McDowell’s new conceptualism and the difference between chickens, colours and cardinals

Abstract

McDowell recently renounced the assumption that the content of any knowledgeable, perceptual judgement must be included in the content of the knowledge grounding experience. We argue that McDowell’s introduction of a new category of non-inferential, perceptual knowledge is incompatible with the main line of argument in favour of conceptualism as presented in Mind and World [McDowell, John. 1996. Mind and World. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press]. We reconstruct the original line of argument and show that it rests on the assumption that a specific model of justification, the Comparison Model, must apply to all cases of non-inferential, perceptual knowledge. We then show that the Comparison Model cannot be applied to McDowell’s new category of non-inferential, perceptual knowledge. As a consequence, McDowell is in need of an alternative model of justification and an alternative argument for conceptualism. We propose such an alternative model of justification based on McDowell’s reading of Sellars, but argue that the model only serves to make the need for an alternative motivation for conceptualism more urgent.

Keywords:

• McDowell
• conceptual content
• perceptual knowledge
• recognitional skills
• the Myth of the Given

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Hagit Benbaji for her helpful comments on a prior version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Johan Gersel received his Ph.D. from University of Copenhagen in 2011 and has held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Copenhagen (Department of Media, Cognition and Communication).

Rasmus Thybo Jensen received his Ph.D. in 2008 also from the University of Copenhagen and has held postdoctoral fellowships at University College Dublin (School of Philosophy), the University of Copenhagen (Department of Media, Cognition and Communication) and at the University of Tokyo (Department of History and Philosophy of Science).

Morten S. Thaning is an associate professor at Copenhagen Business School (Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy) and received his Ph.D. from the University of Aarhus in 2009.

Notes

1. The circumstances under which the visual presence of the cardinal will give rise to the inclination are different from the circumstances that will allow the inclined judgement to be knowledgeable. The cardinal might be in plain view and give rise to the inclination to judge without the inclined judgement being knowledgeable, if for instance the subject is placed in fake-cardinal county and by pure luck is looking at the only real cardinal amongst the thousands of seeming cardinals (compare McDowell 1998a, 390, n. 37).

2. By an unqualified use of the expression “non-inferential” we mean non-inferential in both the epistemological and the psychological sense.

3. This is how McDowell has recently treated the knowledge of a physicist who can immediately recognize a mu-meson in a cloud chamber (McDowell 2010, 141; see also McDowell 2002, 280; and McDowell 2006a, 118).

4. Here we disagree with Roessler (2009, 1022) who takes McDowell’s considered view to be that experiential reasons consist in the facts revealed to the subject through perception rather than the perceptual experience itself. This view, however, is explicitly dismissed by McDowell (McDowell 2006b, 134).

5. This line of argument is suggested by Evans (1982), Heck (2000) and Burge (2010).

6. O’Shea raises the worry that McDowell’s new distinction between fundamental and non-fundamental concepts relocates rather than overcomes Davidsonian coherentism (O’Shea 2010, 81). Our worry is better expressed in terms of a danger of falling back into the Myth of the Given as it is characterized in Mind and World.

7. We thank our two anonymous reviewers for pressing us to relate our arguments regarding the first change with McDowell’s second change.

8. The usefulness of this distinction was suggested by one of our anonymous reviewers.

9. Some further qualifications about how one relatum grounds the truth of the other must be included as any relation could be said to ensure the truth of the proposition “2 + 2 = 4”. The rough idea should be clear though.

10. Thanks to one of our anonymous reviewer for raising this issue and for suggesting a way to respond to it which we basically adopt in the following.

11. Whether this is restricted to essential properties of the objects experienced depends on how finely one types experiences. One might type them in terms of time, date, and as a relation to actuality as a whole, in which case the whole state of the world would be metaphysically settled by the occurrence of the experience. This seems to be a consequence of Travis (Forthcoming) view that experience is a relation to the particular unfolding of history. However, it only strengthens our argument that we show how such an alethic relation still leaves our reasons beyond scrutiny in even the most compelling case where the type of experience merely metaphysically ensures that the experienced bird is a cardinal.

12. Recently McDowell has given up the idea that intuitional content is object-dependent (McDowell 2013, 155–156). But even with this change his position implies a strong relational view of experience because he remains committed to both the idea that experiences can constitute a truth-ensuring warrant and to the idea that amongst the judgements conclusively warranted by an intuition are judgements with object-dependent content.

13. McDowell uses the terms “justify”, “entitle” and “warrant” interchangeably.

14. The interpretation is found in two recent publications: “Why is Sellars’s Essay called ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind?’” (2009b) and “Brandom on Observation” (2010).

15. See also Evans (1982) for the role of background knowledge or what he calls “a simple theory of perception” in supporting our perceptual capacities.

16. A similar account of recognitional capacities is articulated by Millar in “What the Disjunctivist is Right About” (Millar 2007, 192).

17. Roessler (2009) has also argued that we must conceive of perceptual knowledge as being supported in a different fashion from the ordinary conception of justification as requiring the presentation of truth-ensuring (or likelihood increasing) reasons. However, he takes perceptual justification to fall outside the scope of ordinary justification and to at best be transcendentally defended (Roessler 2009, 1032–1039). In contrast, we wish to draw attention to the fact that our ordinary practices of justifying ourselves are wider and more varied than simply presenting truth-entailing reasons. One may also draw attention to oneself and one’s status as a reasonable thinker and speaker.

18. See Gersel (Forthcoming) for one attempt at a McDowell inspired argument that shows why we cannot generalize the Authority Model to all perceptual knowledge.

19. Crane provides a similar response to McDowell’s criticism on behalf of Travis (Crane 2013, 232).

Additional information

Funding

Rasmus Thybo Jensen’s work was partly funded by a postdoctoral fellowship from Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) [grant number KAKENHI 26-04747]; Johan Gersel’s work on this paper was partly funded by a postdoctoral fellowship from the The Danish Council for Independent Research, Humanities [grant number 1030801001]. Morten S. Thaning's work on this paper was partly funded by a grant from the Velux Foundation [grant number 33274].