On what we call the world and human experience: Rorty, McDowell, and a socio-historical genesis of human naturalness

ABSTRACT

In this article, I examine recent developments of socio-historical conceptions in Anglo-American analytic philosophy by focusing, via Richard Rorty and John McDowell, on the notions of the world and human experience. While how and whether McDowell’s ideas are really more than an echo of the insights within the activity-theoretical framework might be up for debate, I end by briefly considering the ways that McDowell’s philosophy enriches socio-historical research with reference to two ongoing attempts: what David Bakhurst calls McDowell’s “transformational view” of human development and learning and David Macarthur’s project of McDowellian “liberal naturalism.”

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Jan Derry and David Bakhurst for their helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this article. I also appreciate the insightful criticisms and suggestions for improvement provided by two anonymous reviewers and two editors, Alfredo Jornet and Bonnie Nardi, of this journal.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Throughout this article, I mostly employ the term “socio-historical” for convenience, but do not intend to exclude “cultural” aspects in relevant cases.

2. In his review of David Bakhurst’s The Formation of Reason (2011), which, with specific reference to the work of the analytic philosopher John McDowell, reveals the socio-historical genesis and formation of human mindedness, in the context of which the concept of education can be reconsidered, Blunden (2013) writes: “Bakhurst believes, and I agree, that the socio-historical current of philosophy represented by Ilyenkov and Vygotsky does indeed have the required philosophical foundation. But the intricate, demanding and rigorous attention to philosophical nuance which is demanded in the Anglo-American tradition of analytical philosophy … is necessary if Cultural Psychology and Activity Theory is to break into the mainstream and make the kind of transformation of education systems that justice urgently requires” (p. 197).

3. One might suspect that such philosophical reflection and inquiry adds nothing whatsoever to the tradition of CHAT concerning the socio-historical dimensions of the distinctiveness of the human mind and of the world in which human beings live. But Bakhurst’s philosophical treatment of the issues might place in the right context his criticism directed at contemporary advocates of activity theory, particularly some of Yrjö Engeström’s followers, who, deviating from the spirit of Russian antecedents, choose and use activity theory as a powerful (qualitative) research method for measuring and interpreting socio-historically conditioned empirical data (Bakhurst, 2009, 2018).

4. Gadamer’s philosophy has also fascinated many authors within the socio-historical tradition, such as Wilfred Carr, who is an influential proponent of action research (Carr & Kemmis, 1986; Carr, 2006; cf. Somekh & Nissen, 2011). For a detailed and critical discussion of Carr’s view, see Misawa (2011).

5. Readers familiar with the analytic tradition of philosophy will rightly be reminded that the issue Gadamer mentions is the same as the one that Sellars addresses by employing the terms manifest and scientific images (e.g., in Sellars, 1962/1991).

6. That is, Rorty (2010) encourages us to jettison “the world-picture picture” (p. 58), such as “the natural world” and “our socio-historical world,” as I have described. The target of attack in the quote is Sellars’ visual metaphors of the world, i.e., the manifest and scientific images of the world mentioned in footnote 5.

7. Of course, the CHAT tradition has entertained an essentially different notion of “representation.” Along Hegelian Marxist lines, Ilyenkov (1977), for example, claims that “what is ‘represented’ as a thing is the form of people’s activity, the form of life activity which they perform together, which has taken shape ‘behind the back of consciousness’ and is materially established in the form of the relationship between things [involved]” (emphasis in original).

8. Rorty (1998a) insists that “the only criterion we have for applying the word ‘true’ is justification, and justification is always relative to an audience” (p. 4). It is also notable that “justification” in Rorty’s conception differs from that in philosophy-as-epistemology. He contends that “justification is not a matter of a special relation between ideas (or words) and objects, but of conversation, of social practice” (Rorty, 1980, p. 170). In other words, once we “give up the idea of context-free justification,” Rorty (1999) argues, we can “give up the idea of ‘knowledge’ as a suitable object of study – an idea which Descartes and Kant inherited from Plato’s Theaetetus” (p. 34).

9. Borrowing the famous title from Michael Oakeshott’s “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind,” Rorty uses the phrase “philosophy in the conversation of mankind” as the title of the final section of PMN.

10. More concretely, the three-way relationship is “the mutual and simultaneous responses of two or more creatures to common distal stimuli and to one another’s responses” (Davidson, 2001, p. xv). Rorty believes that this sort of intersubjective agreement through conversation is sufficient and that it takes the place of the traditional notion of objectivity. Yet McDowell takes issue, in a way reminiscent of the insights of CHAT, with this replacement, as shown later.

11. This term is obviously Kantian. While Rorty (1972/1982) believes that “[i]f you start out with Kant’s epistemology … you will wind up with Kant’s transcendental metaphysics” (p. 16), McDowell (McDowell, 1996) certifies that “Kant should still have a central place in our discussion of the way thought bears on reality” (p. 3, emphasis added).

12. An “actualization” of conceptual capacities in sensory receptivity must not be taken for an “exercise” of the capacities: “An actualization of a conceptual capacity need not be an exercise of the capacity … ” (McDowell, 2000b, p. 11). This is to say that the world’s impact on one’s sensibility is, in the right kind of context, saturated with conceptual capacities, albeit “outside the control of their possessor” (p. 11).

13. The likely accusation that McDowell is a reactionary Cartesian, holding that non-human animals are automata, misfires. There is no slight to other animals in McDowell’s (e.g., 2008) argument, for non-human animals also have their second nature (p. 220) that permeates “their worlds,” rendering their worlds different in kind from ours. However, it cannot be said that phenomena that take place by their second nature occupy a place in the logical space of reasons (p. 220).

14. The reader might be reminded of Ilyenkov’s (1977) notion that “[t]he ideal form of a thing is not the form of the thing ‘in itself’, but a form of social human life activity regarded as the form of a thing” (emphasis in original).

15. Such a transformational view has naturally had a deep impact on the debate about the concept of education, a view that attends to the transformation from a human animal with no second nature to a human individual responsive to reasons with a distinctive mode of rational-conceptual intelligibility that is open to the world. An important symposium on Bakhurst’s The Formation of Reason is included in the first issue of the 50th anniversary volume of the Journal of Philosophy of Education (2016). I give a detailed treatment of each symposium contribution in Misawa (2017); I also take up the issue of a fundamental interweaving between the social, the natural and the educational in Misawa (2019).

16. Jaegwon Kim (2003) writes: “If contemporary analytic philosophy can be said to have a philosophical ideology, it undoubtedly is [scientific] naturalism” (p. 83, abstract).

17. Another philosophical discipline engaging noticeably in this issue is phenomenology, which has traditionally placed the issue of the essential structures of experience at the center of its study. The classic book The Embodied Mind (2016, originally published 1991), which has populated the idea of “enaction” to capture the complexity of our lived experience in our living body, explores the connections between cognitive science and (Western) phenomenology (and Buddhism).

18. Ideas developed within the CHAT framework are also amenable to scientific inquiry. Bakhurst (2005) contends that “enculturation remains a precondition of the emergence of [Vygotskyan] higher, distinctively human, mental capacities. This view is contentious, but it is not guilty of naïve nurturism. On the contrary, it is open to serious dialog with cognitive science” (pp. 270–271). The work of Alva Noë, for instance, has been taken seriously in this journal.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Kakenhi [grant number JP16K21323].