• Banno
    26.1k
    The supposed illusory nature of certain experiences is trivial. Consider that we are aware that they are illusions. We are aware of this becasue they are evaluated by the whole web of belief, and not segregated and separated as "experiences". The "Need" McDowel sees to "distinguish the experience" suggests a profound misapprehension of Davidson's much more subtle argument.

    That is, I don't see much value in McDowell's comments. While you are welcome to try to convince us otherwise, so far, I'm not seeing it.
  • Banno
    26.1k
    I think spiders do experience things, and I think it's probably so different from my own experience that if we could upload the spider's thoughts and download them into my brain, my mind would just detect inexplicable noise.frank

    I wanted to come back to this, to make a point this time about what conceptual schema are not. They are not a neural network.

    Frank's description here is part of the reason I thought his OP excellent, since it makes explicit a misunderstanding of the relation between brain and mind. Frank may well be quite right that if the spider neural net were somehow grafted to his own, the result would be noise. But that need not count against Davidson's account. The beliefs of the spider sit apart from the mere firing of the neural networks that cause it's movement, and cannot be reduced to them. Indeed, it is problematic to attribute beliefs to the spider at all, since beliefs sit within the broader framework of of triangulation, interpretation, and hence occur at a level that it utterly foreign to the spider.

    Which is just to say, we can explain the behaviour of the spider in terms of belief, but the spider cannot.

    For Davidson, mental events—like beliefs, desires, intentions—are not reducible to physical events. There is no deterministic, law-like relationship between the two; instead, mental descriptions are interpreted within the broader context of social practices and linguistic frameworks.

    Hence the anomalism of the mental. There need be no correspondence between physical stats and the intentional descriptions of them.
  • Pierre-Normand
    2.5k
    The supposed illusory nature of certain experiences is trivial. Consider that we are aware that they are illusions. We are aware of this becasue they are evaluated by the whole web of belief, and not segregated and separated as "experiences". The "Need" McDowel sees to "distinguish the experience" suggests a profound misapprehension of Davidson's much more subtle argument.Banno

    It might help if you would sketch the argument that you take McDowell to be misapprehending. In cases when a experiencing subject doesn't believe things to be as they appear to them to be, it is hard to equate the content of the experience E (e.g. that the cat is on the mat) with a belief since the subject doesn't believe this content. It is true that they, in that case, believe a different content LE, namely that it looks to them like the cat is on the mat. But that it looks to them like there is a cat on the mat, although it indeed is part of their conceptually articulated web of knowledge, isn't the content of the experience that is, according to Davidson, caused by the world to happen.

    You're nevertheless right that the illusory nature of certain experiences isn't the central issue. The issue is how experience can provide reasons for our beliefs. McDowell isn't denying that we evaluate experiences against our web of belief. He's asking how experience can have any justificatory force if its role is merely causal.

    In cases where I don't believe things are as they appear, it's true that I don't form the belief E (that the cat is on the mat). I might form the belief LE (that it looks to me like the cat is on the mat). But for Davidson, experience just is the causation of a belief. So, in this case, he'd likely say that the experience caused me to form the belief LE.

    But this creates a problem. LE is a belief about my experience, not a basic empirical belief directly caused by the world like 'the cat is on the mat' would be. It's a higher-order belief. Even if Davidson says LE is the belief caused in cases of illusion, it doesn't explain how the experience E—the experience as of a cat on the mat—plays any role in justifying my beliefs.

    McDowell, on the other hand, argues that the experience E itself, with its conceptual content, provides a reason for my belief E. It's because it appears to me as if there's a cat on the mat that I'm justified in believing that there's a cat on the mat. The experience E doesn't just cause the belief E; it rationalizes it. This rational connection is what's missing in Davidson's account.

    A related issue arises from cases where the belief LE (that it looks like E) is consistent with both a veridical experience E and an illusory experience that is subjectively indistinguishable from E. This raises the question of how we can distinguish between veridical and illusory experiences. While this isn't a problem unique to McDowell, his approach differs from Davidson's.

    Davidson relies on overall coherence within the web of beliefs to make this distinction. For instance, if I believe it looks like there's a cat on the mat (LE), but I also believe that I'm currently looking at a hologram (based on other beliefs), coherence favors the belief that my experience is illusory. However, this approach still faces the challenge of explaining how experience itself contributes to justification, beyond merely triggering beliefs that are then assessed for coherence.

    McDowell, in contrast, addresses this through a form of disjunctivism, understood through the lens of perceptual capacities. This view holds that veridical and illusory experiences, while they may be subjectively indistinguishable, fundamentally differ in terms of the capacities they involve. In veridical perception, our capacity for rational, perceptual engagement with the world is successfully exercised. We are in genuine, perceptually-mediated, rational contact with the fact that P, and this contact provides a reason for believing that P. In an illusion, this capacity, while engaged, fails to be properly actualized due to misleading circumstances. The experience may seem the same, but it does not involve the same successful exercise of our capacity for rational engagement, and therefore does not provide the same kind of reason for belief. This capacity-based understanding of disjunctivism (that I also owe to Sebastian Rödl and Andrea Kern) aligns with direct realist conceptions of perception, where we directly perceive the world, not internal representations. It also allows McDowell to reject "highest common factor" views, where both veridical and illusory experiences are thought to share a common element (like a mental representation). If both types of experiences involved the same actualized capacity, it would be difficult to explain how experience can justify beliefs. By focusing on the success or failure of our capacity for perceptual knowledge, McDowell provides a more intuitive understanding of how experience can rationally constrain our beliefs, even though our perceptual capacities are fallible.

    So, while both Davidson and McDowell reject the scheme/content dualism, McDowell's disjunctivist approach, by giving experience a genuine rational role, arguably does a better job of securing this rejection. It avoids the pitfalls of reducing experience to a mere causal intermediary, thereby providing a more robust account of how our beliefs are answerable to the (always already conceptually structured) world.
  • Banno
    26.1k
    It might help if you would sketch the argument that you take McDowell to be misapprehendingPierre-Normand

    Why? I'm not making McDowell's argument. If you think he has a case, then you can make it.

    Thanks for the response.

    We ought be careful not to think of seeing the cat on the mat as happening in isolation, especially since this is what Davidson says does not happen. That what we see is interpreted as cat and mat is not seperate to the belief - in a sense it is the belief, caused by the physics and physiology of the situation. The physics and physiology cause the belief that the cat is on the mat; the "experience" doesn't "contribute to the justification" that you see the cat, since there is no justification. You see the cat. The experience is not isolated from the beliefs.

    So thinking of LE as a belief about your experience would not fit Davidson's account. Part of what is going on here is an ambiguity in introducing the term "experience". A better way to say this would be that the physics and physiology cause the belief; dropping the word "experience".
  • Apustimelogist
    676
    [reply="Banno;964071"

    I think I will have to look at that paper again, On the idea of conceptual schemes, but I believe I more-or-less agree on things in there iirc.

    Indeed, it is problematic to attribute beliefs to the spider at all, since beliefs sit within the broader framework of of triangulation, interpretation, and hence occur at a level that it utterly foreign to the spider.Banno

    instead, mental descriptions are interpreted within the broader context of social practices and linguistic frameworks.Banno

    Yes, I think these are some good points.
  • Leontiskos
    3.7k
    Why? I'm not making McDowell's argument. If you think he has a case, then you can make it.Banno

    Because you said:

    The "Need" McDowel sees to "distinguish the experience" suggests a profound misapprehension of Davidson's much more subtle argument.Banno

    So you want to critique and call out McDowell while simultaneously avoiding giving any substantive account of what you think McDowell is saying. If Pierre-Normand doesn't even have a clear account of what you are accusing McDowell of, how is he supposed to engage with the content of your accusation? :chin:
  • Pierre-Normand
    2.5k
    We ought be careful not to think of seeing the cat on the mat as happening in isolation, especially since this is what Davidson says does not happen. That what we see is interpreted as cat and mat is not seperate to the belief - in a sense it is the belief, caused by the physics and physiology of the situation. The physics and physiology cause the belief that the cat is on the mat; the "experience" doesn't "contribute to the justification" that you see the cat, since there is no justification. You see the cat. The experience is not isolated from the beliefs.

    So thinking of LE as a belief about your experience would not fit Davidson's account. Part of what is going on here is an ambiguity in introducing the term "experience". A better way to say this would be that the physics and physiology cause the belief; dropping the word "experience".
    Banno

    It is also common ground that acts of perceptual experience, and acts of perceptually grounded judgements, don't occur in isolation. McDowell draws not only on Davidson, but also on Kant, Frege and Sellars, in maintaining that contents of propositional attitudes are essentially conceptually articulated with many more such attitudes (e.g. many other experiences, beliefs and intentions, according to McDowell, mainly beliefs, according to Davidson).

    To illustrate this difference, let's return to our example. Suppose our subject doesn't know where the cat is. So, she looks for the mat and sees the cat laying on it. On Davidson's account, she acquires the belief that the cat is on the mat, a belief that, we are to suppose, she takes to have been caused by the presence of the cat via the normal workings of physics and physiology. She ensures that this newly acquired belief doesn't undermine the overall coherence of her web of belief (e.g. doesn't clash with the belief that she had brought her cat to the vet for being euthanatized the week before). We then have, indirectly, a source of empirical justification mediated by the newly acquired belief that the cat is on the mat which, she speculate, she has been caused to acquire by the worldly presence of the cat on the mat (where the causal mediation is a matter of physics and physiology).

    You might object that there's no justification involved when we see the cat on the mat, only the causal impact of physics and physiology on our belief-forming mechanisms. While it's true that physics and physiology play a causal role in perception, McDowell's point is that our experience, as a conceptually structured, conscious state, provides us with reasons for our beliefs, not just causal antecedents.

    When our subject sees the cat on the mat (in the factive sense of 'sees'), she's not merely undergoing a causal process; she's having an experience as of a cat on the mat, an experience that, on McDowell's view, has rational significance. This experience, on McDowell's view, provides her with a reason to believe that the cat is on the mat because in having this experience, the fact of the cat being on the mat is made manifest to her. In such a case, her reason is grounded in her direct perceptual contact with the fact itself, a contact that is made possible by her being part of the conceptually structured, perceptible world. Of course, she might be mistaken about whether she is actually seeing a cat on the mat; she might unknowingly be in the illusory 'bad case' where it merely seems to her as if she is seeing a cat on the mat. But when she is in the normal 'good case', her experience provides a conclusive reason.

    Davidson, by contrast, can only say that the presence of the cat, via physics and physiology, caused her to form the belief. He can appeal to the overall coherence of her web of beliefs to explain why she retains this belief, and he can appeal to the process of radical interpretation to argue that most of her beliefs must be true. But this doesn't fully address the question of how her experience, in the moment, provides her with a reason to believe that the cat is on the mat. It only explains how the belief came about and how it fits with her other beliefs.

    Ultimately, the disagreement boils down to whether experience plays a purely causal role in the formation of our beliefs (Davidson) or whether it also plays a rational role in their justification (McDowell). McDowell's view, by giving experience a rational role, provides a more satisfying account of how our beliefs are answerable to the world, not just causally connected to it.
  • Janus
    16.7k
    How are basic empirical judgments primarily justified? You might judge that the cat is on the mat because you looked and saw that it is. What happened when you looked? On McDowell's view, the conceptual elements that make up this perceptual content—along with your self-conception as a being with sense perception, the Kantian 'I think'—are passively drawn upon in experience. This allows you to judge that the cat is on the mat based on it visually appearing to you that it is.Pierre-Normand

    On Davidson's view, the presence of the cat on the mat causes you to acquire the belief that the cat is on the mat. New perceptual beliefs might trigger revisions of prior beliefs, in line with his coherentism. However, Davidson would describe illusory or misleading perceptions as cases where the world causes us to form a false belief. The experience is still the causation of a belief, regardless of its truth.Pierre-Normand

    If on McDowell's view my acquisition of language including the categories of *cat* and ^mat* along with my self-conception as a being with sense perception enables me to judge or believe there is a cat on the mat when I see one, what would allow a dog to believe it sees a cat on the mat?

    I don't find any convincing reason for bringing belief into it as a primary aspect of the experience. I see the cat, just as the dog does. The fact that I am symbolic language-competent enables me to formulate the judgement or belief that I see a cat. I see that as the only difference between myself and the dog. How it is that the pre-cognitive effects the environment/ world have on dogs and humans enable the dog and me to see particular things in our respective umwelts, to "see things as whatever" cannot be anything to do with language and culture.

    It seems to me that language and culture just enable a voice to be given to what is seen—I see no reason to think they determine what is seen beyond perhaps what variously stands out for the dog and for me. Even there we might say that in the dog's case what stands out is determined very little or not at all by culture, but by physiology and biology, and even in my case physiology and biology would seem to be prior to culture in the order of such determinations.

    Looked at this way I don't see that McDowell improves on Davidson's view. Do you think we can say that the world is always already interpreted for the dog?
  • Banno
    26.1k
    Thanks for the response. Perhaps we re talking past each other? So I'll try again.

    This experience, on McDowell's view, provides her with a reason to believe that the cat is on the mat because in having this experience, the fact of the cat being on the mat is made manifest to her.Pierre-Normand

    Now this is at odds with Davidson, but also I think it is not accurate. The "experience" here is already the belief that the cat is on the mat, already interpreted. So if it were to "give you a reason" to think the cat is on the mat, that would amount to "the cat is on the mat becasue the cat is on the mat".

    It's not too far from Moore's "Here is a hand"...

    Seeing that the cat is on the mat is not a reason to think the cat is on the mat so much as believing that the cat is on the mat...

    So we have two differing accounts, and I think Davidson's the better.
  • Banno
    26.1k
    Do you think we can say that the world is always already interpreted for the dog?Janus

    I like that. What a bugger of a question!
  • Banno
    26.1k
    Your criticism worries me more than McDowell's.

    ...those affections feed into our thinking in ways we cannot hope to understandJanus
    But we do increasingly understand how the stuff around us works on our neural system... so I'm not convinced of this.
  • Pierre-Normand
    2.5k
    If on McDowell's view my acquisition of language including the categories of *cat* and *mat* along with my self-conception as a being with sense perception enables me to judge or believe there is a cat on the mat when I see one, what would allow a dog to believe it sees a cat on the mat?Janus

    I'm only quoting part of your post but I read it all and here are two notes that I wrote for myself and that I intended to flesh out. Gemini did flesh them out brilliantly, but since AI generated content understandably isn't suitable for posting here, I posted it in my second AI thread to showcase Gemini's abilities. (It is, of course, merely optional reading for you. You can feel free to read only my notes below and state your objections or ask for clarifications.

    Note 1

    What comes to mind is the neglect of the distinction between 'seeing X' where X is the object being seen but "X" isn't necessarily part of the intentional content of the subjects intentional state, which depends on their conception of an "X" and "seeing that X", where "that X" not only has propositional content but also richly conceptually articulated intentional content. When a dog sees a cat, they grasp affordances (e.g. something to cuddle with, to bark at, to keep a safe distance from, etc.). When a human being sees a cat, they also grasp direct behavioral affordances, arguable different in character than those of the dog, but they also grasp a whole new class of affordances for navigating the space of reasons for purposes both of theoretical and practical reasoning. Their linguistically mediated conceptual structuring of the world enables them to grasp affordances such as planning to buy food for the dog later in the afternoon, inquiring if its the same dog that they saw on the front lawn the day before, etc. etc. etc.

    Note 2

    The whole conceptual apparatus that Davidson and McDowell bring to bear on dismantling a duality of mind and world that relinquishes the latter outside of the space of reason (and the former behind a veil of appearances) is meant to specifically address the epistemic predicament of rational animals. So, my response will not satisfy Janus's worry that Davidson and McDowell's rejection of the duality of empirical content and conceptual scheme since it will appear to him that the world of the dog and the human world and incommensurable just in the way that Davidson purports to deny. But my rejoinder to this would be simply to assert that the dog, owing to it not being rational, is blind to the aspects of the world that our rational abilities disclose (including affordances for reasoning practically and theoretically) while, on the other hand, our different animal nature makes it simply hard to grasp affordances of the specifically canine form of life. But Davidson's considerations about charity and interpretation still suggest that our making sense of the behavior of dogs (which we do to a large extent) signifies that we at least are able to achieve good approximate understandings of their "empirical" world, which is the same as ours albeit viewed with different emphases.
  • jkop
    948
    Seeing that the cat is on the mat is not a reason to think the cat is on the mat so much as believing that the cat is on the mat...Banno

    I'd say seeing it presents it, unlike the belief which one can maintain or change regardless of the whereabouts of the cat. You won't keep on seeing the cat on the mat when it hops up on the chair. The visual experience is then the cat on the chair. This suggests that seeing is different from believing, and that seeing can be used as a reason for believing that the cat is on the mat (or on the chair).
  • Pierre-Normand
    2.5k
    I'd say seeing it presents it, unlike the belief which one can maintain or change regardless of the whereabouts of the cat. You won't keep on seeing the cat on the mat when it hops up on the chair. The visual experience is then the cat on the chair. This suggests that seeing is different from believing, and that seeing can be used as a reason for believing that the cat is on the mat (or on the chair).jkop

    Your point about seeing being different from believing is well-taken. Seeing the cat on the mat indeed presents the cat being on the mat in a way that merely believing doesn't. This connects to Sellars's important insight that empirical knowledge can be non-inferential without being non-conceptual.

    Sellars rejected the "Myth of the Given," the idea that our knowledge rests on a foundation of non-conceptual experiences. He argued that all awareness involves the application of concepts. But he also recognized that we can have non-inferential knowledge—knowledge that isn't inferred from other beliefs.

    When we see the cat on the mat, we don't infer that it's there from other beliefs. Our knowledge is direct and immediate. But it's still conceptual, involving the concepts 'cat,' 'mat,' etc. This is what Sellars meant by 'looks' talk. I can report 'It looks to me as if there's a cat on the mat' without making an inference. This report is a "language entry transition," a move within the space of reasons that's occasioned by my transactions with the world.

    McDowell builds on this Sellarsian account. He argues that in veridical perception, our conceptual capacities are passively actualized in experience, allowing the world to be directly present to us. This is why seeing the cat on the mat can provide a reason for believing that it's there. The experience is not an inference, but it's also not a non-conceptual 'given.' It's a conceptually structured 'entry' into the space of reasons, providing a rational basis for belief.

    This also highlights why Davidson's purely causal account is insufficient. While Davidson acknowledges that beliefs are caused by the world, he doesn't give experience itself a rational role in justification. For McDowell, following Sellars, experience is not just a causal intermediary; it's a non-inferential but conceptually structured encounter with the world that provides reasons for our beliefs.
  • jkop
    948
    Sellars rejected the "Myth of the Given," the idea that our knowledge rests on a foundation of non-conceptual experiences. He argued that all awareness involves the application of concepts. But he also recognized that we can have non-inferential knowledge—knowledge that isn't inferred from other beliefs.

    When we see the cat on the mat, we don't infer that it's there from other beliefs. Our knowledge is direct and immediate. But it's still conceptual... .
    Pierre-Normand

    To say that knowledge is direct and immediate yet conceptual seems incoherent. Do we experience the cat or the concept?

    While Davidson acknowledges that beliefs are caused by the world, he doesn't give experience itself a rational role in justification.Pierre-Normand

    The belief that the cat is on the mat is caused by (experiencing) the cat on the mat.

    One might add, that the way the cat is on the mat, or one's angle of view etc. fixes the experience to be a certain way. I think these are examples of what's "given" and available for us to discover in the experience.
  • Joshs
    5.9k


    This also highlights why Davidson's purely causal account is insufficient. While Davidson acknowledges that beliefs are caused by the world, he doesn't give experience itself a rational role in justification. For McDowell, following Sellars, experience is not just a causal intermediary; it's a non-inferential but conceptually structured encounter with the world that provides reasons for our beliefsPierre-Normand

    Joseph Rouse entered into the debate involving Davidson, Brandom and McDowell, concluding that while McDowell was right to accuse Davidson’s approach of treating conceptual thought as a “frictionless spinning in a void”, McDowell’s attempt to ground conceptually-mediated perception in the nature of objects of the world ends up in the same quagmire.

    Each view develops its own model of conceptual understanding as a Sellarsian “space of reasons”: Davidsonian radical interpretation, McDowell's second-nature acculturation as rational animals, Brandom's game of giving and asking for reasons, or Haugeland's account of constitutive skills, standards, and commitments. Each then tries to show how performances within this space of reasons are genuinely constrained externally, by objects, experience, or the world. Their critics, myself included, respond that only the semblance of constraint has been demonstrated: we are left with a “frictionless spinning in a void,” a second nature disconnected from any explicable relation to first nature, a self-contained game of intralinguistic moves in which perception and action always remain “external,” or a self-binding commitment with no greater normative authority and force than New Year's resolutions.

    Common to these accounts is an understanding of us as thinking and knowing subjects (whether as individuals or as discursive communities) who “have” conceptions of things in the form of mental representations or intralinguistic dis-cursive commitments. “Objects” “stand against” these conceptions as external normative constraints upon what we (should) think, say, and do, via their experiential or causal impingements upon us from “outside.” In each case, their externality to the conceptual or epistemic domain (ascribed in order to provide the needed constraint or “friction”) blocks any effective engagement with epistemic justification or conceptual understanding. My account begins differently. We are not subjects confronting external objects but organisms living in active interchange with an environment. An organism is not a self-contained entity but a dynamic pattern of interaction with its surroundings (which include other conspecific organisms). The boundary that separates the organism proper from its surrounding environment is not the border of an entity but a component of a larger pattern of interaction that is the organism/environment complex.
  • Count Timothy von Icarus
    3.2k
    R. Scott Bakker has a neat paper on this question.

    Given a sufficiently convergent cognitive biology, we might suppose that aliens would likely find themselves perplexed by many of the same kinds of problems that inform our traditional and contemporary philosophical debates. In particular, we can presume that ‘humanoid’ aliens would be profoundly stumped by themselves, and that they would possess a philosophical tradition organized around ‘hard problems’ falling out of their inability to square their scientificself-understanding with their traditional and/or intuitive self-understanding. As speculative as any such consideration of ‘alien philosophy’ must be, it provides a striking, and perhaps important, way to recontextualize contemporary human debates regarding cognition and consciousness.

    I rarely agree with Bakker on philosophy, but he is normally thought provoking



    Do we experience the cat or the concept?

    A good question.

    If sensation were not any different from imagination, and if belief, memory, etc. were dominant, it would be hard to explain why people often listen to songs they know by heart, watch their favorite movies very many times, or how cooks, prostitutes, theme parks, etc. all stay in business (since presumably visiting them multiple times doesn't do much to affect our beliefs about them, or perhaps even our memories). Likewise, there are all sorts of neurological disorders whose affects seem largely contained to concept recollection or word recall. Yet such disorders are not the same thing as being deaf or blind. As far as can be ascertained, it seems possible for the visual field to be largely unaffected (e.g. people can draw what they see, and navigate the world) even as a person losses the ability to attach concepts (e.g. "what a thing is and is used for") to what they experience.

    Sometimes it is argued that such disorders show that the all external objects must be "constructed," or must be "representations" of some sort. I don't find this conclusive at all. To the contrary, I think the most obvious reason to suppose that man has the capacity for picking out plants from rocks, a branch above from the sky, or a tiger from the jungle background, is that these things exist, and that it is very important for us to recognize them directly in sensation. So, while "what is experienced" might be, in some sense, the interaction of the sense organ and ambient environment (that latter of which mediates through its interactions with the objects sensed), this does not preclude a strong "sense realism," since this sort of mediation is hardly unique in physical interactions. Indeed, all physical interactions might be said to involve some sort of mediation, yet "everything is received in the manner of the receiver," does not presuppose "everything is received as representation."

    On a related note, I've come to have the opinion that a great many "escapes from representationalism" are just replacing one form of representationalism (normally a caricature of early modern versions) with some alternative form.
  • Joshs
    5.9k


    , there are all sorts of neurological disorders whose affects seem largely contained to concept recollection or word recall. Yet such disorders are not the same thing as being deaf or blind. As far as can be ascertained, it seems possible for the visual field to be largely unaffected (e.g. people can draw what they see, and navigate the world) even as a person losses the ability to attach concepts (e.g. "what a thing is and is used for") to what they experience.Count Timothy von Icarus

    The fact that neurological damage can manifest itself at different levels of perceptual processing doesn’t mean that the ‘lower’ levels of processing of the visual field arent as conceptually saturated as the higher levels. The effects of lsd and optical illusions both reveal how at the lowest level conceptual expectations organize the appearance of the seen world.

    I think the most obvious reason to suppose that man has the capacity for picking out plants from rocks, a branch above from the sky, or a tiger from the jungle background, is that these things exist, and that it is very important for us to recognize them directly in sensation. So, while "what is experienced" might be, in some sense, the interaction of the sense organ and ambient environment (that latter of which mediates through its interactions with the objects sensed), this does not preclude a strong "sense realism," since this sort of mediation is hardly unique in physical interactions. Indeed, all physical interactions might be said to involve some sort of mediation, yet "everything is received in the manner of the receiver," does not presuppose "everything is received as representation."Count Timothy von Icarus

    Most contributors to the Philosophy Forum share, to one extent or other, your belief that the meaning of the truth of the world is ultimately bound up with the way things are outside of , and pre-existing, our interactions with them or our schematic constructions of them, even if we never have direct acces to such a reality. The philosophical positions I endorse, however, insist that our contact with the world is neither that of indirect representation nor direct seeing of an independent reality. Instead, to perceive a world is to enact it or produce it. Let me make it clear that enaction is not the imaginative act of a mind. In interacting with our environment, we don’t internally model an outside world, we produce an actual world. More precisely , an absolutely new, never before existing aspect of world is produced through our practical engagement with our physical and social surrounds. It is neither from inside a mind nor from the world that this production of the new proceeds, but in-between the two.

    The reason is that world is not a flat space of pre-existing objects for us to encounter, is that it is continually changing itself nature, and human -world interaction is just one manifestation of this. Since for the realist meaning and truth require an anchoring in a nature composed of pre-existing objects, the idea of what sounds like a chaos of Heraclitus flux would seem to destroy the very possibility of meaningful truth and replace it with nihilism. But meaning isn’t the product of fixed, pre-existing facts, it is a function of the experience of patterns of familiarity, relevance and consistency within the always changing flow of events that we enact in our inter-affecting with world. Nihilism and meaninglessness is only a possibility to the extent that we try to freeze the flow of events into fixed , pre-existing objective facts. And even when we think this way, we are still enacting a new world implicitly while we explicitly hold to our belief in the objective independence of the facts of reality for our engagement with the world.

    That the enacted world of continual becoming is not a chaotic, senseless flux is demonstrated by the fact that it allows us to theorize it in realist terms as directly perceived or indirectly represented. To abandon realism for enactivism doesn’t at all mean that we have to abandon the security and stability provided by belief in independently existing ‘facts’ of nature. It instead allows us to replace the arbitrariness and duality of such models with a way of thinking which sees our relation to the world as more intimate, connected and relevantly meaningful.
  • Janus
    16.7k
    So, my response will not satisfy Janus's worry that Davidson and McDowell's rejection of the duality of empirical content and conceptual scheme since it will appear to him that the world of the dog and the human world and incommensurable just in the way that Davidson purports to deny. But my rejoinder to this would be simply to assert that the dog, owing to it not being rational, is blind to the aspects of the world that our rational abilities disclose (including affordances for reasoning practically and theoretically)while, on the other hand, our different animal nature makes it simply hard to grasp affordances of the specifically canine form of life.Pierre-Normand

    When a dog sees a cat, they grasp affordances (e.g. something to cuddle with, to bark at, to keep a safe distance from, etc.).Pierre-Normand

    The underlined part seems to contradict what you say below it. Also I don't agree that dogs are not rational—I think they are capable of reasoning, although obviously not linguistically mediated reasoning.

    When you say that Davidson and McDowell reject "the duality of empirical content and conceptual scheme" are you suggesting that they believe there is no difference between experience and what we judge to be the case on account of experience?

    When Davidson understands experience to be always already interpreted I take him to mean that it is always to some degree conceptually mediated. Is the conceptual only possible in the context of symbolic language? Surely, we allow that gestalts are for animals as well as humans. Gestalts involve recognition, which arguably involves pattern recognition. Should we understand pattern recognition as well as the understanding of the significance for the animal of what is recognized as a kind of (proto in the case of non-linguistically mediated) process of conceptualization?

    I never agreed with Wittgenstein's assertion that if a lion could speak we would not understand him. Why would we not be able to understand the lion if he spoke our language? The lion is not all that different from us. For me the idea that we could not understand the lion stinks of human exceptionalism. So contrary to what you say I do not see animal's experience as being radically incommensurable with human experience. They eat, drink, run, walk, swim or fly, smell, taste, hear, see, feel, mate and so on just as we do.


    Your criticism worries me more than McDowell's.

    ...those affections feed into our thinking in ways we cannot hope to understand
    — Janus
    But we do increasingly understand how the stuff around us works on our neural system... so I'm not convinced of this.
    Banno

    I didn't mean to say that we could never develop a scientific understanding of what goes on with the pre-cognitive effects of the environment on the organism, but that they are not a part of our conscious experience in vivo and hence cannot play a part in or be used to justify our directly reasoned perceptually based judgements.

    So, I don't see that McDowell has solved a puzzle that Davidson failed to solve. It's Sellar's problem of integrating the space of causes with the space of reasons, and I see little reason to think that it can be achieved. I think it's just a fact about our limitations, and about our inability to transcend dualism in thought.

    We can recognize that the world is not really dualistic, but it seems that language is nonetheless inherently dualistic because to understand propositionally is to separate what is experienced from the experiencer. Just look at the title of McDowell's book: Mind and World for example.
  • Pierre-Normand
    2.5k
    So, I don't see that McDowell has solved a puzzle that Davidson failed to solve. It's Sellar's problem of integrating the space of causes with the space of reasons, and I see little reason to think that it can be achieved. I think it's just a fact about our limitations, and about our inability to transcend dualism in thought.Janus

    (This was your reply to Banno but I'd like to address it also. I'll then address your comments to me in another post.)

    One problem that many modern philosophers have faced with integrating the space of laws (our conception of which makes intelligible the phenomena of some of the natural sciences) with the space of reasons (our conception of which makes intelligible the thoughts, claims and actions of human beings) is, on my view, the wrongheaded identification of the space of causes with the space of laws. By 'space of laws,' I mean the realm of nomological regularities, the kind of law-governed processes that are typically studied by the natural sciences. I hadn't seen that clearly until I read Eric Marcus's wonderful book—Rational Causation—(that has helped me understand how human actions fit in the causal order). Marcus states in his first sentence of the acknowledgement: 'I was profoundly influenced by John McDowell’s classes at the University of Pittsburgh in the 1990s. The “space of causes,” he taught, straddles the non-overlapping “space of reasons” and “space of laws,” a metaphor that fits the central thesis of this book.'

    Marcus's central thesis is that reasons are causes, but they are not reducible to the kind of law-governed causes that operate in the physical world. They belong to a distinct category of 'rational causation' where causes are not related to effects in a nomological manner. Elizabeth Anscombe, Jennifer Hornsby and Michael Thompson also have helped me see how human actions and intentions are both causal and rational (and conceptual) but not thereby nomological.

    In his writings on action and the philosophy of mind, unlike his writings on language and interpretation (although his treatments of language and meaning create an overlap), Davison attempts to make causation bridge the space of laws with the space of reasons with his appeal to the nomological character of causation, which seeks to salvage the normative non-nomological character of the source of human actions while making them fit within the natural order. This doesn't work, on my view, and likely is motivated by his identification of intentional human actions with the physical motions that occurs (within their bodies and brains) when they form intentions and/or act.

    Davidson's insistence that all causation is nomological makes it difficult to see how reasons (and episodes of practical deliberation), which are not governed by strict laws in the same way, can be genuinely causal. He notoriously subsumes both of those under the neutral category of 'events'; this is his thesis of anomalous monism. However, as David Wiggins has brilliantly argued in Sameness and Substance, two things can be at the same place at the same time and not be the same things or the same event. We need to attend to their different criteria of persistence and individuation to trace their distinctly protracted trajectories. As Wiggins argues, a physical event, like the movement of my hand, might momentarily coincide with an intentional action, like my raising my hand to vote, but they are not the same event. The action has a rational and temporal structure that the physical event lacks. Human actions take place in the natural world and may, in a sense, supervene on physical events, but aren't on that account physical events.

    McDowell's project, in part, is to show how we can understand reasons as causes without reducing them to law-governed processes. He does this by rejecting the narrow conception of causation that Davidson inherits from a broadly Humean tradition, and by emphasizing the role of conceptual capacities in shaping our experience and guiding our actions. I don't wish here to expand anymore on how McDowell, or others, like Joseph Rouse and Jennifer Hornsby, purport to achieve the requisite integration. Banno would rightfully complain about this being off topic. But I just wanted to point out how the resistance to such an integration (or failure to achieve it) might present itself in Davidson's philosophy. If however, we take our departure from his seminal work on radical interpretations, and jettison some of the claims that he makes on the metaphysics of "mental events" (and "bodily actions,") we can then view him as an ally on the path towards this reintegration and towards the rejections of a dualism of conceptual scheme and empirical content.
  • Janus
    16.7k
    What you say raises an interesting issue. On the one hand it seems obvious that a rational argument can either convince or fail to convince. In the cases where it convinces, we might say the argument caused a conviction to be adopted. The question is then why does a rationally valid and sound argument not convince? It might be that, even if the argument is perfectly valid, the presuppositions it is based on are not accepted by the person who fails to be convinced. If we are being honest and unbiased, and we understand what counts as a valid argument we are not free to choose whether or not we accept it as valid, but we might reject it nonetheless because we fail to accept its grounding assumptions. Are we really free to accept or reject grounding assumptions? Of course we are in principle, just as in principle we might say we are free to like or dislike ice cream.

    In any case, if we reject the idea that all causes, and in particular rational arguments, are nomological or strictly law governed then we might still maintain that integrating the space of reasons and the space of laws is impossible because we are incapable of understanding our actions in vivo in terms of causation. The example you give of the difference between raising the hand to vote as opposed to just raising it for no reason might be explained by saying that different brain regions or processes are involved in each case, but that both actions are strictly caused by the brain.

    Marcus's central thesis is that reasons are causes, but they are not reducible to the kind of law-governed causes that operate in the physical world. They belong to a distinct category of 'rational causation' where causes are not related to effects in a nomological manner. Elizabeth Anscombe, Jennifer Hornsby and Michael Thompson also have helped me see how human actions and intentions are both causal and rational (and conceptual) but not thereby nomological.Pierre-Normand

    This also seems pertinent: the Merriam Webster Dictionary defines 'nomological' thus:

    "relating to or expressing basic physical laws or rules of reasoning".
  • Pierre-Normand
    2.5k
    What you say raises an interesting issue. On the one hand it seems obvious that a rational argument can either convince or fail to convince. In the cases where it convinces, we might say the argument caused a conviction to be adopted. The question is then why does a rationally valid and sound argument not convince? It might be that, even if the argument is perfectly valid, the presuppositions it is based on are not accepted by the person who fails to be convinced. If we are being honest and unbiased, and we understand what counts as a valid argument we are not free to choose whether or not we accept it as valid, but we might reject it nonetheless because we fail to accept its grounding assumptions. Are we really free to accept or reject grounding assumptions? Of course we are in principle, just as in principle we might say we are free to like or dislike ice cream.Janus

    The fact that the argument, even if its a conclusively good argument, may fail to convince highlights a key distinction between norms and laws, and their respective "direction of fit". When a phenomenon is found to fail to obey a putative law, then the putative law is (at leas prima facie) falsified. There is something wrong with our understanding of the laws of nature if some phenomena genuinely fail to abide by them. When an human being fails to abide by a rational norm (or an animal's behavior or physiology fails to exemplify a ethological or biological norm) then there is something wrong with their thought process or motivation (or perceptual circumstances, health, or metabolism). What this also means is that norms of human behavior (and norms of biological functioning) point to the, indeed, "normal," form of behavior, but a person's (or animal's) abiding by them reflects the actualisation of fallible capacities. It's because our rational abilities are fallible that our occasional failures to abide by them don't "falsify" those norms as genuine explanatory principles of human behavior, and neither do they indicate that we don't have those capacities. Just as is the case in epistemological disjunctivism (which concerns itself with our rational capacities for justified knowledge) we can occasionally fail to abide by norms of practical rationality without this indicating that, in the case where we do abide by them, the rational norms that we rely on to govern ourselves aren't causally effective (in the sense that they constitute genuinely non-redundant explanatory factors of our behavior).

    I would not say that, when we like ice cream, we are free not to like it, anymore than, when we are sensitive to good reasons, we are free to disregard them. But in those cases, I follow Susan Wolf who, in Freedom Within Reason, argues that free will (or rational autonomy) doesn't consist in the ability to freely choose between a reasonable and an unreasonable option but rather in having acquired rational abilities through becoming (mainly by means of upbringing and acculturation) asymmetrically sensitive to good reasons. We always remain fallible, and the ineliminable asymmetry consists in the fact that rational or irrational behavior have distinct modes of explanation—our rational behaviors being explained by our sensitivity to reasons, and our failures to behave rationally being explained by interfering factors, which we may sometimes (e.g. drugs, stokes or misleading information) or may not (e.g. callousness or intellectual laziness) be exculpated or excused for.
  • Alonsoaceves
    22
    I loved your post Frank, It left me thinking about your example. It resonated with what I read years ago when I read House of Leaves. Navidson's house represents our limitation of understanding; the universe is actually like Navidson's house. At times, we all feel like Johnny Truant and struggle to make sense of things.
  • Pierre-Normand
    2.5k
    Joseph Rouse entered into the debate involving Davidson, Brandom and McDowell, concluding that while McDowell was right to accuse Davidson’s approach of treating conceptual thought as a “frictionless spinning in a void”, McDowell’s attempt to ground conceptually-mediated perception in the nature of objects of the world ends up in the same quagmire.Joshs

    I would not say that Rouse charges McDowell in ending up in the exact same quagmire. Rather, although Rouse endorses McDowell's criticism of Davidson, he wishes to fulfill more effectively than McDowell does the project of accounting for the intelligibility of our rational nature within a naturalistic framework and understanding of natural sciences. He does seem to charge McDowell with too often or too closely assimilating the intelligibility of the order of first nature (i.e. our pre-conceptual animal nature as opposed to our linguistically informed and acculturated second-nature) with the realm of laws (physics, chemistry, etc.) And I am sympathetic to this criticism.

    I've had Rouse's book 'How Scientific Practices Matter: Reclaiming Philosophical Naturalism' sitting on my shelves for many years and haven't read it yet just because there only are twenty-four hours in a day. But I greatly enjoyed the book ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’: The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons that he co-authored with Rebecca Kukla. I just now found an excellent review of How Scientific Matter written by Kukla. I greatly recommend it.

    Let me quote from Willem deVries who in his SEP entry about Sellars wrote:

    "Sellars studies has been dominated by a clash between the “right-wing Sellarsians” (e.g., Patricia and Paul Churchland, Ruth Millikan, Jay Rosenberg), who emphasize Sellars’s scientific realism and nominalism, and the “left-wing Sellarsians” (e.g., Rorty, McDowell, and Brandom), who emphasize instead Sellars’s insistence on the irreducibility and sociality of rules and norms."

    In his contribution to the volume Rorty and His Critics, Bjørn Ramberg wrote a very illuminating paper—Post-ontological Philosophy of Mind: Rorty versus Davidson—, indeed my favorite contribution in the whole volume, and one that Rorty was very receptive to, that I now forgot much of the substance of except that it illuminatingly shows how moving a bit from right-wing towards left-wing Sellarisianism can help Rorty illuminate the notion of rational causation while enabling Rorty to avoid some of his scientistic/reductionistic tendencies, within the bounds of naturalism. A few years ago, I had gone to Oslo University to attend (uninvited!) a philosophical workshop organised by Jennifer Hornsby (about Helen Steward's newly published A Metaphysics for Freedom) and I ran into Ramberg in a corridor, not even knowing he was teaching there. But when he told me his name, I was immediately able to praise him for this specific paper that had impressed me so much.

    If I can find the time, I'll reread Ramberg's paper and attend closely to what he had to say about Davidson and mental causation.
  • Pierre-Normand
    2.5k
    This also seems pertinent: the Merriam Webster Dictionary defines 'nomological' thus:

    "relating to or expressing basic physical laws or rules of reasoning".
    Janus

    It's relevant but also misleading. This is how the term is being used broadly but, just like 'libertarianism' qua thesis about free will and determinism, and as opposed to the ethical/political philosophy championed by Ayn Rand, in specific philosophical contexts 'nomological' also has a narrower connotation. As used by Davidson, 'nomological' refers to a causally closed order of exeptionless laws of nature, precisely in opposition with the 'rules' (i.e. norms) of reasoning that may be expressed as ceteris paribus rules and that rational animals like us aren't always abiding by even when we should. It's indeed the 'anomalous' character of the 'rules of rationality' (and his token-identification of mental events with physical events) that motivate his 'anomalous monism'.
  • Joshs
    5.9k


    Roise does seem to charge McDowell with too often or too closely assimilating the intelligibility of the order of first nature (i.e. our pre-conceptual animal nature as opposed to our linguistically informed and acculturated second-nature) with the realm of laws (physics, chemistry, etc.) And I am sympathetic to this criticism.

    I've had Rouse's book 'How Scientific Practices Matter: Reclaiming Philosophical Naturalism' sitting on my shelves for many years and haven't read it yet just because there only are twenty-four hours in a day. But I greatly enjoyed the book ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’: The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons that he co-authored with Rebecca Kukla.
    Pierre-Normand

    I would add that a central point of Rouse’s is that our animal nature is not pre-conceptual at all. Also, the Yo and Lo book was by Kukla and Mark Lance.

    Tying this back to the OP, Rouse replaces the concept of conceptual scheme with that of normative discursive practices. Would Rouse respond differently than McDowell and Davidson to the question of whether it makes sense to talk of individuals or communities as living in ‘different worlds’? I think he would. I think Rouse’s treatment of material circumstances as already intertwined with normative practices makes the data of perceptual experience internal to social practices in a way that it is not for either Davidson or McDowell.
  • frank
    16.4k
    I loved your post Frank, It left me thinking about your example. It resonated with what I read years ago when I read House of Leaves. Navidson's house represents our limitation of understanding; the universe is actually like Navidson's house. At times, we all feel like Johnny Truant and struggle to make sense of things.Alonsoaceves

    Thank you! I hadn't heard of House of Leaves. I got a copy to read.
  • Janus
    16.7k
    I would not say that, when we like ice cream, we are free not to like it, anymore than, when we are sensitive to good reasons, we are free to disregard them. But in those cases, I follow Susan Wolf who, in Freedom Within Reason, argues that free will (or rational autonomy) doesn't consist in the ability to freely choose between a reasonable and an unreasonable option but rather in having acquired rational abilities through becoming (mainly by means of upbringing and acculturation) asymmetrically sensitive to good reasons.Pierre-Normand

    Since we don't create ourselves by fiat so to speak and given that we have no choice given who and what we are as to whether we are convinced by arguments or not. I'm not seeing much difference between the ideas of being convinced and being caused to be convinced.

    I also want to reiterate that once we look at the world as always already interpreted, then I think the interpreted evidence of the senses, although obviously sometimes mistaken, does provide good evidence and hence rational justification for both animals and humans for at least the basic beliefs about what is observed. I think we've explicated our respective positions pretty thoroughly so I'm not sure there's much more to say at this point. Thanks for your efforts and polite participation, Pierre.
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