Table Of ContentPreface
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Philosophy, like piloting, is mostly about 6guring out where you are. The
basic principle of both is much the same: Find an object whose position is
known and locate yourself with respectt o it. Typically, in both case,s the
object in question is somewheret hat you do not wish to be: On a rock,
on a shoa,l at the edge of the channe,l or half a mile inland from the shore.
So the trick is to get close enough to recognizet he thing and to 6gure out
what it means, but not so close that it swallows you up. Thus Aristotle
with respect to Plato, Kant with respectt o Hume, Descartesw ith respect
to Newton, and me with respect to many a bell buoy on many a summer
Sunday afternoon.
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The difference is that whereasn avigators dont often argue with their
landmarks, philosophers hardly ever do anything else. Hence this collection
. Each of these essaysr eacts to a position in philosophy or cognitive
scien'ce( in the present co'ntext the distinction is hard'ly worth drawing)
that Im pretty sure I dont want to occupy, but that Im also pretty sure
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needs to be marked on the charts and, as sailors say, honored. I think
that not getting wrecked requires avoiding all of them at once. And I
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think that theres a way to do that: Whats required is a mix of intentional
realism, computational reductionism, nativism, and semantic atomism,
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together with a representationalt heory of mind. Ive talked and written
about all that elsewhere, however; in these polemical essayst he positive
program is present largely by implication. Very roughly, and just for orientation
: The views examined in Part I bear on questions of realism and
reductionism, and those in Part II mostly concern semantica tomism. Part
III is about what, if any, sensec an be made of the idea that mental pro-
cessesa re computational. Part IV is about what, if any, constraints evolutionary
theory imposeso n semanticsa nd the philosophy of mind.
Many of these papers are book reviews and the targets are identmed
by the titles. Others are responsest o journal articles which are likewise
eponymous. The apparent exceptions are chapters 4 and 5, the ones
about recognitional concepts. In fact, however, these were prompted by,
and constitute an extended commentary on, a philosophical project that
x Preface
Christopher Peacockeh as been working out for some years and which is
most explicitly set forth in his book A Study of Concepts(s ee chapter 3 of
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the present volume for an overview). Quite a lot of the philosophy Ive
done of late is an attempt to not be co-opted by Peacock'es project, while
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at the same time not getting lost. It turns out thats not so easy. Im
indebted to Peacockef or having provided a particularly bright light to
steer by- and away from.
Chapter 1 was originally published in TheL ondonR eviewo f Book,s April
20, 1995. Chapter 2 was originally published in J. Tom berlin (ed)., Philo-
sophical Perspectiv,e s11, Mind, Causatio,n and World, Ridgeview, CA.
Chapter 3 was originally published in The LondonR eviewo f Book,s April
20, 1995. Chapter 4 was originally published in Philosophicallssu,e Vsol. 9
(E. Villanueva, ed.), Ridgeview Publishing Co., 1998. Chapter 7 was originally
published in The LondonR eviewo f Book,s October 30, 1997. Chapter
8 was originally published in The TimesL iterary Suppleme,n tAugust 25,
1995. Chapter 9 was originally published in Cognition, 1990,35, 183-204.
Chapter 10 was originally published in Cognition, 1996,62, 109- 119. (I'm
grateful to ProfessorB rian McLaughlin for agreeing to my reprinting this
paper.) Chapter 12 was originally published in The London Review of
Book,s Vol. 20, No. 12, 1997. Chapter 13 was originally published in The
LondonR eviewo f Book,s Vol. 18, No. 23, 1996. Chapter 14 was originally
published in The LondonR eviewo f Book,s Vol. 18, 1996. Chapter 15 was
originally published in Mind and Languag,e 1996, Vol. 11, No.3, pp. 246-
262. Chapter 17 was originally published in The LondonR eviewo f Book,s
Jan. 22, 1998. I am grateful to all of these sourcesf or their kind permission
to publish this material here.
A word about style: many of these papers were originally intended for
an audience that was either lay or interdisciplinary. In those, hard core
philosophy is kept to a minimum. There are also a lot of jokes, for which I
am sometimest aken to task. I do admit to finding many of the views that
I argue against pretty funny. I find many of my own views pretty funny
too. Nietzsche is righter than Brecht: Sometimest he man who laughs has
heard the terrible news.
1
Chapter
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Review of John McDowell s Mind and World
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Mind and World collects McDowell s 1991 John Locke lectures, with
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some of his afterthoughts appended. Until youre halfway through, the
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book seemst o be about a relatively technical question: Whats the relation
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between the minds contribution to perceptual experience and the
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world s? A deep worry, to be sure; but one thats maybe best left for epis-
temologists to thrash out. In chapter 4, however, McDowell achievesa
coup de theatre. The angle of view widens unexpectedly, and the specifically
epistemologicali ssue is seen to be a microcosm of some of modern
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philosophys most characteristicc oncerns: How should we construe the
relation between the realm of reason and the realm of natural law? How
can it be that w~ are both physical objects and thinking things? How can
conceptualizationb e free and spontaneousi f the mind is a mechanism?
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Why, in short, isnt ra Honal animal an oxymoron? This is a fine expository
contrivance, and the framing of the issuest hat it permits is deeply
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illuminating. McDowell s book finds new ways to register a number of
our deepestp erplexities.
Which, however, is not to say that I believe a word of it.
A dialectic between two different and opposed conceptionso f naturalism
- in particular, of a naturalistic account of rationality- is working
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itself. out in Mind and World. Theres the reductionist version (McDowell
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callsit bald naturalism; scientism is another pejorative that is currently
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in fashion). And theres the kind of naturalistic pluralism that
McDowell himself is striving for. Very roughly, the distinction is between
the tradition that runs from Kant through the positivists to the likes
of Dewey and Quine, and the tradition that runs from Kant through the
Hegelians to Wittgenstein, Ryle, and Davidson (and Hilary Putnam since
he left MIT for Harvard).
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It s hard to be articulate about this disagreemen;t were very close to the
edge of what we know how to talk about at all sensibly. But, forreduc-
tionists, the world picture that the natural sciencesl ayout has a sort
of priority- sometimesv iewed as metaphysica,l sometimesa s methodo-
logical, sometimesa s ideological, sometimesa s all of these at once- to
4 Chapte1r
which other discoursei s required to defer insofar as it purports to speak
literal truths. Conflicts between the scientific image and, for example, the
claims that moral theories make, or theories of agency, or theories of
mind, are real possibilities, and if they arise, sciencei s privileged- not
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becauset he scientific method is infallible, but becauset he natural realm
is the only realm there is or can be; everything that ever happens, including
our being rational, is the conformity of nature to law. And our science
is the best attested story about the conformity of nature to law that we
know how to tell. Accordingly, the philosophical problems about mind
and world have to be situated within the general scientific enterprise, if
literal truth is what philosophers aim for. What our rationality consistsi n
is an open question, apt for a kind of inquiry that is empirical and metaphysical
at the samet ime; as, indeed, scientific inquiry is wont to be.
For pluralists, however, the situation presents itself quite differently.
There are lots of more or less autonomousv arieties of discourse( or world
views, or languageg ames, or forms of life, or paradigms), and the critique
they are subject to is largely from inside and in their own terms. As
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McDowell puts it, Even a thought that transforms a tradition must be
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rooted in the tradition that it transforms (187; all referencesin this paper
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are to McDowell, 1994). Accordingly, the natural scientists activity of
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limning a normlessa nd otherwise disenchantednatural order is just one
way of world-making among others. For the epistemologist's purposes, in
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contrast to the scientists, the normative charactero f rational assessment
is given a priori; to that extent, we already know what the essenceo f
rationality is. The problem is to find a place for it outside what the natural
sciencest ake to be the natural order, but to do so without, as McDowell
sometimess ays, thereby making rationality look spooky.
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Pretty clearly McDowell thinks that bald, reductive naturalism isnt
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seriously an option, so it s going to be pluralism or nothing if the integrity
of the rational is to be sustained. Just why he thinks this is less clear.
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Circa page 74 theres some moderately loose talk, with a nod to Donald
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Davidson, about the constitutive principles of rationality being such
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that the logical spacet hat is the home of the idea of spontaneity cannot
be aligned with the logical space that is the home of ideas of what is
natural in the relevant sense[ viz. with] the characteristicallym odem conception
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according to which somethings way of being natural is its position
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in the realm of law. The unwary readerm ight supposef rom this that
"somebody has actually argued conclusively that the reductionist program
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cant be carried through, hence that either the mutual autonomy of the
natural order and the rational order is somehow guaranteed, or else there
is no such thing as rationality; the latter outcome being, to use a favorite
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epithet of McDowell s, intolerable.
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Review of McDowell s Mind and World 5
In fact, of course, nothing of the sort has been shown, nor will be. Bald
naturalism may, for all philosophers know, be viable after all. That may
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strike you as comforting if, like me, you find McDowell s efforts to
formulate a pluralistic alternative rather less than c9nvincing.
I guess I am a hairy naturalist: Though I do agree that the problems
about mind and world are a lot harder than reductionists have sometimes
supposed, I also think that an adequatea nd complete empirical psychology
would, ipso facto, tell the whole, literal truth about the essenceo f
the mental. Scienced iscovers essence,s as Kripke once remarked. So, if
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it s literally true that rationality, intentionality, normativity, and the like
belong to the mind essentially, then they must all be phenomenaw ithin
the natural realm that scientistse xplore. McDowell comments, sort of in
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passing, that cognitive psychology is an intellectually respectable~ sci-
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pline ... so long as it stays within its proper bounds. That, however, is
truistic, proper bounds being what they are. The serious question is
whether there is anything about mentality that can be excluded from
scientific inquiry a priori; anything, anyhow, that claims to be both of the
essencea nd literally true.
Consider, for example, the epistemological question that McDowell
starts with. You might have thought that seeing a tree goes something
like this: Light bounces off the tree and affects your eyes in ways that
determine the sensory content of your experience. Your mind reacts by
inferring from the sensory content of your experiences omething about
what in the world must have causedi t. The upshot, if all goes well, is that
you seet he world as locally entreed.
So, then, perception is a hybrid of what the sensesa re given and what
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the mind infers. The process is causal through and through: It s part of
psychophysicst hat encountersw ith trees bring about the kinds of visual
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sensationst hat they do. And it s part of cognitive psychology that the
visual sensationst hat encountersw ith trees provoke occasiont he perceptual
inferencest hat they do in minds with the right kinds of history and
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structure. To be sure, the story as Ive just told it is bald and insufficiently
detailed; but ironing out its wrinkles is what perceptualp sychologists are
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paid to do, and my impression is that theyre getting along with the job
pretty well. So what, exactly, is supposedt o be wrong?
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McDowell s answer is entirely characteristic: The trouble about the
Myth of the Given is that it offers us at best exculpationsw here we wanted
justifications. . .. [T]he best [it] can yield is that we cannot be blamed for
believing whatever [our experience]s lead us to believe, not that we are
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justified in believing it (13). That is: McDowell has in mind a certain
account of what the rationality of a perceptualj udgment consists in, and
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that account isnt satisfiedi f the world s contribution is merely to provide
the judgment with the right sort of etiology. The empirical story sayst hat
Chapter 1
what the world gives beliefs come from the sensory states that it causes
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us to have. But that wont do since sensationsa rent reasons; nothing can
count as a reason for holding a belief except something else that is also
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in the space of concepts.. . (140). Period. To have to tinker with the
epistemological story- to have to reconsider what rational judgment is
in light of a merely empirical theory about the conditions under which it
can be achieved- would strike McDowell as, well, intolerable.
So McDowell is committed to a view that might well strike you as
hopelesso n the face of it; he needs to be a naturalist and a dualist at the
samet ime. On one side, what the world contributes to perception must be
something that one can think. It must have, so to spea,k the kind of structure
that thoughts have, for only then does the mental processt hat gets
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from experience to judgment count as rational by McDowell s criteria.
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But, on the other side, McDowell is quite aware that the world isnt any
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kind of text, and that idealism has to be avoided. in a common medieval
outlook, what we now see as the subject matter of natural sciencew as
conceived. .. as if all of nature were a book of lessonsf or us.... It is a
mark of intellectual progress that educatedp eople cannot now take that
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idea seriously (71). One is therefore not to argue as idealists might wish
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to do: that if the world s contribution to perception has to be something
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thats thinkable, then sincea ll that is thinkable is thoughts, the world must
be made of thoughts if we are to be able to perceive it.
These views are, however, alternatives that a lot of philosophers hold
to be exhaustive. Granting something unconceptualizedt hat is simply
Given to the mind in experienceh as generally been supposedt o be the
epistemological price one has to pay for an ontology that takes the
world to be not itself mind-dependen.t The epistemological passagesin
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McDowell s book struggle to find spaceb etween these options. Im not
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at all sure they do. Im not at all sure that there is any spacet o find. From
the comfortable perspective of my kind of naturalist, anyhow, the whole
undertaking seemst o carry contortion beyond necessity. Laocoon looks a
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little comical if theres no snake. Until the second appendix, McDowell
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doesnt even consider taking what is surely the easy way out: Maybe
sometimese xculpation is justification and is all the justification that there
is to be had.
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Why not, after all? If the situation is that I cant but believe that Im
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looking at a tree, and if, in that situation, it s the caset hat I am looking at
a tree, and if there is a workable account of why, in such situations, Ireli -
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ably come to believe that theres a tree that Im looking at (viz., because
they are situations where trees cause the kind of sensationst hat cause
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minds like mine to think that they are seeing trees), why isnt that good
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enough for my judgment that Im seeing a tree to make it into the Realm
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of Reason? Why, in short, mightnt fleshing out the standard psycho-
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Review of McDowell s Mind and World 7
logical account of perception itself count as learning what perceptualj us-
tification amounts to?
When McDowell does finally consider this kind of option, he switc hes
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ground disconcertingly. Suddenly, the worry isnt that causationp rovides
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for exculpation but not for justification; rather, it s that the justification
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it provides for neednt constitute a subjecst reasonsfo r believing something
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(sic, 161). This all goes very fast, and I doubt that it actually
amounts to much. When, in the situation imagined, I come to believe that
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I see a tree, my reason for believing theres a tree is that I see it; and my
reason for believing that I see it is that I do. Why do I think I see a tree
there? Well, why on earth should I not? Just look at the thumping great
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thing! Mcdowell s sense of how justification actually goes occasionally
strikes me as excessivelye arnes.t
This easy path having once been eschewed, the hard path proves to
be very hard indeed: 'if we can rethink our conception of nature so as
to make room for spontaneity, even though we deny that spontaneity is
captured by the resourceso f bald naturalism, we shall by the samet oken
be rethinking our conception of what it takes for a position to be called
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naturalism (77). More bluntly: The cost of McDowell s a priorism is
that he has to be some sort of dualist; not necessarilyt he Cartesians ort,
who thinks that there are immaterial things. But, quite likely, the kind of
faculty dualist who is, willy-nilly, landed with occult powers. Having situated
the rational (and the ethical, and a lot else.t hat we care about) outside
the realm of law, McDowell needst o face the embarrassingq uestion
how, by any natural process, do we ever managet o get at it?
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He needst o, but in fact he doesnt. When we are not misled by experience
, we are directly confronted by a worldly state of affairs itself, not
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waited on by an intermediary that happenst o tell the truth (143). But if
you want to hold that states of affairs themselvesa re what veridical perception
works on, you need a story about how unmediated cognitive
connections to states-of-affairs themselves might be achieved. Likewise,
and more so, in the nonperceptual case,s where the objects of cognition
are normative or otherwise intentional aspectso f things: how do we get
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at those if they arent in the natural order? Maybe better, how do they get
at us? How canw hat is not in the realmo f law makea nythingh appe?n
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Heres what I take to be McDowell s answer: We need to bring responsiveness
to meaning back into the operations of our natural sentient
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capacitiesa s such (77); as he sometimesp uts it, we need somehow to
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think of the mind as resonating to rational relations. Or consider: the
rational demandso f ethics are not alien to the contingencieso f our life
as human beings.... [O]rdinary upbringing can shape the actions and
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thoughts of human beings in a way that brings these demandsi nto view
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(83). But bringing into view is a metaphor; only what is in nature can
