John McDowell

Tim Thornton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781315445861
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

John McDowell is one of the most widely read philosophers in recent years. His engagement with a philosophy of language, mind and ethics and with philosophers ranging from Aristotle and Wittgenstein to Hegel and Gadamer make him one of the most original and outstanding philosophical thinkers of the post-war period.

In this clear and engaging book, Tim Thornton introduces and examines the full range of McDowell's thought. After a helpful introduction setting out McDowell's general view of philosophy, Thornton introduces and explains the following topics:

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• Wittgenstein on philosophy, normativity and understanding;
• value judgements;
• theories of meaning and sense;
• singular thought and Cartesianism;
• perceptual experience and knowledge, disjunctivism and openness to the world;
• Mind and World, the content of perceptual experience and idealism;
• action and the debate with Hubert Dreyfus on conceptual content and skilled coping.

This second edition has been significantly revised and expanded to include new sections on: McDowell's work on disjunctivism and criticisms of it; a new chapter on McDowell's modification of his account of perceptual experience and conceptual content, and criticisms by Charles Travis; and a new chapter on action and McDowell's engagement with Hubert Dreyfus and the debate concerning skilled coping and mindedness.

The addition of a glossary and suggestions for further reading makes John McDowell, second edition essential reading for those studying McDowell, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, ethics and epistemology, as well as for students of the recent history of analytical philosophy generally.

1

WITTGENSTEIN ON PHILOSOPHY, NORMATIVITY AND UNDERSTANDING

In this chapter, I shall examine McDowell’s interpretation of Wittgenstein’s discussion of normative rules that govern, among other things, the meaning of words. Given that one of McDowell’s most general aims is shedding light on the relation of mind and world, concentrating on understanding rules in this chapter may seem to be heading in a different direction. But McDowell thinks that what makes the relation of mind and world seem problematic is a deeper dualism between norms and nature. By norms he means normative rules. The deeper dualism is between the kind of intelligibility exemplified in what Sellars calls the “space of reasons”, which is structured by normative rules, and what McDowell calls the “realm of law”. So a proper understanding of rules and their place in nature promises to ease the dualism of mind and world.

There are two other reasons for starting this book with McDowell’s interpretation of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. It informs the central focus of his own work in two key respects:

• Metaphilosophically, McDowell’s account of Wittgenstein serves as a model of his own therapeutic conception of philosophy in general. By contrast with commentators who advance philosophical theses in Wittgenstein’s name, McDowell respects Wittgenstein’s injunction that philosophy should leave everything as it is. Having diagnosed the misleading assumption that makes normative rules problematic, McDowell is able to remove the apparent need for a philosophical theory.
• Substantially, McDowell’s interpretation of Wittgenstein involves key philosophical ideas, which recur throughout his positive account of mind and world. One key idea is the rejection of an assumption he dates back to Descartes that mental states are freestanding inner states.

As I shall describe below, the central difficulty in giving an account of rules is in escaping a dilemma that seems inevitable. It seems that rules either exert a genuine constraint on human practice that is underpinned supernaturally through a form of Platonism, or they do not exert a genuine constraint after all. Thus the choice is between Platonism and scepticism. McDowell argues, however, that this choice is underpinned by a “master thesis” that the mind is populated with freestanding states. Such states are states of “inner space”, independent of the outer world.

On this model, understanding a rule is a mental phenomenon that stands there “like a signpost” (Wittgenstein 2009: §85). The idea is that a signpost is just a board with some writing or a diagram on it. In itself it seems incapable of sorting human behaviour into that which is in accord – perhaps going in a particular direction – and that which is not. It seems that something else needs to be added to a description of the sign to achieve this: an interpretation of the writing or diagram that says what it means. If mental states were like that then they too would need further interpretation to come to be about anything. That would lead either to the notorious regress of interpretations, which in turn leads to scepticism, or to a form of rampant Platonism if one postulated an end to that regress through an interpretation that somehow interpreted itself. So one part of McDowell’s diagnosis is to reject that master thesis.

Unlike sceptical commentators such as Saul Kripke (discussed below), McDowell does not think that Wittgenstein expresses any hostility to our pre-philosophical understanding that norms – such as those implicit in meaning, or the continuation of a mathematical series – have a degree of autonomy. They are ratification-independent. That is, norms do not depend on the ongoing judgements of rule-followers to create, for example, what should count as the correct continuation of a mathematical series. Rather, the series itself determines what rule-followers ought to judge is the correct next number in a particular case.

Articulating this view of rules introduces a number of McDowell’s central concerns in the rest of his philosophy. He suggests that one lesson from this area of philosophy is that norms can be part of nature, when both are properly understood, without having to be explained in non-normative terms. For this reason he advocates a form of “naturalized” (by contrast with “rampant”) Platonism to characterize the partial autonomy of rules and hence of the space of reasons. But he suggests that the right way to understand nature so as to accommodate that understanding of concepts is a form of German Idealism: a view that the world is constitutively apt for conceptualization. This helps undermine a stark contrast between reason on the one hand and non-normative nature on the other. And the right way to understand our ability to “resonate” to the partially autonomous normative demands of the space of reasons and our ability to hear them expressed in the utterances of others is to think of it as part of what he calls our “second nature”. I shall introduce these ideas towards the end of this chapter.

Although he has written a number of papers on Wittgenstein, the main focus of this chapter will be “Wittgenstein on Following a Rule” (McDowell 1984b).

I The background: Wittgenstein on normativity

McDowell begins “Wittgenstein on Following a Rule” with the comment that “We find it natural to think of meaning and understanding in, as it were, contractual terms” (McDowell 1998b: 221). The idea of a contract evokes a commitment or obligation. When one understands the meaning of a word, one is obliged to use it in a particular way, a way that accords with the meaning.

By stressing the natural contractual view, McDowell places normativity at the heart of the discussion to come. His aim is not to offer a substantial philosophical theory about meaning but to remove obstacles to a clear view of the matter. One key obstacle is misconstruing the nature of the contractual obligation involved in, for example, understanding the meaning of a word. In this short section I shall outline some of the connections between Wittgenstein’s discussion of rules, meaning and intentional mental states by focusing on normativity. These will be developed further in Section II as I set out McDowell’s complex discussion.

McDowell’s discussion of meaning and understanding follows Wittgenstein’s central emphasis on the importance of rules. Baldly, this emphasis on rules helps us to focus on the normativity of meaning and content. Thus Wittgenstein discusses rules as a way of more generally discussing meaning, thought and intentionality, or “aboutness”. Elucidating the nature of the standard that a rule imposes on moves made in accord with it – and how we can understand that constraint both in a flash and as manifest over time – sheds light on the connection between thought and world.

Michael Luntley sets out a very similar general starting-point thus:

Meaning is normative. That is the starting point to our investigations. The normativity of meaning comes from the fact that the content of our utterance or thought is something assessed as true or false … Without adding anything further about the nature of the concept of truth, this basic fact about meaning forces the following constraint. For any utterance or thought to possess meaning its meaning must be such that it demarcates between those conditions that would render the utterance true and those that would render it a failure in aiming for truth.

(Luntley 1991: 171–2)

A rule is explicitly normative: it prescribes the moves that accord with it and those that do not. Understanding the rule for the correct use of a word prescribes its correct use. But other intentional mental states are similar in that they too prescribe those acts, or events, that are in accord with or satisfy them. So having a mental state, like an expectation, imposes a standard by which the world can be judged. In the case of an expectation, subsequent events will either satisfy or frustrate it, and what that depends on is determined by the expectation itself.¹

These everyday observations on understanding rules and forming mental states suggest a philosophical question: how is it possible to grasp or to take on such an orientation or obligation? Wittgenstein’s discussion, in a hundred or so paragraphs in the Philosophical Investigations, starts with the following observations and questions:

But we understand the meaning of a word when we hear or say it; we grasp the meaning at a stroke, and what we grasp in this way is surely something different from the “use” which is extended in time!

(Wittgenstein 2009: §138)

[I]sn’t the meaning of the word also determined by this use? And can these ways of determining meaning conflict? Can what we grasp at a stroke agree with a use, fit or fail to fit it? And how can what is present to us in an instant, what comes before our mind in an instant, fit a use?

(Wittgenstein 2009: §139)

Later, Wittgenstein describes the normative constraint more generally:

A wish seems already to know what will or would satisfy it; a proposition, a thought, to know what makes it true – even when there is nothing there! Whence this determining of what is not yet there? This despotic demand? (“The hardness of the logical must”.)

(Wittgenstein 2009: §437)

Wittgenstein considers a range of substantial explanations of this kind of connection. These explanations are, in general, attempts to connect the understanding that can happen in a flash with subsequent events or actions at a distance. But each substantial explanation fails. Typically they fail either because they do not sustain the normativity of the connection, or because they smuggle that normativity into the explanation in a question-begging manner. Explanations that postulate an inner mental mechanism fail to distinguish the normative notion of a correct response from a merely causal disposition to act in some way. Explanations that postulate inner signs or symbols that encode the understanding or mental content generate an infinite regress of interpretations.

Thus, in outline, Wittgenstein emphasizes the close connections between meaning, intentional states and normativity. He raises the question of how one can adopt such normative obligations (in understanding a rule or forming a mental state). And he rejects explanations based on causal mechanisms or interpreting inner signs.

The challenge this leaves to interpreters is this. If Wittgenstein rejects explanations of the connection between understanding a word and applying it over time, what is the purpose of that criticism and what account of meaning and normativity can survive that criticism? As I shall set out in Section II, Saul Kripke and Crispin Wright both interpret Wittgenstein as offering a radical and revisionary account of meaning. They both undermine the natural contractual view of meaning: the view that understanding imposes a specific obligation on word use, for example. Against them, McDowell argues that it is only a misunderstanding of the nature of that contract that should be rejected.

II Opposing interpretations of Wittgenstein

Here, and in Sections III and IV, I shall summarize, in some detail, the key features of the interpretation of Wittgenstein that McDowell puts forward in his paper “Wittgenstein on Following a Rule”. Overall, McDowell presents Wittgenstein as a therapeutic philosopher who does not advance claims that aim to transform our everyday understanding of the relation of mind and world. He argues that Wittgenstein’s discussion of rules is revelatory not of a successful philosophical theory of the relation of mind and world, but of why there need be no such theory.

McDowell sets out his own interpretation of Wittgenstein’s work by contrasting his account of Wittgenstein with Kripke’s and Wright’s accounts. In this section I shall outline Kripke’s and Wright’s views as they feature in McDowell’s paper, his criticisms of them and his diagnosis of where they diverge from a proper interpretation of Wittgenstein.

Kripke’s Wittgenstein

Kripke’s influential account takes Wittgenstein to advance a new form of scepticism about meaning. It is directed against the idea that rules can exert a constraint on, for example, the correct use of words. Because McDowell’s account of it is very brief, I shall summarize Kripke’s argument as presented in his Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982).

Kripke casts doubt on what appears, pre-philosophically, to be an everyday metalinguistic fact: the fact that one can mean something by a word. He considers the case of meaning addition by the word “addition” and asks the question: what justifies the claim that answering “125” is the correct response to the question “What does 68 + 57 equal?” Two simplifying assumptions are made:

• that “correct” means in accordance with the standards of one’s previous usage of the signs involved;
• that one has never calculated that particular result before. In fact Kripke assumes that one has “added” no number larger than 57.

If called upon to justify the answer “125”, one might usually give two sorts of response. Arithmetically, one might ensure that one has carried out the computation correctly. Metalinguistically, one might assert: “that ‘plus’, as I intended to use that word in the past, denoted a function which, when applied to the numbers I call ‘68’ and ‘57’, yields the value 125” (Kripke 1982: 8). Kripke now introduces the sceptical hypothesis that in the past one might have followed a different mathematical function, the quus function. This is defined to give the same number as the plus function for all pairs of numbers smaller than 57. For numbers greater or equal to 57, the application of quus gives the answer 5. Kripke now presses the question: what facts about one’s past performance show that one was calculating in accordance with the plus function rather than the quus function?

There is a further condition on any satisfactory answer to the question. It must show why it is correct to respond 125 rather than 5. It must have the right normative properties. This precludes citing facts about one’s education or training that now dispose one to answer 125. It may be true that one has such a disposition, but that will not show that one is correct to answer 125. (One may equally be disposed to make mistakes when adding large columns of figures.)

Kripke then deploys broadly Wittgensteinian arguments to show, apparently, that no facts about one’s past actions, utterances or dispositions can justify an answer (1982: 7–54). Anything one did or said in the past could be interpreted as following the quus rule. It appears that nothing that one does or says or thinks to oneself can justify the claim that answering “125” is going on in the same way.

Consider two initially attractive lines of thought. Although it seems that the problem is set up so that one’s past actions might equally be interpreted as according with the plus or quus function, one might still settle the issue if one previously said or thought to oneself “Now I’ll add these numbers”. But this would only answer the sceptic if there were an independent way to settle the correct interpretation of these words. Perhaps they meant quad. Suppose, now, that one had explicitly added, sotto voce, “And by add I mean a function based on counting in the following normal way …”. Whatever follows would also depend on the interpretation given to the word “count”. Perhaps it meant quount, defined as the same as counting except in the case of the combination of numbers 57 and 68.

By such means, Kripke argues that there are no facts about one’s past behaviour nor one’s past mental history that allow one to infer the further fact that one has, in th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Wittgenstein on philosophy, normativity and understanding
• 2. Value judgements
• 3. Formal theories of meaning and theories of sense
• 4. Singular thought and the Cartesian picture of mind
• 5. Experience, knowledge and openness to the world
• 6. Mind and World and perceptual experience
• 7. Action, intention and embodied coping
• 8. Perceptual content after Mind and World
• 9. Guide to further reading
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index