Intuitional Content or Avoiding the Myth of the Given – A Dilemma for McDowell

ABSTRACT

McDowell’s “Avoiding the Myth of the Given” (2008, 2009) attempts to reconcile two claims: 1) what we most fundamentally experience is a fundamental level of invariable simple objects and their sensible properties; experience of these objects and properties is the ultimate ground of our knowledge of the world; 2) experience is through-and-through conceptually structured. This leads McDowell to endorsing the incoherent notion of intuitional content – necessary and thus irrevisable basic empirical conceptually structured contents or empirical categories. The notion requires the necessity and irrevisability of purely formal concepts and the on-going responsiveness to experience of empirical concepts. This reveals a dilemma: If the fundamental objects of experience are invariable then they cannot have empirically conceptual form; for revisability is a mark of the empirically conceptual. But purely formal concepts cannot give us the fundamental empirical structure of the world. The dilemma forces us to choose between claiming that the fundamental objects of experience are invariable and claiming that they are conceptually formed. I conclude by briefly describing how Kant successfully faces the challenge of accounting for the most fundamental invariable level of objects of experience without yielding to the myth of the given.

KEYWORDS:

• McDowell
• intuitional content
• myth of the given
• perception
• experience
• Kant

1. Introduction

What gives us our most basic hold on the empirical world? What capacities are involved in encounters with those sensible objects and properties we must experience, if an encounter with the empirical world is to be called an experience of it at all? Specifically, do concepts or discursive capacities play a necessary role even at this most fundamental level of experience; and if they do, what sort of concepts or conceptual capacities are involved in such experiences? Or are these occupants of the empirical world given to us by our perceptual capacities without the involvement of concepts or our discursive capacities?

It is my purpose in this paper to present the more recent answer given to these questions by John McDowell and to ask whether the position he takes is coherent and, moreover, avoids the so-called ‘myth of the given’. My guiding question will be the following: Can the claim that what we most fundamentally encounter in a given experience are sensible objects and their properties, which are invariable both between perceivers and over time, be reconciled with conceptualism about such experiences? I will claim that it cannot, for revisability is a mark of the empirically conceptual – including those concepts through which we presumably experience these invariable objects and properties. I will focus on McDowell’s recent endorsement of the notion of intuitional content as our most fundamental encounter with the empirical world. I will argue that it accounts for the invariability of our most fundamental experience, thus giving us access to a single objective world, but consequently exposes him to the criticism that no empirical contents are beyond revision – including the most fundamental. I will further argue that McDowell’s affirmation of the notion of intuitional content to account for these most fundamental empirical experiences gives way to the myth of the given, precisely because of the irrevisable givenness of intuitional content.

The paper focuses on McDowell’s essay, ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’ (McDowell 2008, 2009).¹ I will claim that in it McDowell attempts to reconcile two claims: 1) the claim that what we most fundamentally encounter in a given experience are invariable spatiotemporally extended simple objects and their sensible properties and that experience of these objects and properties is the ultimate ground of our knowledge of the world; 2) McDowell’s long-standing commitment to the claim that experience is through-and-through conceptually structured. His solution, I will claim, employs the incoherent notion of intuitional content – basic conceptually structured empirical contents or empirical categories that are irrevisable. The solution requires the irrevisability of purely formal concepts (or categories) and the on-going responsiveness to experience of empirical concepts. But the two cannot be married. This reveals a deep dilemma: If the fundamental objects of experience are invariable then it seems that they cannot have empirically conceptual form; for revisability is a mark of the empirically conceptual. But purely formal concepts by definition cannot give us the fundamental empirical structure of the world. So the dilemma forces us to choose between claiming that the fundamental objects of experience are invariable and claiming that they are conceptually formed.² I will conclude by very briefly describing how I think Kant successfully faces the challenge of accounting for the most fundamental invariable level of objects of experience without yielding to the myth of the given – an account I defend exegetically and develop at greater length elsewhere.³

2. The Content of Experience: Propositional or Intuitive?

In his seminal Mind and World (1994, 1996) and in later essays, McDowell claims that the content of experience is conceptual. Only so, he argues, can we explain how experience can justify our beliefs about the world and avoid the so-called ‘myth of the given’.

What, briefly, is the myth of the given and why should it be avoided? The locus classicus of the answer to this question is Sellars’s seminal paper ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.’ But it is difficult to clip short and accessible answers to these questions from this very dense text.⁴ For our purposes, it is useful to turn to McDowell’s answer to these questions. It begins with the thought that the space of empirical knowledge and thought quite generally is constituted by rational relations – this is what Sellars calls the ‘space of reason’. But once we view the relations of empirical thought and knowledge (say relations between judgments or beliefs) as rational relations, we face the threat that our thinking about the world nowhere makes contact with its object. The myth of the given is a response to this concern:

What we wanted was a reassurance that when we use our concepts in judgment, our freedom – our spontaneity in the exercise of our understanding – is constrained from outside thought, and constrained in a way that we can appeal to in displaying the judgments as justified. (McDowell 1996a, 8)

But the response, McDowell argues, is deeply inadequate:

The idea of the Given is the idea that the space of reasons, the space of justifications and warrants, extends more widely than the conceptual sphere. The extra extent of the space of reasons is supposed to allow it to incorporate non-conceptual impacts from outside the realm of thought. But we cannot really understand the relations in virtue of which a judgment is warranted except as relations within the space of concepts: relations such as implication and probabilification, which hold between potential exercises of conceptual capacities. The attempt to extend the scope of justificatory relations outside the conceptual sphere cannot do what it is supposed to do. (McDowell 1996a, 7)⁵

It is here that McDowell draws on Kant to explain how thought can be receptive to the way the world is without subscribing to the myth of the given.

The relevant conceptual capacities are drawn on in receptivity […] It is not that they are exercised on an extra-conceptual deliverance of receptivity. We should understand what Kant calls ‘intuition’ – experiential intake – not as a bare getting of an extra-conceptual Given, but as a kind of occurrence or state that already has conceptual content.(McDowell 1996a, 9)

In short, McDowell’s claim is that empirical experience has conceptual content. Even our most fundamental experience of the world is conceptually structured. In what follows, I will accept this line of thinking – although a great deal more has been said about it, both for and against it.

McDowell claims then that even our most fundamental contact with the world is conceptually structured. More specifically, he claims in Mind and World (and later essays) that the content of experience is propositional. The passage just quoted continues:

In experience one takes in, for instance sees, that things are thus and so. That is the sort of thing one can also, for instance, judge. (McDowell 1996a, 9)

That things are thus and so is the most general form of a proposition. In the ordinary case, where what we claim about the world is what experience has taught us, we simply claim or judge that things are as experience reveals they are. According to our experience things are thus and so – and so we also claim or judge they are (for we have no ground to think our senses are deceiving us). The claim affirms what experience reveals. But in his later essay, ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given,’ McDowell retracts the claim that the content of experience is propositional, while still maintaining that it is conceptual.

I used to assume that to conceive of experiences as actualizations of conceptual capacities, we would need to credit experiences with propositional content. And I used to assume that the content of an experience would need to include everything the experience enables its subject to know non-inferentially. But both these assumptions now strike me as wrong. (McDowell 2009a, 258)

McDowell does not explain at any length why he changed his views on these matters.⁶ But at least regarding the second claim, his reasons seem to emerge in the course of the essay. When McDowell speaks about experience, he is apparently thinking of a mental state that is conscious, at least to some degree. To have an experience of things is to be aware of them.⁷ Experiential content is therefore conscious content. And the claim that we are to some extent conscious or aware of everything a particular experience can teach us is simply implausible, for certain particular experiences can teach a great many things. Clearly though, no one has available the conceptual resources to frame and formulate everything such experiences can potentially teach us or the capacity to hold all this simultaneously consciously in mind.⁸ The following thought, I suggest, is at least in part motivated by consideration of the wealth of experience:

Consider an experience had, in matching circumstances, by someone who cannot immediately identify what she sees as a cardinal. Perhaps she does not even have the concept of a cardinal. Her experience might be just like mine in how it makes the bird visually present to her […] There is no ground here for insisting that the concept of a cardinal must figure in the content of my experience itself. (McDowell 2009a, 259)

How does McDowell respond to this problem? He introduces the distinction between intuitive content, that is, conceptually structured content that is apparently given to us through the most basic unreflective activity of our perceptual capacities (McDowell 2009a, 264), on the one hand, and, on the other hand, discursive content, which seems to be the result of further reflective or deliberate activity of processing the content of experience.

In discursive dealings with content, one puts significances together […] That is not how it is with intuitional content. The unity of intuitional content is given, not the result of putting significances together […] [In] discursive exploitation of some content […] one needs to carve out that content from the intuition’s unarticulated content before one can put it together with other bits of content in discursive activity. Intuiting does not do this carving out for one. (McDowell 2009a, 263–264)⁹

Carving out contents and putting significances together are, so it seems, deliberate acts driven by our theoretical and practical interests. The notion of articulation serves here in two of its senses: specifying and making explicit.¹⁰ Discursive content, in the sense McDowell employs, specifies and makes explicit content that is given to us intuitively. The picture here seems to be this: Intuitional content is given to us in experience, possessing a certain rudimentary structure; at a second level of cognitive activity, we attend to this intuitive content or bring it to mind, carve out contents from it, and possibly also put such contents together to create more complex propositional content. Therefore, when McDowell speaks of capacities of recognition taking part in the second stage – capacities that are possibly definitive of this stage – then, on the one hand, what we now recognize is something that was already cognitively given to us in intuition (in re-cognizing we cognize again); and, on the other hand, we only now recognize it as the thing it is.¹¹

The content, which the rudimentary structure of intuition makes present to us, is limited in extent.¹² That of the propositional content, which it structures and that can be drawn from it, is much greater. Moreover, McDowell appears to think that the rudimentary structure of intuitive content is common to the experience of us all and in this way secures an experience of the fundamental objects and properties of a single objective world. McDowell says that the experience of the person who does not possess the concept of a cardinal ‘might be just like mine in how it makes the bird visually present to her.’ For this reason precisely, it seems that the basic objects and properties given to us in intuition must be invariable, both for different perceivers and over time. (I will consider the possibility that intuitional content changes over time and is part of our shared social second nature in Section 5.) McDowell emphasizes that his is an unproblematic notion of givenness: ‘there is nothing wrong with saying things are given to us for knowledge. The idea of givenness becomes mythical – becomes the idea of Givenness – only if we fail to impose the necessary requirements on getting what is given’ (McDowell 2009a, 258). And I am emphasizing that the intuitional content we are given appears to possess an invariable structure or form; it gives us the sensible objects and properties we most fundamentally encounter in an experience.

3. Intuitive, Conceptually Structured Content

Is there a connection between the two changes: regarding the wealth of experience, and regarding its propositional content? Is the realization that the content made present to us in experience must be limited in extent to some base or foundation (or must depend upon such a foundation) somehow related to the distinction between two functions of our conceptual capacities, fundamental and unreflective, on the one hand, and a higher reflective or deliberate function, on the other hand?

The answer appears to be affirmative. The claim that a fundamental mental activity is unreflective is very plausible. It is implausible to claim that the activity charged with delivering the most basic organization of the matter of experience, what is in any case given to us in experience, is deliberate. This is part of the sense McDowell seems to attribute to the purportedly innocuous notion of intuitional givenness, which contrasts with an active doing: ‘The unity of intuitional content is given, not a result of our putting significances together.’ It is further worth recalling that in Mind and World McDowell takes it to be a major challenge to explain how the conceptual nature of experience can be reconciled with its passivity: ‘experience is passive. In experience one finds oneself saddled with content’ (McDowell 1996a, 10). The challenge is met there by coming to see that ‘conceptual capacities are drawn on in receptivity’ (McDowell 1996a, 9).

Examining more closely the way in which McDowell develops the notion of intuitive content, it is striking just how much he is taking here – and indeed reworking – from the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant is a great and acknowledged inspiration of Mind and World. The position of the book might be characterized as adopting the view that our conceptual web is a transcendental condition of experience and knowledge, but without taking on the considerable weight of Kant’s categories or pure concepts of the understanding and pure forms of intuition (see, McDowell 1996a, 40–45).¹³ In their place, we find the web of our concepts, or simply – drawing here on Wittgenstein – our language.¹⁴ But in ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given,’ we find both categories and a remarkable emphasis on the decisive importance of space and time. In the balance of this section, I will focus on this aspect of McDowell’s view. My overarching claim will be that the sort of categories McDowell gives as examples and the contribution of space and time as he views it cannot do the work he sets out for them.

What, more precisely, is intuitive content? McDowell is avowedly employing here Kant’s notion of intuition (Anschauung). He quotes Kant’s famous claim: ‘The same function that gives unity to the different representations in a judgment also gives unity to the mere synthesis of different representations in an intuition; which, expressed generally, is called the pure concept of the understanding’ (Kant, Guyer, and Wood 1997, 211; A79/B104–105). Intuitive content then is conceptually structured content; it has conceptual form and unity. But McDowell is not talking about the activity of subsuming an intuition under a concept in a judgment. What is given to us in intuition, he is claiming, is structured by a set of fundamental concepts or categories:

The concept of a bird, like the concept of a cardinal, need not be part of the content of the experience […] But perhaps we can say it is given to me in such an experience, not something I know by bringing a conceptual capacity to bear on what I anyway see, that what I see is an animal – not because ‘animal’ expresses part of the content unified in the experience in accordance with a certain form of intuitional unity, but because ‘animal’ captures the intuition’s categorical form, the distinctive unity it has. (McDowell 2009a, 261)

It bears emphasizing that McDowell is committed to taking very seriously the notion of a category:

The concept of an object here is formal. In Kant’s terms, a category, a pure concept of the understanding, is a concept of an object in general. A formal concept of, as we can naturally say, a kind of object is explained by specifying a form of categorical unity, a form of the kind of unity that characterizes intuitions. Perhaps, as I suggested, following Thompson, ‘animal’ can be understood as expressing such a concept. (McDowell 2009a, 265)

McDowell is laying emphasis on Kant’s notion of a purely formal category as ‘a concept of an object in general.’ But he is employing it in a sense that clearly extends the notion to a ‘formal concept of […] a kind of object’ – thus introducing both empirical form and content to it, a sense very different from Kant’s. Indeed, Thompson is attempting to articulate the logical form of the family of such empirical judgments, which he also calls ‘natural-historical judgments’ presupposing ‘Aristotelian categoricals’:

What is fit to be the subject of such a thing we may call a species concept or a life-form word. A species or life-form, then, will be whatever can be conceived through such a concept or expressed by such a word […] It is because in the end we have to do with a special form of judgement, a distinct mode of joining subject and predicate in thought or speech, that I am emboldened to say that the vital categories are logical categories (Thompson 1995, 267–268).¹⁵

It is central to McDowell’s use of this distinct notion of a formal category to characterize intuitional content that it allows us access to empirical species. McDowell is (and Thompson is not, I think) employing the idea of a formal concept of a kind of object to account for our most fundamental experience of nature.

We find, moreover, a noteworthy emphasis of McDowell’s on space and time. In answering what concepts are drawn on in intuition, he says:

A natural stopping point, for visual experiences, would be proper sensibles of sight and common sensibles accessible to sight. We should conceive experience as drawing on conceptual capacities associated with concepts of proper and common sensibles.(McDowell 2009a, 260)

McDowell is talking about the immediate objects of one of our senses or of them all. The proper sensibles of sight are colors; of hearing – sounds, etc. The common sensibles McDowell lists are shape, size, position and movement or its absence (McDowell 2009a, 261).¹⁶ The interesting thing here is that the common sensibles are all spatiotemporal; and McDowell explicitly says that forms of categorial unity are ‘modes of space occupancy’ (McDowell 2009a, 261). On the one hand, it seems most natural to assume that McDowell is thinking of what the common and proper sensibles are as empirical facts concerning our modalities of sense. On the other hand, space and time as common sensibles are the form of all our experiences, because common sensibles necessarily accompany the proper sensibles. They are then something very much like empirical analogues of Kant’s pure forms of intuition. And McDowell’s notion of a ‘formal concept of […] a kind of object’ is something very much like the illusive Kantian notion of an empirical schema, though McDowell also includes the proper sensibles such as color with his ‘modes of space occupancy,’ whereas Kant (as I understand him) is thinking simply of spatial forms.¹⁷

4. The Revisability of Empirical Concepts

I think it is very important to see that the categories McDowell names clearly have empirical content and form: McDowell speaks of a formal concept of a kind of object (McDowell 2009a, 265) – not of a purely formal concept of any object whatsoever, as Kant does. However general, they allow us to grasp cardinal-shaped things; and the discursive capacity to recognize things of this form and coloring as cardinals can be acquired by us. He is thus obviously extending Kant’s notion of a category – as he earlier did Kant’s notion of a transcendental condition of experience. But how is their invariability to be accounted for – thus allowing all access to one objective world? To make them merely innate, mere products of biological evolution, would be disastrous to McDowell’s very undertaking. For then it would be unclear what distinguishes our basic ability to have in intuition the form of a kind of animal from a dog’s ability to experience the presence of a cat or bird.¹⁸ It would be the very surrender to the myth of the given that McDowell’s project in perception avows to avoid. But I am going to set aside the question of how the acquisition of these invariable empirical conceptual forms is to be understood, not because it is unimportant, but in order to approach the problematic notion from a different direction.¹⁹

The best way to get at the problem is, I think, to recall one of Sellars’s characterizations of the myth of the given, a description McDowell himself analyzes in another essay.²⁰ In discussing the question of whether empirical knowledge has a foundation, Sellars says the following:

One of the forms taken by the Myth of the Given is the idea that there is, indeed must be, a structure of particular matter of fact such that (a) each fact can not only be noninferentially known to be the case, but presupposes no other knowledge either of particular matter of fact, or of general truths; and (b) such that the noninferential knowledge of facts belonging to this structure constitutes the ultimate court of appeals for all factual claims – particular and general – about the world.

(Sellars 1997: §32, 68–69)

The problem is not with the first point; for we can safely assume McDowell is thinking holistically of the basic concepts of the empirical categorial framework he is proposing. He rejects the idea that ‘the contents one puts together in discursive activity are self-standing building-blocks, separately thinkable elements in the contents of claims or judgments’ (McDowell 2009a, 263).²¹ The common and proper sensibles hang together and presuppose the fundamental conceptual structure of kinds of objects or modes of space occupancy. This elementary holistic conceptual framework is constitutive of our intuitive hold on the empirical world.

The problem is with the second point. The conceptual categorial framework McDowell is proposing is supposed to be the stable – or, as I have been calling it, invariable – ground of cognition. It is ‘the ultimate court of appeals for all factual claims.’ For whatever experience can teach us has its origin there: ‘every aspect of the content of an intuition is present in a form in which it is already suitable to be the content associated with a discursive capacity, if it is not – at least not yet – actually so associated’ (McDowell 2009a, 264).²² Whatever we can claim directly about the empirical world is already there in what is given to us intuitively – or built up from what is so given. But Sellars’s thought is that the space of reasons is the space of asking for and giving justifications. A position in the space of reasons, which we have no justification to occupy, is a position we are intellectually obligated to abandon. This is an essential part of the normative commitment that makes occupying positions and making moves in the space of reason rational. But McDowell’s ultimate court of appeals of all factual claims is not one that can be corrected, if that is intellectually required, precisely because it is supposed to be the stable or invariable ground of all cognition given unreflectively. The fundamental conceptual framework cannot, furthermore, receive its justification from the discursive whole, precisely because it is the invariable ground of all discursive cognition, in contrast to a whole in which every part – including the most fundamental – is open to revision in light of new experiences. To quote Sellars again:

I do wish to insist that the metaphor of ‘foundation’ is misleading in that it keeps us from seeing that if there is a logical dimension on which other empirical propositions rest on observation reports, there is another logical dimension in which the latter rest on the former.

[…] empirical knowledge, like its sophisticated extension, science, is rational, not because it has a foundation but because it is a self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once. (Sellars 1997: §32, 78–79)

Replace in this passage observation reports with the contents made present in intuition. The important point is precisely that McDowell’s intuitively present contents cannot be put in jeopardy at all and for this reason cannot be viewed as part of the self-correcting process that is constitutive of empirical rationality, as Sellars conceives of it.

According to McDowell, Sellars’s second point should be understood as claiming that observation reports presuppose conceptual capacities and ‘other knowledge of matters of fact’ (McDowell 2009b, 223). The knowledge referred to is the sort of knowledge required to know in what circumstances one can tell what color something has by looking at it (McDowell 2009b, 224–225; see again, McDowell 1996a, 30; cf., McDowell 1996b, 284). What I think McDowell does not engage with is Sellars’s emphasis on the self-correcting nature of empirical rationality.

Above all, the picture is misleading because of its static character: One seems forced to choose between the picture of an elephant which rests on a tortoise (What supports the tortoise?) and the picture of the great Hegelian serpent of knowledge with its tail in its mouth (Where does it begin?). Neither will do. For empirical knowledge, like its sophisticated extension, science, is rational, not because it has a foundation but because it is a self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once. (Sellars 1997: §32, 78–79)

Sellars clearly wants to affirm that experience rests on observation reports and that these observation reports can be revised or rejected. As I will claim below, the revisability of observation reports implies more than being able to reject them as cases of misperception.

It bears emphasizing that McDowell repeatedly acknowledges the fact that empirical thinking is, in its very essence, revisable:

Active empirical thinking takes place under a standing obligation to reflect upon the credentials of the putatively rational linkages that govern them. There must be a standing willingness to refashion concepts and conceptions if that is what reflection recommends. (McDowell 1996a, 12–13; see also, McDowell 1996a, 34, 40, 47, 124–125)

And McDowell (1996a, 81) further acknowledges that such reflection can be radical and might consequently require radical revisions. But being confronted with and taking in intuitive content is not active thinking. This apparently places it beyond the reach of reflection.

The problem, I suggest, is with the marriage of the empirical with the categorial. Kant thinks of the framework of necessary transcendental conditions of experience as determining only the most general form of experience, not its empirical content. But when it comes to empirical concepts, they are, by the very rationality of the space of reasons, open to scrutiny, revision and even rejection as inadequate to the task of describing the empirical world and its laws. This fact cannot be reconciled with the notion of an invariable or irrevisable categorial framework. This suggests the dilemma I described in the opening of this paper: We must, it seems, choose between the compelling idea that what we most fundamentally encounter in an experience are invariable simple sensible objects and properties, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the claim that empirical experience, even at this most basic level, is conceptually structured and so revisable. Implausible as this must sound, McDowell’s attempt to grasp both horns of the dilemma leads to what looks like a surrender to the myth of the given.

It might be objected, as I mentioned above, that McDowell does have a place in his account for the revisability of our most fundamental encounter with the world. There is room in his account for learning that what experience revealed to me as red and possessing the characteristic shape of a northern cardinal was not in fact a northern cardinal. Lighting conditions were misleading. If I employed my discursive capacity to claim that there is a northern cardinal in front of me, I can later correct myself. McDowell has certainly given a great deal of thought to cases such as these.

But correcting misperceptions is not the sort of revision I am focusing upon. I am focusing upon the fact that the concepts that present to us the most fundamental order of the world – McDowell’s modes of space occupancy, his empirical categories – might need revising. I am focusing on the possibility that the shapes and colors that present to us what we most fundamentally perceive might not reveal to us the basic objects of the empirical world – though we see them perfectly clearly and just as they are. McDowell himself acknowledges above that empirical thought is characterized by a ‘standing willingness to refashion concepts and conceptions if that is what reflection recommends.’ Correcting our mistaken perceptions is not revising the concepts we employ in making them nor the conceptions we hold.²³

5. Intuitional Content, Second Nature and the Invariability of Perception

There is another option here. I have so far been reading McDowell as coming to think that we need an account of the most fundamental invariable structure of what is given to us in experience – invariable both between perceivers and over time. I assumed that accounting for this invariability of the structure is one important role that the notion of intuitional content is meant to play. But there is perhaps another way to understand the notion. In earlier work, McDowell laid emphasis on the notion of second nature and the idea that we become rational creatures by acquiring a language.²⁴ On this sort of view, we encounter the world through the language we are taught. This is a markedly social conception of our acquisition of concepts. Perhaps McDowell’s view in ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’ implicitly assumes that the language we employ to describe the natural world is revised over time in response to new experiences and discoveries. Perhaps he also thinks intuitional content is common to all perceivers, but subject to similar change over time. He says something that suggests he might develop his thinking in this way at the end of Mind and World:

[…] a natural language, the sort of language into which human beings are first initiated, serves as a repository of tradition, a store of historically accumulated wisdom about what is reason for what. The tradition is subject to reflective modification by each generation that inherits it. Indeed, a standing obligation to engage in critical reflection is itself part of the inheritance. (McDowell 1996a, 126)

Perhaps he is thinking that the language we acquire – and through the acquisition of which we make the space of reason our home – encodes the structure of intuitional content. So intuitional content would reflect a ‘standing obligation to engage in critical reflection’ – a willingness thought of as a social and historical process of the revision of our language, specifically of the language and concepts that structure the most fundamental intuitional experience of the world.

I think there is much to say for the emphasis on language and the social and historical aspects of our conceptual lives. For the sake of the argument of this paper, it is important to emphasize the following: If this is how McDowell is thinking, then he has chosen one pointy horn of the dilemma I presented over the other. For the revisability of the structure of intuitional content contradicts the invariability of perception. It makes it a function of the historical moment we occupy and the current stage of the on-going investigation of nature. Perhaps it also makes it a function of the particular language we learn. But one thought driving this paper has been that what we most fundamentally take to be objects and their basic properties is not subject to such changes.

This is not deny the social and historical evolution of our language (or languages). But a thought driving this paper is that part of what enables us to learn any language is what is most fundamentally given to us in perception. Children who have learned the word fish will use it on first seeing a dolphin; and only later will they learn to say it is not a fish but a mammal – to say, but not to see. They will learn to identify certain insects by their characteristic form and color long before they learn that they are dependent on obligate endosymbiosis for their survival – they obviously still see a single organism rather than two.²⁵ The point is that what we most fundamentally perceive is not subject to change. This is the invariability or obduracy of perception.

In the next section, I will turn all too briefly to Kant and claim that he affirms the invariability of our most fundamental experience of objects and denies its conceptuality. The point I will emphasize is that he gives a non-conceptual account of the most fundamental invariable organization of the matter of experience, while nevertheless avoiding the myth of the given.

6. Kant on Pure Aesthetic Judgment and Empirical Experience

On the view I defend exegetically and develop at length elsewhere (Geiger 2022), the great discovery that led Kant to write the Critique of the Power of Judgment – and include in it an analysis of pure aesthetic judgment – was coming to believe that such judgments underwrite our empirical investigation of nature. As I read him, Kant’s analysis of pure aesthetic judgment is an account of the most fundamental and non-conceptual delineation of empirical objects according to their aesthetically pleasing spatial form alone. Furthermore, our pleasurable response to the form of such objects makes possible a first non-conceptual sorting of objects according to their spatial form. Indeed, Kant calls the idealized general spatial forms of such judgments ‘aesthetic normal ideas of species’ (Kant et al. 2000, 117–120; KU 5:233–235) – clearly stating that they are characteristic of natural kinds and suggesting their connection to the task of the empirical investigation of nature. These aesthetic normal ideas are just the empirical schemata that the Critique of Pure Reason claims are ‘a hidden art in the depths of the human soul’ (Kant, Guyer, and Wood 1997, 273; A141/B180). Kant’s analysis of pure aesthetic judgments is then his account of our most fundamental non-conceptual experience of empirical objects and first non-conceptual access to natural kinds.²⁶ Significantly, for Kant, these experiences are non-conceptual and irrevisable. His is thus an account of the most fundamental and irrevisable experience of objects and rudimentary sorting of objects into kinds. This first sorting makes possible the conceptually-guided investigation of nature and search for empirical laws. Suppose this is Kant’s view, how does it compare with the position McDowell presents in ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’ – assuming I have read him correctly?

In order to bring Kant and McDowell into fruitful exchange I propose to set aside the idea of space and time as the subjective a priori forms of experience and to endorse McDowell’s focus on empirically conceived modes of space occupancy and the common sensibles. I also propose to set aside Kant’s claim that it is their aesthetically pleasing spatial form that most fundamentally delineates objects for us. This idea makes no contact with McDowell’s thinking, which appears to have the Critique of Pure Reason as its exclusive focus. In other words, I mean to take Kant minimally to be offering an account of the mental function involved in delivering the most fundamental order of nature – a rudimentary delineation of the sensible manifold into observable objects and their sensible properties and so sortable into kinds. I take Kant then to be offering an account of our most fundamental experience of the world. Non-conceptual aesthetic judgments are, for Kant, an achievement. This suggests that ordinarily our experience of the world is conceptual. And as I understand McDowell, a person who possesses the concept can experience a bird as being a cardinal and so discursively. But we are focusing on the more fundamental capacity both attribute to cognizers to apprehend or take in the various ways in which certain objects occupy space, which does not require but rather makes possible actively conceptualizing what we are perceiving. The obvious difference between Kant and McDowell is that Kant insists that this capacity is not conceptual, whereas McDowell claims that it is.

Kant nowhere says that his analysis has the virtue of accounting for the invariability of our most fundamental taking in of the empirical world. But he does make a logically very closely related point, namely, that we cannot offer demonstrations that might compel others to agree with our judgments of taste (see, Kant 200: 216; KU 5:340). The important point, conversely, is that at this fundamental level no rational argument will bring us to stop viewing what appear to be objects as objects nor to stop seeing certain objects as similar – no matter what empirical evidence we acquire regarding them. What Kant thinks of as an aesthetically pleasing spatial form would continue to please us aesthetically, even if we again and again learn upon touching it that it is comprised of two empirically distinct objects joined seamlessly or that it is causally quite unlike other similarly shaped objects. Precisely because pure aesthetic judgments are not conceptual, reasons cannot be given for them – nor indeed against them. The analysis of pure of judgments of taste as non-conceptual accounts then for the givenness or invariability of perception – the fact that what we most fundamentally experience are simple invariable sensible objects and properties.

How, on Kant’s account, does our most fundamental capacity to sort objects according to their fundamental observable similarities fall short of giving us a preliminary conceptual sorting of nature into kinds? How does this sorting fall short of providing us with conceptual norms? As an account of our fundamental experience of invariable objects and properties, how does it avoid the myth of the given?

I suggest that on the Kantian view we are considering our fundamental aesthetic sorting is not in itself rationally normative. Reasons cannot be given for aesthetic judgments, though they lay claim to universal assent – this is a crucial point for Kant. What is missing in order to make our first hold on the order of nature rationally normative is taking upon ourselves rational responsibility for the deliverances of aesthetic judgment. This means that these deliverances are not immune to rational criticism. We take upon ourselves the responsibility of testing them empirically. We accept them merely provisionally and take upon ourselves the rational responsibility to revise or even reject them – if that is required. Of decisive importance, on Kant’s view, is the question of whether any further generalizations, crucially, any causal generalizations, apply to a proposed sort or kind. Putting the point skeptically, on Kant’s account, we might ultimately claim that what our senses most fundamentally present to us as similar are not in fact similar, or, more precisely, not similar in any way beyond being merely observationally similar. This is the way I am suggesting we gloss the distinction between pure aesthetic judgment and conceptual judgment.

I suggest we think of this first aesthetic sorting of objects into kinds as not yet integrated into the sort of systematic and causally informative body of knowledge, which Kant envisions as our end in cognition. Suppose sorting like-shaped and similarly colored objects is revealed to be causally just uninformative. They would then be precisely the ‘grues’ and ‘sphubes’ of discussions of empirical conceptualization. For Kant, I think, the idea of the complete determination of what is given to us sensibly by a comprehensive system of empirical concepts grounds the claims made by empirical determinative judgments to being objectively true. So, for Kant, objects that are merely observationally similar are not objectively similar. In other words, to claim that observationally similar objects are objectively similar is to claim that they would fit into the comprehensive system of concepts that would ideally describe and causally explain the natural world in full.

Putting the point about the integration of merely observational kinds into a system of knowledge in this way brings us again to the very important passage from Sellars quoted above.

I do wish to insist that the metaphor of ‘foundation’ is misleading in that it keeps us from seeing that if there is a logical dimension on which other empirical propositions rest on observation reports, there is another logical dimension in which the latter rest on the former […] empirical knowledge, like its sophisticated extension, science, is rational, not because it has a foundation but because it is a self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once.

(Sellars 1997: §32, 78–79)

To put the point skeptically, the worry is that no further empirical propositions might rest on our fundamental observations and, conversely, that consequently there would be no sense in which the observations rest on such further empirical propositions. Put non-skeptically, Kant’s deep concern is getting right the precise status of our most fundamental observations. They are first proposals or hypotheses; their very normative status, content and truth ultimately depend on what they turn out to ground. Put slightly differently, our fundamental observations of similarity are not rationally normative independently of revealing further similarities – crucially for Kant, similarities in causal profile. Insisting on this means that, on Kant’s account, even our most fundamental observations of similarity can be put in jeopardy and corrected, if and when this is required. As Sellars claims, it is definitive of empirical norms of rationality that they must not be immune to revision and possibly even rejection.²⁷

But can’t McDowell take on this point and claim that on his view too (some) intuitional content might turn out to be wholly unreliable and that its deliverances too can be rejected if that is required. I think he can. But if he further agrees that we will nevertheless continue to delineate objects intuitively and see similarities between them just as we always have, what is this but acknowledging that such mental functions are in themselves just facts about us – facts and not rational norms. For Kant and Kantians such as McDowell, concepts are rules with norms of correct use. But recognizing that what looks like a coherent object is not one or that observably similar objects aren’t really alike at all is just to say that there is no situation in which concepts delineating the object or describing the similarity would be correctly used affirmatively of them. They would be norms we should never follow – and thus not norms at all.

Crucially for Kant, the hypothetical access to a first sorting of nature into kinds is not conceptual; and so the invariability of the most fundamentally given order of nature, as Kant conceives of it, does not succumb to the myth of the given. Taking rational responsibility for what our senses present to us as objects and similarities comes with the commitment to refine, revise or even reject this sorting and indeed what our senses present to us as objects and similarities, if there are reasons to do this. This is why it is so important to distinguish what as a matter of fact is most fundamentally presented to us aesthetically from a first conceptual empirical ordering of nature. Viewed in the latter way, the order is hypothetical. We are not epistemically bound by it. Quite the contrary, we are bound to test it through on-going empirical research and to revise and even reject it, if that proves necessary. In this way Kant meets the Sellarsian dictum that ‘science is rational […] because it is a self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once.’ Kant avoids then this way of succumbing to the myth of given.

7. Conclusion

The purpose of this paper was to ask how an account of the invariability of the most fundamental organization of the empirical world can avoid the myth of the given. I claimed that McDowell’s notion of intuitional content does not and that indeed any conceptual account of it cannot. I further claimed all too briefly that Kant’s analysis of pure judgments of taste and their role in the investigation of nature is such an account. I argued that precisely because Kant thinks that the most fundamental order of nature is given to us purely aesthetically, he does avoid the myth of the given.

I have also argued that viewing the most fundamental order of nature as given purely aesthetically has the virtue of accounting for the invariability of this order, the fact that at the most fundamental level we simply see certain spatial forms as objects and as similar to others – whether or not they in fact turn out to be coherent objects and significantly similar to others that look like them. Kant’s account of the invariability of perception does not conflict with the essential revisability of all empirical concepts, precisely because he does not view this experience and the order it proposes as conceptual. In this way, Kant can account for the invariability or obduracy of perception and avoid the myth of the given. As it turns out, we should not be conceptualists in our account of the most fundamental encounter with the empirical world to avoid the myth of the given.²⁸

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation [grant No. 659/19].

Notes

1. The paper first appeared in 2008, in a collection of essays edited by Jakob Lindgaard (2008) and entitled John McDowell: Experience, Norm and Nature. It appeared the following year in a collection of McDowell’s essays entitled Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel and Sellars. Page numbers refer to the latter collection.

I assume that the essay represents McDowell’s current view. He appears still to be committed to the notion of intuitive content, upon which I will focus, in an essay from 2013 (McDowell 2013, 155–156) and in an interview from the same year (O’Shea and McDowell 2023, 4, 12–16). The distinction between intuitive and discursive content, though without employing either term, is emphasized in a more recent paper; see, McDowell (2018a, 89–93); see also: McDowell (2018b, 104–105); McDowell (2018c, 24). However, none of these papers mentions categorial concepts, which will be a focus of my criticism.

2. McDowell’s notion of intuitive content has been criticized on other grounds. Browning (2019) claims that it equivocates between two senses, one of which cannot explain the distinctness of perceptual awareness and the other is not in fact fully conceptual. Kalpokas (2020) claims that intuitive content cannot justify belief and that the content of experience is cognitively penetrable. Regarding the last point, I think the notion of intuitive content is fruitfully read as an account precisely of what is not cognitively penetrable.

3. See, Geiger (2022).

4. McDowell (2009b, 256) notes that Sellars does not explain in general terms what he means by the myth of the given. For the claim that this is not an accident and has everything to do with our present concerns see, O’Shea (2021, 10553–10554); see, note 27.

5. In the essay on which I will focus, McDowell offers the following brief characterization of the myth; it makes very clear why it is problematic: ‘Givenness in the sense of the Myth would be an availability for cognition to subjects whose getting what is supposedly Given to them does not draw on capacities required for the sort of cognition in question’ (McDowell 2009a, 256). More specifically, the myth is ‘the idea that sensibility by itself could make things available for the sort of cognition that draws on the subject’s rational powers’ (McDowell 2009a, 257). In his response to Travis, in the volume in which his essay was originally published, he says: ‘The Myth of the Given is the idea, or supposed idea, that things can be available to a subject’s rationality without capacities that belong distinctively to the subject’s rationality being operative in her being thus related to them’ (McDowell 2008, 266); see also, O’Shea and McDowell (2023, 3–4, 11). For a very illuminating discussion of McDowell’s understanding of the myth of the given see, Gersel (2018), I will return to this matter toward the end; see, note 27.

6. For a reconstruction of Travis’s criticism of McDowell see, Browning (2019, 87–88).

7. In Mind and World, McDowell says that his view ‘makes it possible to for us to conceive experience as awareness’ (McDowell 1996a, 31). In ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’ he says: ‘That rational capacities are pervasively in play in human epistemic life is reflected in the fact that any of it can be accompanied by the “I think” of explicit self-consciousness’ (McDowell 2009a, 271) – suggesting that our epistemic life in its entirety is to some extent conscious. In this essay, furthermore, McDowell acknowledges his debt to Travis, whose view is that ‘perception, as such, simply places our surroundings in view; affords us awareness of them’ (Travis 2004, 65); see also, Travis (2008, 189). McDowell insists that our epistemic life is not a sub-personal matter (McDowell 2009a, 271–272). In recent papers, he says: ‘In an experience in which someone is perceiving, ways things are in the world are perceptually manifest to her’ (McDowell 2018a, 89); ‘In a visual intuition of an object, the understanding – the faculty of concepts – unifies visual presentations of visually sensible ways the object is, into an awareness of the object in which it is presented as being those ways’ (McDowell 2018c, 24).

8. Gersel, Jensen and Thaning (2017, 89–90) emphasize that McDowell’s earlier view depends on attributing to all perceivers the conceptual resources that might be deployed by some perceiver in a given situation; Browning (2019, 93) emphasizes that on McDowell’s new view the content of perception is considerably narrower. Kalpokas (2020, 38–39) argues that McDowell is adopting a notion of conceptual content that is not a taking to be so. These different motivations seem complementary. Indeed, Kalpokas (2020, 39) claims that the reason he identifies is insufficient to motivate the change in mind.

9. McDowell explicitly denies the view that ‘all our epistemic life is actively led by us’ and speaks of ‘unreflective perceptual awareness’ (McDowell 2009a, 271). The distinction between the givenness of intuitional content and the activity required to articulate discursive content is emphasized in the following passages.

Part of the point is that there are typically aspects of the content of an intuition that the subject has no means of making discursively explicit. Visual intuitions typically present one with visible characteristics of objects that one is not equipped to attribute to the objects by making appropriate predications in claims or judgments […] And articulating goes beyond intuiting even if we restrict ourselves to aspects of intuitional content that are associated with discursive capacities one already has (McDowell 2009a, 263)

Note that McDowell speaks here of making contents ‘discursively explicit.’ In the next passage he speaks of ‘acquiring a new discursive capacity.’

With much of the content of an ordinary visual intuition, the capacities that are in play in one’s having it as part of the content of one’s intuition are not even susceptible of discursive exercise. One can make use of content’s being given in an intuition to acquire a new discursive capacity, but with much of the content of an ordinary intuition one never does that. (Think of the finely discriminable shapes and shades of colour that visual experience presents to one.) (McDowell 2009a, 265).

10. The content employed in discursive activity can also be more general than that of intuitional content (McDowell 2018c, 25).

11. McDowell may well have Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and the last stage of the three-fold synthesis of the first edition Transcendental Deduction in mind, namely, the synthesis of recognition in the concept. Recognition, Kant there says, gives to representations ‘the unity that only consciousness can obtain for it’ (Kant, Guyer, and Wood 1997, 230; A103).

12. McDowell speaks of getting down ‘to a minimal inventory of concepts that are suitable to be alive in an experience in which an object is given’ (O’Shea and McDowell 2023, 15).

13. The point is made in the essay we are considering as well; see, McDowell (2009b, 261).

14. See, Wittgenstein (1958: §241).

15. I think that what McDowell draws on here from Thompson is an indispensable part of his conception of intuitive content. Drawing only on the notion of proper and common sensibles and without such Aristotelian categoricals or modes of space occupancy we would not be presented with determinate objects and their sensible properties. For what is given to us sensibly can be delineated in indefinitely many ways. See, O’Shea (2010, 76–77, 77 note 16; cf. 79, 80).

16. For helpful discussion of the proper and common sensibles in Aristotle’s De Anima, Book II, Chapter 6 see, Polansky (2007, 256–259).

17. This is Kant’s brief but suggestive reference to empirical schematism in the Critique of Pure Reason:

This schematism of our understanding with regard to appearances and their mere form is a hidden art in the depths of the human soul, whose true operations we can divine from nature and lay unveiled before our eyes only with difficulty. We can say only this much: the image is a product of the empirical faculty of productive imagination, the schema of sensible concepts (such as figures in space) is a product and as it were a monogram of pure a priori imagination, through which and in accordance with which the images first become possible, but which must be connected with the concept, to which they are in themselves never fully congruent, always only by means of the schema that they designate (Kant, Guyer, and Wood 1997, 273–274; A141–142/B180–181; see also, 552–553; A570/B598)

For the claim that empirical schemata are spatiotemporal forms required for ordering nature taxonomically see, Williams (2020). For an illuminating discussion of the historical context of this important issue see, Daston and Gallison (2007, 55–113).

18. McDowell says: ‘Now it is not even clearly intelligible to suppose that a creature might be born at home in the space of reasons. Human beings are not: they are born merely animals, and they are transformed into thinkers and intentional agents in the course of coming to maturity’ (McDowell 1996a, 125). In the essay we are focusing upon, he says clearly that he is speaking of ‘knowledge of a distinctive kind, attributable only to rational animals’ (McDowell 2009a, 257).

19. Ginsborg (2006, 80–91) argues that, generally speaking, McDowell cannot offer a satisfactory account of the acquisition of concepts. Her paper predates the essay we are focusing upon and obviously does not address the issue of intuitional content and empirical categories. But she does discuss the problematic status of fundamental empirical concepts on McDowell’s earlier view; see, Ginsborg (2006, 85–87).

20. See, McDowell (2009a, 221–238).

21. For an analogous point made in relation to concepts of secondary qualities see, McDowell (1996a, 29–30, 31).

22. O’Shea (2010, 79) too emphasizes this point.

23. For this point see, Ginsborg (2006, 83–84).

24. See again, note 18.

25. An endosymbiont lives within the body or the cells of another organism. The relationship is obligate when one or the other depends on the symbiosis for its survival.

26. It would be far more accurate to speak of proto-objects and proto-kinds to emphasize the fact that what I am referring to as objects and kinds are not subsumed under concepts. I speak of objects and kinds simply for the sake of convenient comparison with McDowell’s view.

27. Recent work on Sellars indeed insists that this is the heart of his critique of the given. Thus, Hicks (2020, 13–14) claims that ‘the target of EPM [‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of MInd’] is the assumption that some category of thought-objects – whether sense-data or middle-sized dry goods – has an absolute authenticity, such that the philosopher need only pay respect to it and cannot expect empirical developments to overthrow it. […] I am arguing that his rejection of a “home base” for content is the basic point underlying the attack on the myth of the given.’ For a particularly broad, lucid and detailed argument that this indeed is Sellars’ target see, O’Shea (2021). ‘The myth of the given, in perhaps its most basic form, is thus the idea that there is some implicit categorization of whatever is under consideration that is assumed to be in principle not revisable or replaceable by a fundamentally different categorization in this way. […] Hence, again, the myth of the categorial given’ (O’Shea 2021, 10554). While the issue of revisability is not the heart of his discussion, it is explicitly taken on by Klemick (2024, 127–128, 129–130), who cites both Hicks and O’Shea.

28. For comments on earlier versions of my paper and for discussion of McDowell’s paper, I am very grateful to Ori Beck, Hagit Benbaji, Bill deVries, Yael Gazit, Johannes Haag, Jim O’Shea, Yakir Levin, Mahdi Ranaee and Luz Seiberth. I am also very grateful for the comments and suggestions of two anonymous reviewers.

This paper is dedicated to the memory of Yakir Levin, a true Rensaissance man and my dear friend.