John McDowell

Knowledge and the Internal

1. I am going to work with an idea from Sellars, that knowledge-at least as enjoyed by rational animals-is a certain sort of standing in the space of reasons.2 My concern is a familiar philosophical dialectic, which I shall approach in terms of what happens to the Sellarsian idea when the image of standings in the space of reasons undergoes a certain deformation. That it is a deformation is something we can learn from how unsatisfactory the familiar dialectic is.

NON-COGNITIVISM AND RULE-FOLLOWING

A supposed ground for non-cognitivism about values lies in a conception according to which descriptions of the world must be intelligible from no special point of view, whereas ascriptions of value are essentially made from within an affectively and conatively shaped form of life (§ 1). This paper expresses a skepticism about whether repeated applications of a value concept can be made out to be cases of going on in the same way, consistently with this kind of non-cognitivism, by explaining them as repeated responses to instances of a non-evaluatively specifiable kind (§ 2). Wittengsteins discussions of rule-following undercut a motivation for supposing that consistency in the application of a value concept would have to be like that ( § 3).The paper considers how this connects with a familiar argument that recommends non-cognitivism on the ground that moral judgments are action-guiding ( § 4). Finally, it urges that this conception of consistency in evaluative thinking cannot easily be rebutted by proponents of non-cognitivism( § 5).

Knowledge by Hearsay

Language matters to epistemology for two separate reasons (although they are no doubt connected).

Response to Dreyfus

Dreyfus acknowledges that he was wrong to think practical intelligence, as I conceive it, is situation-independent. But he still thinks my view of mindedness can be characterized in terms of ‘‘detached conceptual intentionality’’. Now if you assume that mindedness is detached from immersion in activity, it is not surprising that mindedness should seem alien to the unreflective involvement that is characteristic of the exercise of skills. But the idea that mindedness is detached is just what I mean to oppose. The supposed Myth of the Mental is the result of reading me through the lens of what is by my lights a mythological conception of the mental. In other work, I invoked the image of stepping back, with a view to distinguishing rationality in a strong sense—responsiveness to reasons as such—from the kind of responding to reasons that is exemplified by, say, fleeing from danger, which is something non-rational animals can do. The idea was that given the ability to step back, the capacities that are operative in ordinary perceptual engagement with the world, and in ordinary bodily action, belong to a subject’s rationality in that strong sense: they are conceptual in the sense in which I claim that our perceptual and active lives are conceptually shaped. When one is unreflectively immersed, one is exactly not exercising the ability to step back. But even so the capacities operative in one’s perceiving or acting are conceptual, and their operations are conceptual. Nothing is discursively explicit in these goings-on, so it might seem natural to say, as Dreyfus does, that my view is that they are implicitly conceptual. But it is easy to hear that as amounting to ‘‘only implicitly conceptual’’, with an implication that conceptuality would be properly on the scene only after something had been made explicit in discourse or

Tyler Burge on disjunctivism (II)

In McDowell (2010), I responded to Burges attack (2005) on disjunctivism. In Burge (2011) Burge rejects my response. He stands by his main claim that disjunctivism is incompatible with the science of perception, and in a supplementary spirit he argues against the detail of my attempt to defend disjunctivism. Here I explain how disjunctivism is compatible with the science, and I respond to some of Burges supplementary arguments.

Precis of Mind and World@@@Mind and World

1. The idea of world-directedness -that is, content in one senseis intelligible only in terms of a normative context that is its primary home. We must be able to work with the notion of a posture or stance that is correctly or incorrectly adopted according to whether or not things are thus and so. Only so can we understand the posture or stance as a judgement or belief to the effect that things are thus and so. (If we can make sense of judgement or belief as directed at the world in that way, we need have no trouble with other kinds of content-bearing postures or stances.) We might express the point like this: thinking that aims at judgement, or at the fixation of belief, is answerable to the world for whether or not it is correctly executed. And now a small step away from that abstract formulation takes us to a minimal, and one might think undisputable, empiricism: in the sorts of case that must come first for reflection on the very idea of directedness at the world, the worlds verdict, to which thinking must be answerable if it is to be

In Defence of Modesty

A modest theory of meaning for a language — in the technical sense introduced by Michael Dummett — is one that gives no account of the concepts expressed by primitive terms of the language. We should note that the use of ‘concepts’ here is not Fregean, in two ways. First, Fregean concepts are associated only with predicative expressions, whereas Dummett’s considerations are meant to apply to meaningful expressions in general. Second, Fregean concepts belong to the realm of reference, whereas the concepts Dummett is concerned with would belong to the realm of sense; they are determinants of content — determinants of the thoughts expressible by sentences containing the associated words.

Truth-Value Gaps*

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses two ways of approaching the notion of truth-value, in the context of the idea that a theory of meaning for a language might centre on the notion of truth. In the first approach, the notion of truth-value constitutes the point of connection between, on the one hand, an account of what it is to make an assertion, and, on the other, the general form of statement, whereby the theory determines the content of assertions that can be effected by uttering sentences, simple or complex, in the language. In the second approach, truth-values are ascribed to sentential constituents of complex sentences, in such a way as to facilitate a systematic account of their impact on the truth-values of the sentences of which they are constituents. The chapter reviews that for the systematic account of sentential compounding that the second approach would yield could have no point other than to subserve the needs of a systematic determination of the content of assertions effected by uttering whole (complex) sentences. Its assignments of truth-values to whole (complex) sentences would have to conform to whatever requirements the first approach imposes.

Why Is Sellars's Essay Called “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”?

‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’ (EPM) is sometimes read as attacking empiricism in general. But Sellarss announced target is traditional empiricism. In traditional empiricism, experience yields knowledge in a way that does not presuppose other empirical knowledge, so that the knowledge provided by experience can serve as foundations, in a straightforward sense, for other empirical knowledge. To accept this conception is to fall into a form of the Myth of the Given. In EPM Sellars works out a different conception of experience, according to which it is a kind of inner episode that, in the best kind of case, yields knowledge, but in a way that presupposes other empirical knowledge. The knowledge provided by experience can still serve as foundations for other empirical knowledge, but now only in a nuanced sense. The article concludes that so far from rejecting empiricism altogether, EPM rehabilitates empiricism, but in a non-traditional form.

Comment on Hans-Peter Krüger’s paper

Abstract In my Mind and World I appeal to second nature, which, according to Hans-Peter Kru¨ger, plays a central role in Plessners philosophical anthropology. But I think this convergence is less significant than Kru¨ger suggests.This note differentaties my purpose–to disarm the temptation to think perceptual experience, natural as it is, could not figure in what Sellars called “the space of reasons”–from Plessners, which is to disarm the temptation to hope for an ahistorical insight into what is properly authoritative over the shape of our lives,