Dr.

Enrique Villanueva
Ridgeview Publishing Company

Prcis of "Mind and World"

Author(s): John McDowell
Source: Philosophical Issues, Vol. 7, Perception (1996), pp. 231-239
Published by: Ridgeview Publishing Company
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22,)
f22

Precis

PHILOSOPHICALISSUES, 7

',Perception,

of

Mind

and

1995

World1

John McDowell

1. The idea of world-directedness -that is, content in one sense- is

intelligible only in terms of a normative context that is its primary
home. We must be able to work with the notion of a posture or
stance that is correctly or incorrectly adopted according to whether
or not things are thus and so. Only so can we understand the posture
or stance as a judgement or belief to the effect that things are thus
and so. (If we can make sense of judgement or belief as directed at
the world in that way, we need have no trouble with other kinds of
content-bearing postures or stances.)
We might express the point like this: thinking that aims at judgement, or at the fixation of belief, is answerable to the world for
whether or not it is correctly executed. And now a small step away
from that abstract formulation takes us to a minimal, and one might
think undisputable, empiricism: in the sorts of case that must come
first for reflection on the very idea of directedness at the world, the
world's verdict, to which thinking must be answerable if it is to be
1Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1994. I restrict myself here to
those aspects of the book that are relevant to the topic of the SOFIA conference;
and, with a view to capturing the gist of the book in a much smaller space, I
allow myself to approach its themes in different ways.

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232

JOHN MCDOWELL

thinking at all, is delivered by way of a pronouncement from (in

Quine's phrase) "the tribunal of experience".2
Minimal empiricism promises to cast light on certain sorts of philosophical anxiety. If there is an obstacle in the way of seeing how
experience could serve as a tribunal, then by the same token that
obstacle will seem to render urgent the question: how is empirical
content (as we might put it) so much as possible? And only our
small step separates that question from the question how content
-world-directednessis possible at all.
When one thinks about philosophical anxieties that arise in the
neighbourhood of empiricism, that may not be the first question
that comes to mind. Such anxieties are more familiar in the shape
of questions like this: how is empirical knowledge possible? That is,
in terms of the juridical metaphor: how can experience, sitting in
judgement on, say, a belief, return a verdict sufficiently favourable
for the belief to count as a case of knowledge? But suppose we find it
puzzling how experience can be such as to return any verdicts on our
thinking at all. Such puzzlement would clearly be prior to any question about how experience can return a verdict that reaches some
high level of favourableness. I think it is helpful to see the problems
about knowledge in particular that pervade modern philosophy as
more or less inept expressions of a deeper anxiety -an inchoately
felt threat that a way of thinking we find ourselves falling into leaves
minds simply out of touch with the rest of reality, not just questionably capable of getting to know about it. This underlying anxiety
is not well captured by questions about knowledge, but it is well
captured by asking how content is possible -which is achieved, in
the context of minimal empiricism, by asking how empirical content
is possible.
2. I am suggesting that if we can find something that makes it
hard to see how experience could serve as a tribunal, then, given the
attractiveness of minimal empiricism, we shall be able to see that as
the origin of the characteristic anxieties of modern philosophy. The
prospect is that we can trace those anxieties to a single source, so
that in principle they can be exorcized together. And the source
I want to point to can be brought to light by considering Sellars's
attack on the Given.
2

"Two Dogmas of Empiricism", in W.V. Quine, From a Logical Point of View

(Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1961; 1st ed. 1953), pp. 20-46, at
p. 41.

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22.

PRECISOF MINDAND WORLD

233

Sellars insists that the concept of knowledge belongs in a normative context, and it is an implication of something I have urged that
we should take him to be stressing just one aspect of the normative context that is necessary for the idea of being in touch with
the world at all, whether knowledgeably or not. Focusing, as he
does, on knowledge in particular, Sellars writes: "In characterizing
an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the
logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what
one says."3
One way of putting what Sellars is driving at is to say that epistemology -or, in the more general version of the thought that I have
insisted on, reflection about world-directedness as such- is vulnerable to a naturalistic fallacy.4 If we put the thought like that, we are
identifying the natural, as indeed Sellars sometimes does, with the
subject matter of empirical description as he conceives it in the passage I have quoted, where he contrasts empirical description with
placing something in the normative framework constituted by the
logical space of reasons. Sellars, then, draws a distinction between,
on the one hand, concepts that are intelligible only in terms of how
they serve to place things in the logical space of reasons and, on the
other hand, concepts that can be employed in empirical description.
And we can equate empirical description, as Sellars conceives it, with
placing things in the logical space of nature, to coin a phrase that is
Sellarsian at least in spirit.
Putting things this way, we can achieve the effect Sellars is after
by identifying the logical space of nature with the logical space in
which the natural sciences function, as we have been enabled to conceive them by a well-charted, and in itself admirable, development
of modern thought. Positively, we can say that to place something
in nature, on the relevant conception, is to place it in the realm of
law. But what is really important is not such positive characterizations, but the negative point that the relations between elements
of nature, on the relevant conception, are not the normative relations that constitute the logical space of reasons. The relations that
constitute the logical space of nature on this conception (in the way
spatial relations constitute space literally so called) do not include
3"Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind", in Herbert Feigl and Michael
Scriven, eds., Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 1 (University
of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1956), pp. 253-329, at pp. 298-9.
4See p. 257 of "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" for a formulation on
these lines.

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JOHN MCDOWELL

relations such as one thing's being warranted, or -for the general

case- correct, in the light of another.
Now, given this framework, which logical space would be the primary home of the concept of experience? Experience, we can plausibly say, is made up of impressions, effects of impacts made by the
world on a subject's sensory equipment. Surely talk of impacts of the
world on the senses is empirical description; or, to put the point in
the variant terms I have introduced, the idea of receiving an impression is the idea of a transaction in nature. On Sellars's principles,
then, talk of impressions does not operate in the logical space in
which talk of knowledge -or, to keep the general case in view, talk
of world-directedness- operates. The logical space in which talk
of impressions primarily belongs is not one in which things are connected by relations such as one thing's being warranted or correct
in the light of another. So experience, conceived as made up of impressions, cannot serve as a tribunal, something to which empirical
thinking is answerable. In fact the idea that it can is exactly what
Sellars rejects as the Myth of the Given.
I should mention that in Mind and World my main representative of this kind of thinking is Davidson rather than Sellars. Either
would have served my purpose. There is a correspondence between
Sellars's attack on the Given and Davidson's attack on "the third
dogma of empiricism" -the dualism of conceptual scheme and (in a
sense other than the one I have used here) empirical content. And
Davidson explicitly takes it that the thought dislodges even a minimal empiricism; he claims that the third dogma of empiricism is
"perhaps the last, for if we give it up it is not clear that there is
anything distinctive left to call empiricism".5
3. So far I have suggested that we can trace the distinctive anxieties of modern philosophy to a tension between two temptations
that our thinking is subject to. One is a minimal empiricism, which
links empirical content with the idea that empirical thinking is answerable to the tribunal of experience. The other is a tendency,
which I have exploited Sellars in trying to make intelligible, for it to
seem impossible that experience could be a tribunal; the idea of experience evidently belongs in a logical space of natural connections,
and that can easily be made to seem alien to a logical space in which
one thing is warranted or correct in the light of another.
5 "On the
Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme", in Donald Davidson, Inquiries
into Truth and Interpretation (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1984), pp. 183-98, at

p. 189.

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22.

PRECIS OF MIND AND WORLD

235

The exorcism I have projected would require resolving the tension,

and the description I have given leaves various options for doing that.
I shall describe three.
One course, which Sellars and Davidson follow, is to discard the
linkage of empirical content with answerability to impressions; that
is, to renounce minimal empiricism, at least with experience construed in terms of impressions. But I do not believe a position on
these lines can be genuinely comfortable. It is true that the SellarsDavidson option leaves room for minimal empiricism on a different construal; according to the principles that govern this option,
though empirical thinking cannot be answerable to impressions, it
can be answerable to appearings. But if there is no such thing as
answerability to impressions, I think that ought to make it just as
problematic how appearings are possible as how any other mode of
possession of empirical content is possible.
Sellars and Davidson make it seem that the tension amounts to
an incompatibility by insisting that the logical space of reasons is
sui generis, as compared with the logical space in which Sellars sees
"empirical description" as functioning, which I have identified on
Sellars's behalf with the logical space of nature.6 This points to a
second possible way to resolve the tension: namely rejecting that
insistence. On this second option, we are to accept that the concept
of experience has its primary home in the logical space of nature,
conceived in the way that figures in Sellars and Davidson on the
other side of a contrast with the logical space of reasons. But on this
option, we are to reject the contrast; we are to deny that the logical
space of reasons is sui generis in the way Sellars and Davidson claim.
This denial is what figures in Mind and World as "bald naturalism".
Bald naturalism is a programmatic conviction to this effect: the
normative relations that constitute the logical space of reasons can be
reconstructed out of conceptual materials whose primary home is the
logical space in which empirical description, as Sellars conceives it,
functions. (The label "naturalism" is appropriate just to the extent
that it is appropriate to identify that logical space as the logical space
of nature.) Suppose the bald naturalist programme were executed.
That would vindicate moves of the kind that, according to Sellars,
commit a naturalistic fallacy in epistemology, and it would vindicate
6Davidson's counterpart to what figures in Sellars as the sui generis character
of the logical space of reasons is the sui generis character of what Davidson calls
"the constitutive ideal of rationality". See especially "Mental Events", in Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980),
pp. 207-25; the quoted phrase is from p. 223.

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236

JOHN MCDOWELL

counterparts to those moves in reflection about world-directedness

in general. In particular, it would vindicate talk of answerability to
experience, even conceived in terms of impressions. Such talk would
be naturalistic, by all means, but an execution of the bald naturalist
programme would undermine the imputation of a naturalistic fallacy,
perpetrated by combining the naturalistic idea of impressions with
the normative idea of answerability.
I shall say a little more about bald naturalism in a moment, but
first I want to outline the different way of resolving the tension that I
recommend, the third of the three options I undertook to distinguish.
My alternative aims at the same overall effect bald naturalism
would achieve: that, without fear of a naturalistic fallacy, we can
understand empirical thinking as answerable to experience, even conceived in terms of impressions, impacts from the world on a subject's
receptive capacities. But I aim to make room for this without denying, as bald naturalism does, that the structure of the logical space
of reasons is sui generis, as compared with the logical space within
which the natural sciences confer their distinctive kind of intelligibility on things.
The modern scientific revolution made possible a clear conception
of that distinctive kind of intelligibility, with the clarity consisting
largely, I claim, in something close to Sellars's basic or structural
thought: namely, an understanding that natural-scientific intelligibility must be held separate from the kind of intelligibility something
acquires when we place it in relation to other things in the logical
space of reasons. But we do not need to equate the very idea of nature or the natural with the idea of instantiations of concepts whose
primary home is the logical space in which natural-scientific intelligibility emerges. Sellars is right, then, that there is a logical space
that is alien to the logical space of reasons; indeed that is a fundamental insight, a prime lesson from the development of modern
science. But to equate that logical space with the logical space of
nature, as Sellars at least implicitly does, is to forget that nature
includes second nature. The natural, in the sense of second nature,
embraces concepts that function in the logical space of reasons, sui
generis though that logical space is. This makes it unthreatening to
acknowledge that the idea of receiving an impression is the idea of
a transaction in nature. If we resist the conception of nature that
is implicit in Sellars, we undermine the inference to the Sellarsian
conclusion, that the idea of receiving an impression is foreign to the
logical space in which concepts like that of answerability function.
We make room for impressions to be appearings, even as Sellars conceives appearings. Conceptual capacities, talk of which belongs in

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22.

PRECIS OF MIND AND WORLD

237

the sui generis logical space of reasons, can be operative not just
in judgements -results of a subject's actively making up her mind
about somethingbut already in the transactions in nature that are
constituted by the world's impacts on the receptive propensities of a
subject who possesses the relevant concepts. Receiving impressions
can be a matter of being open to the way things manifestly are, and
that yields a satisfying interpretation for the image of postures that
are answerable to the world through being answerable to experience.
4. In Mind and World, I concern myself with bald naturalism
only as a potential competitor with the outlook I have just sketched,
in the project of exorcizing certain philosophical anxieties. I align
myself with bald naturalism in the conviction that the project is a
good one. Philosophy is forced into some peculiar and unattractive
shapes, if we suppose it needs to answer the questions that express
I have suggested we can collect into the
those anxieties -which
question "How is empirical content possible?". It would be better
not to seem obliged to engage in that familiar activity, and that
yields a philosophical motivation for bald naturalism that, as far as
it goes, I respect.7
But my alternative seems to me a more satisfying response to that
motivation than faith in the bald naturalist programme -faith that
we can domesticate the logical space of reasons within the logical
space in which the natural sciences confer their distinctive kind of
intelligibility on things. I have tried to make it plausible that what
underlies the anxieties is a sense -often no doubt only inchoatethat the structure of the logical space of reasons is sui generis, as
compared with the logical framework in which natural-scientific understanding is achieved. This allows us to see it as non-accidental that the period in which dealing with these supposed difficulties
came to seem the dominant obligation of philosophy coincides with
the period in which natural-scientific understanding, as we are now
equipped to conceive it, was being separated out from a hitherto undifferentiated conception of understanding in general. I claim that
the separation was effected largely by way of an increasingly firm
grasp of what is in effect Sellars's basic structural insight: that natural-scientific understanding must be held separate from the kind
7The label "bald naturalism"is perhaps infelicitous for a position with a
sophisticatedmotivationon these lines;that is what I acknowledgein the footnote
on pp. 88-9. I took myself to be stuck with the label even so, since I had given
it a thematic prominencein the lecturesof which the book is a version. (Forthe
same reason,I felt unableto accede to a plea for less discriminatoryterminology
made by NicholasRescher.)

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238

JOHNMCDOWELL

of understanding that is achieved by placing what is understood in

relation to other things in the logical space of reasons. Now according to bald naturalism, that perhaps inchoate sense of a conceptual
divide was simply wrong, and the execution of the programme would
reveal it as such. My alternative, by contrast, gives modern philosophy more credit, even while, no less than bald naturalism, it enables
us to disown those supposed intellectual obligations. (I also give,
in one way, more credit to the development of modern science for
the conceptual revolution it effected.) According to me, people who
think philosophy must centre on problems about how minds can be
in touch with the world are not wrong in the thought they take
to pose those problems -the thought that is crystallized in Sellars's
thesis that the logical space of reasons is sui generis. They are wrong
-and the mistake is quite intelligible- only in supposing that if we
endorse that thought, we are stuck with the intellectual obligations
that modern philosophy characteristically, and unsatisfactorily, sets
for itself.
I do not pretend to have an argument that the bald naturalist
programme cannot be executed.8 The point is rather this: the line
of thought I have just indicated undercuts the only motivation I
consider in my book for supposing the programme must be feasible.
As far as that motivation goes, my attitude to the programme can
be, not "I know it cannot be carried through" but rather "Given
that the motivation is better fulfilled by a different way of thinking,
why bother?"
The invitation
Of course that invites alternative motivations.
which
be
initiate
a
would
discussion,
potentially open-ended;
might
but this further discussion is not my concern in Mind and World.
However, I shall end by allowing myself a brief foray into it.
It is not a contribution to the discussion I have in mind to say
something like this: "Natural-scientific truth is the only truth there
is."9 That is not an argument for bald naturalism, but a mere profession of scientistic faith, the very thing about which the question of
motivation arises. Of course we know better than to believe in paramatter as the stuff of minds, and we know better than to suppose
8Jerry Fodor insinuates that I aim to give "the unwary reader" this impression,
in his review of Mind and World: "Encounters with Trees", London Review of
Books, 20 April 1995.

9As Fodor in effect does. Outlining the position he wants to defend against me,
he writes: "All that ever happens, our being rational included, is the conformity of
natural things to natural laws." And later: "[I]f it's literally true that rationality,
intentionality, normativity and the like belong to the mind essentially, then they
must all be phenomena within the natural realm that scientists explore."

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22. PRECISOF MINDAND WORLD

239

that para-physical forces -forces not needed for explaining "merely

material", or perhaps "merely biological", phenomena- are operative at the level of the material constitution of organisms with minds.
Something on those lines seems to me to be unquestionable. It sets
the agenda for a fine branch of science: to make the material constitution of living things with minds perspicuous, so as to render
it intelligible that their lives exemplify mindedness. But it goes no
distance towards showing that, if we are to give due honour to the
way science has freed us from superstition, we must embrace the
conceptual monism -at least about concepts that pull their weight
in describing reality- on which bald naturalism insists.

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