PART IV
Naive Realism, Sensation, and Apperception
9
Sensation and Apperception
THE REFLECTIONS about the topic of perception and its relations to conception that follow are the product of more than seventeen years of thinking about John McDowellâs great book Mind and World. If I find myself forced to disagree with him at certain points (Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas), that does not alter the fact that his book was a pathbreaking one in the highest sense of the term. For that reason I shall begin the present chapter by reviewing some its arguments, and explain my own view as a correction of his.
John McDowellâs Reasons for Thinking That Experience Is Conceptualized
I once wrote,
What McDowell means by saying that our conceptual powers are âdrawn onâ in experience, albeit âpassively,â is not anything mysterious, nor is this to be construed as psychological speculation of some kind; it is articulated by the work that this idea has to do: to show how experience involves âopenness to how things anyway are.â
If we put aside temporarily McDowellâs difficult (and fascinating) discussion of experiences with âinner accusativesâ (e.g., experiences of pain, or of after-images) and confine our attention to experiences of how it is âout there,â what McDowell is saying is that such experiences, when they are experiences in what McDowell calls âthe demanding senseâ (when they function in the justification of belief), are intrinsically about the outer world, and the possibility of having them depends on the possession of the relevant world-involving concepts.
They are not inner signs with a magical connection to the outer world, but takings in of how it is (in the best case), or how it seems to be (in more problematic cases), with the outer world.
I confess that I no longer understand how I could have thought that McDowellâs claim that the possibility of having perceptual experiences âdepends on the possession of the relevant ⌠conceptsâ can be anything but âmysterious.â
However, McDowell means exactly what he says, as is shown by other things he says. For example, in Mind and World, he writes, âNo subject could be understood as having experiences of color except against a background of understanding that makes it possible for judgments endorsing such experiences to fit into her view of the world.â
And he makes clear that this is supposed to apply to inner experiences such as the experience of âseeing redâ produced by a blow on the head, or even the judgment that I have a pain. According to this view, experiences must be conceptually articulated. What I want to explore is how McDowell arrived at this metaphysical position! What follows is a very brief account.
McDowell Believes the Space of Reasons Cannot Be Reduced to Facts about the Causation of Our Beliefs
McDowell is not satisfied with a merely reliabilist account of justification and other epistemological notions. And I agree with him. Such an account, if offered in a reductionist spirit, presupposes many notions that the reductionist naturalist is not entitled to, for instance, intentional notions such as reference and truth, not to mention the use of counterfactuals, often accompanied by talk of âpossible worldsâ a lĂ David Lewis, as well as being open to a number of counterexamples.
McDowell must be understood as seeking to produce an account of experience compatible with the idea that perceptual experience justifies beliefs about the layout of the world around one and doesnât merely causally âtriggerâ true beliefs a high percentage of the time. This is the first thing one needs to know about Mind and World.
This idea, that perceptual experiences justify accepting and rejecting beliefs about the world and do not merely trigger noises and subvocalizations is what McDowell calls âminimal empiricism.â McDowell clearly identifies this claim with the claim that âimpressionsâ can do this, and I will come back to this identification later.
James Conant has distinguished between two varieties of skepticism, which he calls âCartesian skepticismâ and âKantian skepticism.â Cartesian skepticism, in Conantâs sense, is skepticism about the possibility of knowledge of things and events âoutsideâ the mind. Kantian skepticism is a puzzle about the very possibility that oneâs thoughts, whether seemingly about an external world or even about oneâs own sense impressions, can have content at all. Cartesian Skepticism assumes our thoughts about the world are genuine thoughts, that is, that they are true or false, and only worries about whether we can ever really know that any of them are true. Kantian skepticism threatens to undercut even Cartesian skepticism. This poses a problem for empiricism, in that it is not clear how merely saying that our judgments come from experience explains how any of them have content, as opposed to being merely what Rorty called âmarks and noises.â âCome fromâ needs to mean something more than âare caused by,â McDowell tells us, if experience is to be a âtribunalâ before which our judgments are to stand. The second thing we need to know to understand McDowell is that he is concerned with Kantian, not Humean, skepticism in Mind and World.
McDowellâs Way into the Problem
McDowellâs way into the problem is via an interesting interpretation of Wittgensteinâs Private Language Argument, which he reads in the light of Wittgensteinâs remarks on the supposition that words acquire meaning by âostensive definition.â
Wittgensteinâs point can be illustrated thus: Russell (as of 1912) thought that we acquire our basic concepts by âacquaintance by introspectionâ (in effect, by a sort of inner pointing to our private impressions). But concepts are general, as Russell well knew. So to get the concept red (as applied to sense data), because I obviously canât direct my attention to all my red sense data, including the future ones, I have to âabstractâ the appropriate quality. In other words, I need a private ostensive definition. But all ostensive definition (e.g., holding up a glass and saying âglassâ to teach someone the concept) presupposes that the pupil possess at least implicit knowledge of the relevant sortal concept (e.g., âimplementâ as opposed to âmaterialâ). So ostensive definition canât be the way we acquire all our concepts. That is, pointing to âbare presencesâ canât explain how language and minds âhook on to the world.â (In addition to Wittgenstein, McDowell attributes this insight to Sellars and Davidson.)
A way out that McDowell doesnât discuss would be to say that some concepts are innate. (Think of Quineâs âsimilarity spaces.â) But innate similarity spaces in the behaviorist sense are just innate patterns of response, dispositions to be caused to respond (say, with the noise âredâ), and if thatâs all we have, the corresponding judgments are merely conditioned responses to make certain noises, and we lose the fact that our concepts are concepts. And if this behaviorist story isnât what the nativist has in mind, then it isnât clear what an âinnate conceptâ is. (Chomsky, todayâs best-known nativist, rejects the question of how words refer as too unscientific to discuss.)
I agree with McDowell, Davidson, and Sellars that appealing to âbare presencesâ canât provide an answer to the question as to how concepts and experiences are connected, or, in McDowellâs terms, how experiences can rationally constrain beliefs. That confrontation with bare presences can do this is what Sellars meant by âThe Myth of the Given,â and what Davidson meant by the idea of âcontentâ in the phrase âdualism of scheme and content,â according to McDowell. (Davidson should have said that what he rejected was the dualism of conceptual scheme and Given, on McDowellâs interpretations.) These are fascinating and plausible interpretations, needless to say.
Davidson
Davidsonâwho evidently despaired of finding a rational linkage between concepts and experiences (or impressionsâwe need to keep an eye on McDowellâs identification of experiences with impressions!) held (reviving an idea of Neurathâs) that justification begins with beliefs (which, for Neurath, were just sentences) and not with experiences. But how sentences about experiences can be justified by other sentences is just as problematic! (The coherence of the whole system does the work? How do we know it isnât âspinning in the void?â) And if observation sentences (Neurath called them âprotocolsâ) arenât justified by anything, how can they in turn justify anything? Davidson responds to the problem that bothers McDowell by giving up minimal empiricism. But that canât be right, McDowell feels. Nor can the answer be to just recoil back to the Given. We saw that that didnât work. So what way out is left?
McDowellâs Way Out
McDowellâs way out is to say that perceptual experiences arenât just the products of our sense organs. According to McDowell our conceptual capacities are âin playâ in experience. Impressions âalready possess conceptual content.â Since both beliefs and âimpressionsâ are conceptually articulated, there is supposedly no obstacle to the idea that impressions can rationally justify, and not merely âtrigger,â beliefs. Thus, McDowell claims that we can âdismount from the seesawâ that threatens to keep us oscillating between the Myth of the Given and an equally untenable âcoherentism.â
It seems to me that McDowell, far from giving a philosophical worry peace by âexorcizing the question,â has worked himself into an unbelievable metaphysical position! What I find unbelievable is not the claim that some of our experiences are conceptualized (in some sense of âconceptualizedâ), nor the claim that conceptualized experiences are epistemologically fundamental, but the claim that all experiences, indeed all sensations, involve and presuppose our conceptual powers. Surely, the reader is going to want to know, how exactly is it supposed to be the case that my conceptual capacities are âin operation?â A prima facie difficulty is that any given experience has an enormous number of different aspects. Moreover, as McDowell recognizes, âdemonstrative expressionsâ have to be used to describe many of those aspects; it is not the case that one always has the appropriate concept before having an experience that falls under that concept. McDowell (as of Mind and World) was clearly wedded to the idea that one could not have a particular sensation (âimpressionâ) if one did not have the concepts under which that sensation falls. But how could oneâs conceptual abilities be âin playâ when one has a sensation (say, a particular color-sensation) if one didnât previously have that concept?
McDowellâs view is clearly in flux here. In Mind and World, the answer to this question was that one forms the demonstrative concept and one has the sensation at the same time. In Having the World in View, however, the view McDowell defends is that to have a sensation it suffices th...