that too. The background isn’t a premise from which particular verdicts are derived. That’s the regress that Wittgenstein’s rule-following remarks on agreement in (and not agreement on or about!) form of life forestall. The background is enabling, not justifying. It doesn’t justify perceptual judgments. Initiation into the practice confers the capacities, and then warrant in particular cases is supplied by the particular cases. In the good case, the warrant is supplied by the perceptually manifest fact itself, which is where McDowell’s disjunctivism enters the picture, and which seeks to do justice to Wittgenstein’s claim that “there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call ‘obeying the rule’ and ‘going against it’ in actual cases” (PI §201).
So, it seems to me, when you say that you “dispute whether that same background also tells us when we have warrant to draw the line between being right and seeming right,” you still seem to construe McDowell’s appeal to the background as something that we can gesture at (from sideways-on) to justify our drawing the line in particular cases. But this is the arbiter picture that he is rejecting, instead proposing to construe this background as constituting, or consisting in, the very ability to correctly draw the line in particular cases.
I rather understand the no-priority thesis to be about the subjective pole (how things affect us in experience) not having ontological or epistemic priority. This is Sellars’s point in casting “looks” vocabulary as signifying a guarded mode of expression of an experience rather than signifying what it is that we find through looking inside, since looking inside can at best reveal qualia that (unlike Wittgenstein’s beetle in the box) can only be grasped to be the subjective experiences that they are through appealing to practices of pointing to external samples. And the norms for properly dealing with “external” samples, and objects in general, on the one hand, and the norms for talking about what it is that things look like to us, on the guarded, disjunctivist construal of “looks,” on the other hand, are defined jointly.
I can’t resist making appeal to the Sapir-Whorf thesis, as the exemplification of a conceptual point rather than a mere empirical datum. When “Cartesian” people speak of a red quale, which allegedly only is hypothesized to be produced “in” people who look at red objects (or think about them), they usually assume (as David Chalmers might, through appealing to inscrutable psycho-physical laws that merely happen to preclude cases of inverted spectra) that “red”, or the ordinary Mandarin translation for “red”, would depict the same quale as subjectively experienced by a Mandarin native speaker as it would for an English speaker. But an English speaker who introspects and thinks of a red quale or of a pink quale thinks of two categorically different qualia, whereas a Mandarin speaker thinks of two qualitative variants of the same quale: pink is fěnhóng (粉红), literally “powder red,” a determination of red rather than a color in its own right. (Russian runs the inverse case: goluboj and sinij—light and dark blue—are two distinct basic color terms where English speakers introspect mere shades of one blue quale.) And what it is that reveals this isn’t merely acts of introspection, but inquiry into the logical grammar of color concepts as instilled through mastery of determinate practices for dealing with “external” exemplars.
The upshot is that there isn’t even a prospect of defining external dispositions of objects to produce subjective experiences in terms of antecedently intelligible subjective experiences. Determinate contents of experiences, and the objective features of the objects that they disclose, must rather be “defined” jointly, which is to say that the vocabularies (and conceptual resources) developed to refer to either must be developed together, always already on board Neurath’s boat, as it were.
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