Soft
facts: A space of reasons without tribunal of experience
Hilan
Bensusan
University of Brasilia
Manuel
de Pinedo
University of Granada
1. Introduction
John
McDowell has been maintaining that we can simultaneously accommodate the claims
supporting an idea of objectivity as thoughts’ being responsive to objects, and
avoid the criticisms against immediately given elements in our mental life. He
holds, further, that his minimal empiricism is the way to do justice both to
the idea that experience reveals objects of the world and to the thesis that
nothing can be seen without concepts. Minimal empiricism is understood as a way
to rehabilitate the notion of a tribunal of experience after renouncing any
appeal to the Given. In order to attain a position that satisfies both the
desiderata of traditional empiricism and the criticisms that it attracted, that
views the content of perceptual experience as conceptual and nature as
partially re-enchanted. In this work, we attempt to separate his views on
nature and experience from the theses that we need and that we can afford a
tribunal of experience. We shall argue
that minimal empiricism is not the only way to be responsive to objects through
experience that does not appeal to any immediate element in our mental life. In
contrast, we hold that the postulation of a tribunal of experience is both
unnecessary and unwarranted.
The picture we are
willing to recommend can come to view if we start out with McDowell’s
empiricism and proceed to purge it of any appeal to a tribunal of experience
and, in fact, to any distinction between empirical and non-empirical content or
mental items. This, we hold, should not stop us from talking about experience
as contributing to empirical knowledge or from taking its contents to present
themselves to us as reasons––we can comfortably accommodate McDowell’s
conception of experience as more than a
causal link between us and the world. To be more precise, what we want
to put into question is the thesis that there is something we can call a
tribunal of experience. The thesis can be formulated as follows:
(TE)
There is a subset of the space of reasons that is the genuine locus of
experience and this subset can be detected by its general features,
independently of the specific exchange of reasons at stake.
Our rejection of TE entails a rejection of any separate area of
reasoning that can be properly called experiencing; there are no specifiable
set of structured judgements that can be deemed empirical. Our rejection,
therefore, goes hands in hands with the rejection of Quine’s two dogmas of
empiricism (in conjunction with the rejection of the dogma of a dualism of
scheme and content). In fact, we will argue that McDowell’s rehabilitation of
TE requires his acceptance of the dogmas denounced by Quine. A thourough
rejection of the dogmas would therefore preclude TE and force us to think of
the connection between mind and world with no appeal to a specifiable interface
of experience. We shall argue that we have much to gain insisting on the unwarranted
character of these dogmas. Furthermore, we will also accomplish another
desideratum that both us and McDowell want to satisfy: cutting down on the
theoretical commitments and the constructive nature of our philosophizing:
section 5 will briefly deal with the issue of quietism.
We shall start
highlighting our points of convergence with McDowell. Sections 2 and 3
elaborate on how we attain a partial re-enchantment of nature and what this
entail for our conception of experience. We shall there make explicit the way
we understand some of the ideas of Kant, Hegel and Wittgenstein that have been
instrumental both for our project and McDowell’s. These sections present the
background for the argument. Section 4 endeavours to argue against TE and some
of its consequences and reinstates the case against the dogmas of empiricism
that Quine denounced. The last section concludes by elaboration of the notion
of experience without tribunal that we recommend.
2. McDowell, experience and objectivity
McDowell (1994, 1998, 2000) has been suggesting that in order to fully
understand how our thoughts could have a grip on the world, we need to rethink
the way the world relates to our conceptual practices. He urges us to exit the
oscillation between a frustrating commonsense conception of objectivity that
takes it to be grounded on pure, immediate input from experience––with no
interference from our conceptual exercises––on the one side and an image of our
reasoning where we are left entirely unconstrained by objects. The oscillation
has its root in a deep anxiety of modern philosophy, “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” (1994: xiii). This
Cartesian anxiety geared by the internalist assumption that we can make sense
of our mental life independently of the rest of the world seems to us, as to
McDowell, to demand more exorcism than compliance. We also agree with McDowell
that both poles of the oscillation can be avoided if we abandon the idea that our contact with nature cannot involve concepts and
the thesis that experience is merely a causal interaction with the rest of the
world. It helps now to appreciate how a different
position can come to view so that it starts to become clear that we need
nothing like TE above.
We often try to assure ourselves that our thinking is
capable of responding to the world. The commonsense way of understanding
objectivity––that corresponds to one of the poles of McDowell’s
oscillation––has it that we respond to the world because parts of it impinge on
us as contents of our thinking no matter
what else is going on in our mental life. This view is hostage to an
image that only an external element
could provide objective content to our thinking and act as the ultimate
justifier to our beliefs. This image––often present in the traditional
empiricist way to expect experience to satisfy our craving for
objectivity––postulates a channel that enables some contact with what is
external to thinking and seen as beyond the scope of our conceptual activities.
We can benefit from Kant’s distinction between receptivity and spontaneity to
make clear both the commonsense way of understanding objectivity and this image
of an immediately given element in our thinking. Kant contrasted the
spontaneity of reason, the contribution of our concepts and inferences, to the
production of knowledge—as Kant puts it: “the mind’s power to produce
representations from itself” (1781/7: A51/B75)—to receptivity, what is received
from the world. The position we have in mind concerning objectivity is one for
which receptivity acts unaided by any conceptual capability; it is utterly
indifferent to what takes place in spontaneity. What we get from the world,
what is given to us, constitutes the objective content of our thinking and can
be separated from the sovereign activities of our conceptual practices.
Kant inaugurated a way of thinking that is the
starting point of most criticisms of this commonsense conception of
objectivity. His master thought is that pure receptivity cannot inform us of
anything, for we need our conceptual capacities in order to make judgments.
Intuitions without concepts are somehow impaired (1781/7: A51/B76). Kant then
thought that our concepts play an essential role in the constitution of the
objects of our knowledge. Roughly speaking, the objects that come to view
through our experience and understanding are such that they depend on our
conceptual capacities without which our intuitions would not be operative. His
transcendental distinction between things-in-themselves and objects of our
knowledge enabled him to talk about the world as we know it while leaving
untouched the question about the way objects are beyond the reach of our
experience. The objects of our experience are not themselves guaranteed to be
genuine reality. Attaining objectivity
could be sacrificed in order to attain certainty for our empirical claims,
grounded on a priori judgments. In
Kant’s position whatever is constituted partly by concepts cannot be safely
considered anything but our reality.
Hegel attempted to take the spirit of Kant’s
master thought further and insisted that intuitions can only be contentful when
connected to concepts. He understood that Kant had not taken the concepts to be
constitutive of objects in general but only of objects of our experience. He
diagnosed Kant’s position as an incorrigible subjectivism[1]
for “[...] though the categories, such as unity, cause and effect, are strictly
the property of thought, it by no means follows that they must be ours merely
and not also the characteristics of the objects. Kant however confines them to
the subject-mind [...]” (1802: 70). Hegel, in contrast with Kant, advocates
that the objects are constituted, and not distorted, by our concepts and
judgments. He rejects Kant’s attempt to draw a transcendental distinction and
then elaborates on the Kantian master thought that intuitions without concepts
are blind. He argues, in the Kantian line, that if concepts are removed from
our thoughts about the world, our thoughts are left contentless and the world
is left unthought (1807: 73). He then suggests that the interplay between
concepts and intuitions is so intricate that we cannot conceive of one without
the other. Hegel criticizes Kant for always falling into the temptation of
separating them and think of them as “[...] only united in an external,
superficial way, just as a piece of wood and a leg might be bound together by a
cord” (1825-6: III, 441). Hegel wants to see intuitions and concepts more
intimately linked so that intelligibility requires concepts and no intuition
can show us or tell us anything (intelligible) without concepts. The upshot of
Hegel’s critique is that intuitions without concepts are not only blind for us but they are blind for any
(conceivable) intellect—provided that we could recognize it as an intellect.[2]
Hegel suggests that whatever remains outside the reach of our thinking must be
capable of becoming the content of a thought (1807: 165). Conceptual content can
be independent of our acts of thinking and yet be itself thinkable.
McDowell’s position, at least in his Mind and World, seems to lie in similar
territory. He would also reject the idea of an intuitive intellect and its
consequences for he insists that receptivity cannot even notionally be
separated from spontaneity (1994: 9). It follows that no receptivity could
function without concepts. He agrees that intuitions without concepts are
impaired for they would both fail in justifying our thoughts and in giving them
some kind of objective content. This is the root of his rejection of
traditional empiricism as expressed in Davidson’s critique of the dualism of
conceptual scheme and empirical content (1974). Davidson thought that the third
dogma could easily lead to skepticism. McDowell (2000: 92) sees a separate
problem with it:
the trouble with the [scheme-content] dualism
is [...] this: the very idea that the senses provide testimony becomes
unintelligible. ‘Intuitions without concepts’ are mute. If one nevertheless
cannot see how anything but answerability to intuitions could ensure that
thoughts are not empty, one’s predicament is more unnerving than any standard
skepticism. Standard skepticism takes for granted that we have a world view,
and merely questions whether we are entitled to it. The dualism, on my reading,
generates a much more radical anxiety—about whether we are in touch with
reality. Within the dualism, it becomes unintelligible that we can have a world
view at all.
The way out of the dualism is to consider that empirical content is
already conceptual. Experience, McDowell urges, is itself conceptual; it is
nevertheless the exercise of receptivity although always intertwined with
spontaneity. The content of experience “is not something one has put together
oneself, as when one decides what to say about something. In fact [...]
experience is passive, a case of receptivity in operation [...]” (1994: 10). Experience, even
understood as being conceptual, can therefore act as a constraint on our thinking:
only in this way can we rely on receptivity to produce empirical judgments.
Claims of objectivity are to be understood as claims concerning the conceptual
content of our thinking and the content of any thinking cannot be anything that
is not itself thinkable, i.e., a
thinkable. Exercises of receptivity are possible only for a concept-using
intellect; intuitions can only tell something about the world if they operate
together with concepts.
We are persuaded by both Hegel and McDowell to firmly
wed intuitions and concepts and to draw the consequences of this merge for our
notion of objectivity. We are invited to abandon the idea that our concepts
reach for objects and can fail to attain them. If anything is intelligibly
objective, it could not be alien to conceptual exercises. What seems to be at stake is to exorcise the
very picture of something hidden behind our concepts where the source of
objectivity would lie. Wittgenstein has remarked that our judgements about the
world require concepts but also that concepts can only be used by those who
know how to follow the rules that determine their content. He suspected that we
often fall prisoner of the picture of something that we could not be possibly
seeing but somebody else could be seeing—and this can now sound like an appeal
to intuitions deprived of conceptual practices.[3]
He considers the case of whether ‘7777’ occurs in the decimal expansion of π.
“In the decimal expansion of π either ‘7777’
occurs or it does not––there is no third possibility.” That is to say: “God
sees—but we don’t know”. But what does that mean? We use a picture; the picture
of a visible series which one person sees the whole of and another not. The law
of excluded middle says here: It must either look like this, or like that. So
it really—and this is a truism––says nothing at all, but gives us a picture.
And the problem ought now to be: does reality accord with the picture or not?
And this picture seems to determine what we have to do, what to look for, and
how––but it does not do so, just because we don’t know how it is applied. Here
saying “There is no third possibility” or “But there can’t be a third
possibility!”––expresses our inability to turn our eyes away from this picture:
a picture which looks as if it must already contain both the problem and its
solution, while all the time we feel that it is not so (1953: §352).
The picture is not harmless, Wittgenstein observes, because it can hide
problems. If our conceptual rules are in fact intrinsically wedded to their
objects, there cannot be objects determined independently of the possibility of
our thinking practices. The point is made more explicitly elsewhere (1956:
VII-41). There he points out that an omniscient being can go ahead of us in our
practices but only by going through our practices on her own. Going back to the
π rule of expansion example he says:
Even God can determine something mathematical
only by mathematics. Even for him the mere rule of expansion cannot decide
anything that it does not decide for us. We might put it like this: if the rule
for expansion has been given us, a calculation can tell us that there is a ‘2’
at the fifth place. Could God have known this, without the calculation, purely
from the rule of expansion? I want to say: no.
The picture that we are invited to abandon is therefore that of a world
with a finite and structured set of given facts out there waiting to be
attained by our thinking, and that of thought as aspiring to reach an end of
enquiry. The possibility of a thinking practice (for instance, the calculation
in order to determine π) brings objects
to the fore—objects that can affect our thoughts. If this is right, the source
of objectivity for our thoughts has to lie somewhere within our thinking
practices and not beyond their realm. The question then is what picture should
replace the one we are abandoning? What exactly are we giving up when we
abandon the image that ties objectivity to the nonconceptual deliverances of a
pure receptivity?
3. Rule-following,
soft facts and truth
We agree with McDowell that objects cannot be
conceived as separate from our conceptual practices if they are to be somehow
capable of being thought. Furthermore, we accept an overall externalist picture
according to which mind cannot be systematically and in principle indifferent
to what is constitutive of the world. We
also share McDowell’s (1984) non-Kripkean understanding of Wittgenstein’s
rule-following argument (1953: §§ 185-220). Wittgenstein established that no
set of rules in itself can determine a course of action—or, for that matter, a
course of thinking. The idea is that a rule, no matter how well formulated,
cannot by itself preclude any interpretation of it. The world, then, could not
be merely a set of rules if it is to have a say on the correctness of our
judgments—as the rule of expansion for π is not itself enough for God to find out whether
´7777´ is there. Wittgenstein’s point suggests that what makes an expansion of π right or wrong is neither the certainty of the one
who calculates the expansion—she can make a mistake and offer an interpretation
of the rule that would justify it—nor the rule itself—it can make any move
right. Wittgenstein, however, mentions a way of grasping a rule that goes
beyond interpreting it (for example in 1953: §201). A rule is grasped by
acquiring the capacity to view its examples in the intended manner and this
intended manner is what is acquired with the rule. Such a route would entitle
us to the idea that constraint from the world can come only if we are ready to
think of the world as composed by something other than items available to a
pure exercise of receptivity. By being capable of grasping the intended way to
follow the rules we could be constrained by facts; at the same time, there is
no need to assume something beyond our mastery of those rules. Therefore, God
has to be able to do mathematics in order to be sensitive to the rule of
expansion for π. The question
then is whether God can carry on doing mathematics after the end of the world
in order to determine whether ‘7777’ is in the expansion. Of course, once the
calculations were learned, they could be carried out—although there would be no
way for God to be sure that they are right. Even if there is no one else left
to confirm that God is following the rule correctly, an appeal to the practices
of the disappeared mathematical community could be made: God may not be able to
determine the correctness of her actions, but this does not entitle us to say
that there is not a question as to whether she is correctly using the rule of
expansion.
These remarks about how rules constrain our thinking
practices indicate our agreement with McDowell about the need for a partial
re-enchantement of nature. Only within an image of nature that takes it to be
thoroughly thinkable we can make sense of constraints of the world on our
mental life––exercises of concept-loaded receptivity. The sort of fact that
makes Wittgenstein’s God capable of being right in her further expansion of π is one that depends on a rule endorsed and practiced
in a community of thinkers. We call those ‘soft facts’ and contrast them with the
free-standing, hard facts which would not require the possibility of thinking
practices. A soft fact has the required independence from any act of thinking
in particular, even though it must, in principle, be graspable by some act of
thinking—soft facts are intrinsically thinkable. Objectivity can then be seen as no more than a capacity to respond to
soft facts. We get things right if we judge in accordance to what is a publicly
debatable account of how things are—which requires a reference community
enforcing a set of thinking practices. To get things right[4]
is to respond to the world; yet that cannot mean to respond to something beyond
our thinking practices.
Beyond soft facts, there is no ultimate reality that
can intelligibly function as a tribunal. In fact, the tribunal of soft facts
takes place within the reach of arguments and persuasive reasons. No sense can
be made of us responding to anything beyond them. Moreover, there is no area of
our conceptual exercises that have a privileged access to soft facts. The image
we are putting forward is one where facts are intertwined with the conceptual
judgements within our practices and no special subset of these judgements lie
anywhere closer to the world. The logical space of reasons, in the apt phrase
of Sellars, is all encompassing, and therefore it is frictionless if we expect
friction to be coming from without it—the idea of soft facts is that the “world
is embraceable in thought” as McDowell once put it (1994:33). Our thought is
close to the world everywhere it takes place; it is within a space of
reasons––which are recognised as such only from within our thinking
practices––that we move in an environment of soft facts. In our image of
re-enchanted facts, there is no exercise of reasons that come anyhow closer to
facts than any other––facts are taken to be available to reasons. Soft facts
are not thought as external to reasons, those are pictured as being part of the
world and not elements of the mind’s effort to reach out for facts. The world
of soft facts is also a world of reasons; our moves in the space of reasons are
already capable of being moves in the world––reasons are part of the world and
thinking practices are not alien to the world; they are false when they are not
(soft) factual but they are capable of being true. Falsehood happens when we are mistaken with
respect to what is demanded by the practices that encompass the world. To a
great extent our image of the space of reasons coheres with that of a space
that extends towards the world as put forward by McDowell (1995) when, for
example, he says:
we are fallible in our judgement as to the
shape of the space of reasons as we find it, or––what comes to the same
thing––as to the shape of the world as we find it. That is to say that we are
vulnerable to the world’s playing us false; and when the world does not play us
false we are indebted to it (887).
In our image, soft facts within the space of reasons can play us false
at any point but this should not require us to postulate a split between facts,
on the one side, and practices within the space of reasons on the other. To sum
up, we take facts to be thinkable and thoughts to be capable of being factual.
Now truth is not alien to the space of reasons in the
sense that we cannot be in a same given standing in that space and yet
sometimes but not always hold a true belief. Truth is internal to our moves in
the space of reasons, as truth-makers inhabit that same space. Truth can be
understood in terms of soft facts––they are the truth-makers. Truth can aid us
to understand what is taken to be a fact. Brandom has once espoused a notion of facts as being true claimables. He
writes that
one can understand facts as true claims,
acknowledge that claiming is not intelligible apart from vocabularies, and
still insist that there were true claims, and hence facts, before there were
vocabularies. For we should distinguish between two senses of ‘claim’: on the
one hand there is the act of claiming, and on the other hand there is what is
claimed. I want to say that facts are true claims in the sense of what is
claimed (indeed, of what is claimable), rather than in the sense of true
claimings. With this distinction on board, there is nothing wrong with saying
that facts make claims true––for they make claimings true. […] There were no
true claimings before there were vocabularies, because there were no claimings
at all. But it does not follow that there were no true claimables (1999:162).
Accordingly, we can take soft facts to be truth-makers that pre-existed
our claims. Claims, assertions that correspond to moves in the space of
reasons, are capable of being true. We, then, seem to commit ourselves to an
identity account of truth. The idea, as Hornsby puts it, is that “true
thinkables are the same as facts” (1997: 2). False thinkables, on the other
hand, have contents that are not facts. A false thought is a wrong view on how
things are; their contents stops short of a (soft) fact. A soft fact has no
ground but the norms of correction within our thinking practices—there is no
challenge to the truth of the whole of our beliefs by showing that a connection
between our beliefs and the world that was assumed does not hold. There is
nothing intentionally special about true thinkables—they don’t have any
relation to anything else in the world but other thinkables and therefore can
be evaluated only with respect to other thinkables. Our doctrine of soft facts
is therefore not committed to any word-world relation that could be expressed
in terms of any foundational set of beliefs.[5]
Soft facts, identical to true thinkables, are no more than what we ought to
take as correct within our conceptual practices.
An identity account of truth could nevertheless be
seen as relevantly similar to correspondentism: both could be viewed as being
variations of an adequatio intellectus ad
rem conception of truth. In the identity case, one could conceive of our
thinking as aiming to reach facts out
there; as if truth happened when we successfully manage to achieve identity
with true thinkables. This can give the impression that truth-makers are taken
to be floating thinkables that precede any
act of thinking. Hegel, in 1807: §§ 132-135, criticizes the idea that
conceptually articulated thinkables can float independently of any act of thinking. He says that in
those thinkables “understanding is already present without knowing” (§133). If those
free floating thinkables are somewhere outside the scope of thought but yet
articulated as a judgment and ready to be reached, truth by identity occurs
when we attain them by thought. Such a conception could easily encourage the
idea that we can confront thoughts and facts even if the latter are understood
as an articulation of concepts. The conception of a floating thinkable that we
want to avoid is one that would make possible for God to determine whether ‘7777’
occurs in the expansion of π without doing the calculations—the articulated judgments concerning the value of π would be floating somewhere before our calculations
reach them. Our conception of soft facts, however, should preclude the reading
of truth as identity as an adequatio
account of truth: floating thinkables cannot acquire content outside our
practices. Floating thinkables cannot therefore be conceivable unless, if our
motivation for soft facts is right, they rely on the bogus intelligibility of
hard facts. Soft facts are not, therefore, floating thinkables independent of
any activity of thinking—they are inconceivable independently of thinking
practices.
A fear can then arise that truth conceived as identity
with soft facts would repel the often accepted idea that truth transcends our
epistemic practices. We maintain that soft facts, as truth-makers, can ground
at least some transcendence of truth. Ours is not an adequatio conception of truth because soft facts are not
ready-made, understanding is already present in them—they require the participation of
thinking practices to become capable to constrain our thinking. But it is not
an epistemic conception because soft facts can—at least in some sense—transcend our
most justified beliefs: there are thinkables that can fail to be thought. The
consequences of the norms that guide our thinking––rules and practices of
understanding them––are not only those of which we are currently, or will
eventually be, aware; our thoughts are always corrigible but correction can
only come from further rules and practices. If God could determine the value of
π without the practice of mathematics, the picture of
something that we cannot see but somebody else could, would guarantee the
transcendence of π for the infinite
elements of the sequence could not be thought. When this picture is rejected,
we can still hold that π transcends all
of our current or future practices in the sense that they can be discovered to
be mistaken at any point but only by appealing to guiding norms—rules and
practices. We can be indefinitely mistaken about the rules even though we could
not be corrected without appeal to practices. Truth transcends all current
thinking practices but cannot transcend
the space of reasons for that would mean that our thoughts can fail to respond
to hard, ready-made facts that can be always beyond what our thinking can
grasp. It follows that there are questions that our thinking can always fail to
answer—and there is no reason for us to insist, in these cases, that there is a
(soft) fact of the matter.
4. The case against TE
We have been insisting on the transparency of the world to our thinking
practices. We take soft facts to be enough to quieten the transcendental unease
about loosing contact with the world. The unease, we claim, is provoked by a
conception of nature that alienates our thinking. If there is no appeal to
anything that could ground soft facts, any constraint on our thinking that
comes from the world is itself partly re-enchanted—it comes to us in the form
of a conceptually structured fact: how things are. To get things right is to
acknowledge the relevant soft facts of the matter and we do that within our
conceptual practices. We can gain access to conceptually structured facts
through non-inferential means but this access does not need to be explained in
terms of a causal connection to something beyond the reach of the logical space
of reasons. Our experience of nature enables us to gain content by accessing
how things are; experience does not make us touch anything beyond the scope of
our conceptual practices within the space of reasons. We have claimed that the
conception of facts we have been suggesting can in itself avoid any need to
appeal to exercises of pure receptivity to account for our contact with the
world and our experiencing of facts. In doing so, we have been restating and elaborating
McDowell’s path towards a re-enchanted nature. We share McDowell’s discontent
with the idea that experience is no more than a brutely causal transaction
between the world and the thinkers, a sort of bottleneck through which both
normative and nomological features of the world impinge on the subject––as it
is held by a way of thinking that has
its roots in the Quinean notion of a tribunal of experience and is adopted by
philosophers such as Davidson, Rorty and Brandom––and would, like him, rather
take experience to be a direct contact with how things are.
We part company with McDowell when it comes to TE. We hold that TE is both unnecessary and unwarranted. We take
McDowell’s recipe to disolve the fear of loosing grip of the world
involves one move too many. There is no need to complement the re-enchantment
move with any form of actual privilege of some forms of access to contents over
others. McDowell adds to his effort to
re-enchant nature the claim that our concetual capacities can be exercised in a
passive way so as to provide us with a realm of experience—intuitions with
concepts: viewing things and telling us how they are. He senses that
in order to vindicate the minimal empiricism he wants to put forward it is
crucial to have experience as the locus
where the world is presented to us. For McDowell, the tribunal of experience is
where our thoughts acquire meaning and where our empirical judgments acquire
support. TE requires a distinction between what experience tells us and the
rest of our beliefs; otherwise, our worldview as a whole would itself become
the tribunal. We shall try to show that
this distinction cannot be made to be warranted.
In order to vindicate TE and to distinguish experience
from the rest of our exercises within the space of reasons, we need to be able
to have a separate domain of empirical beliefs. Quine, of course, thought that
this separation was utterly unprincipled. His talk of a tribunal of experience
implies that our whole worldview is confronted with non-conceptual experience
and receives thus a general verdict. McDowell has shown that no proper verdict
could come out from such a tribunal: non-conceptual experience, the Given,
could give us at most some exculpations. Experience, conceived in the Quinean
way, lacks the normative force to put rational constraints on our thinking: the
tribunal is mute (and blind). A tribunal of experience would be possible if
experience were presented to us as judgments or candidates for judgment; if
there were observational statements intimately linked with experience, those
statements could judge and give verdicts from experience about our other
beliefs. Quine could not appeal to anything of this sort for that would take
him to accept the dogma that empirical meaning was separable from the rest of
our worldview. McDowell believes that talk about experience revealing us the
world would require him to somehow restore the talk of a tribunal of
experience. We suggest that the move requires accepting the first two dogmas of
empiricism denouced by Quine. If this is so, his minimal empiricism, and his
remedy to our oscillation between two uncomfortable positions, depends on the
acceptance of the first two dogmas. McDowell can be taken to be suggesting that
the oscillation—between an unintelligible tribunal appealing to the Given and a
coherentist position akin to that recommended by Davidson—starts out when we
reject the first dogma and can only be cured by bringing it back.
McDowell,
in fact, overtly accepts the substance of the two first dogmas (1994: 156-161).
He starts out urging us to view Quine as missing the target by not realizing
that the rejection of the third dogma is more fundamental than the rejection of
the first two: the important philosophical consequences of rejecting the two
dogmas are better obtained by rejecting the third. He then goes on to
suggest that, as we reject the third dogma, the very basis on which Quine
argues against the first two dogmas is no longer available (1994: 157). Quine
claimed that there could be nothing external to our conceptual schemes telling
apart our knowledge of the meanings of our expressions on the one side and our
beliefs on the other. If we recognise that there could be no rational influence
whatsoever on our conceptual schemes coming from outside them, we can face the
demand for constraints on our thinking by experience in a fresh way. McDowell
claims that a conception of experience that views it as already conceptual
entitles us to a distinction between empirical significance and beliefs about
the world.[6]
Our distinction between statements of facts and what seem like meaning
postulates can be grounded on how things are––as grounded on how things are as
any other distinction for which we happen to feel the need. There is no need to
take constraints coming from within our practices to be anything short of part
of the world. What Quine would be inclined to consider as a mere pragmatic
decision, McDowell would rather take as a decision as informed by the world as
any other could possibly be. Once the third dogma is rejected and receptivity
is seen as inseparable from spontaneity, Quine’s urge for a non-pragmatic way
to vindicate the content of the first dogma can be relieved. McDowell has that,
once the third dogma is rejected, we can “rehabilitate the idea of statements
that are true by virtue of their meaning, without flouting the real [Quinean]
insight” (1994: 157). McDowell’s option to
flesh out the distinction established by the first dogma is to go
transcendental and look for a necessary structure of mindedness. He gives the
impression to be taking spontaneity to be capable to act on its own, with no
contribution from receptivity, once concepts are operative. Of course, if not
all our thinking works as a tribunal of experience that judges how things are,
receptivity acts on a restricted domain—the tribunal seems to bound the
rational influence of experience to a subset of our world-view. Parts of our
world-view are not up for revision, even though this does not in itself imply
truth. McDowell correctly points out that the claim that not everything we
think is up for revision does not imply that what is structurally necessary is
somehow right (1994: 158). Immunity to revision does not entail an appeal to
any Given: it can only reveal a structure of our mindedness that could be
necessary. That the structure is necessary does not imply, he stresses, that we
should be somehow in the right track––the structure only tells us about how we
think because we cannot afford to think otherwise. McDowell then goes on to appeal to
Wittgenstein to motivate the idea that there is a way that is somehow our way:
how we go on. And that, he insists, does not fix the structure of our world,
“How we go on” is just our mindedness, which is
ex hypothesis in constituted harmony with our world; it is not something that
constitutes the harmony, as it were from outside (1994: 159).
It follows, for him, that we can make the content of
the second dogma legitimate if we think of experience in terms of rational
answerability given how we go on.
It
is no accident that McDowell is willing to accept Quine’s denounced dogmas.
McDowell’s acceptance of the first dogma (and the second) seems to be essential
for his minimal empiricism: the idea of a tribunal of experience—and the idea
that thinking is tied to the world through an intake of receptivity—depends on
a distinction between a realm of experience and the rest of our beliefs. McDowell wishes to be Kantian both in taking
intuitions as contentless without concepts and in insisting that concepts are
empty without intuitions. Concepts have their content instituted by exercises
of receptivity even though they have to be (passively) operative for
receptivity to have any rational constraining power on our thinking. The
content of a concept is therefore acquired through experience and cannot be
understood only in terms of its interplay with other concepts. The need to make
sure that concepts receive an intake of content from experience seem to inform,
for example, McDowell’s insistence that a theory of sense is not merely
whatever serves as a theory of sense for proper names (1977). A clause like “‘Hesperus’
stands for Phosphorus” could be part of a theory of truth and could serve as a
theory of sense but would not tell us the sense of the name ‘Hesperus’.
McDowell thinks of Sinne as being the
intentional connection between mind and world and therefore the belief that “‘Hesperus’
stands for Hesperus” is to be present if one has grasped the Sinn of ‘Hesperus’. There are not many
ways to acquire the sense of an expression, one needs to know that ‘Hesperus’
stands for Hesperus in order to know its sense: any other true belief about ‘Hesperus’
is not good enough. McDowell would then hold that a theory of sense is
something quite different from a theory of truth—not any theory of truth is a
theory of sense even if we present our theory of sense as a theory of truth.
The relevant connection to experience—though not a capacity to offer a
criterion for that connection—is what is required for one to master the
empirical meaning of a move in the space of reasons. It is not enough to
understand the difference a concept makes in its connection to other judgments
or beliefs: without intuitions, concepts are empty. What we are claiming is the
complement of Sellars’s idea that for a concept to appear in non-inferential
reports it must be capable to appear in the conclusion of an inference: we see
no principled obstacle to extend the conception of experience as to allow for
the possibility that any concept may be used non-inferentially.
McDowell wants to rehabilitate and give fresh plausibility to the idea
that a connection to experience is what gives content to our concepts and
enables us to have non-inferential knowledge. In an exchange with Brandom
(Brandom 2002, McDowell 2002), McDowell claims that proper non-inferential
knowledge cannot come from reliable responses to the environment without
perceptual contact (as in the chicken-sexing example that Brandom gives);
without perception we cannot have much more than mere presentiments.
Perception, he conjecture, seems to require proper sensibles in a way that
sheer reliable responses to the environment do not––they are not open to what
is the case. Brandom diagnoses that for McDowell “if we cannot have perceptual
experiences, then we could not know things non-inferentially at all. (Indeed,
he thinks we could not know anything at all.)” (102). Drawing on a
discussion about secondary quality concepts and the requirement that we know
the appearance of the things to which those concepts are applied in order to
master them, McDowell holds that some concepts are closer to experience. One
could not know what is ‘red’ before one knows what is ‘look red’––its proper
sensible––for this is a concept that depends, to be understood, on a visual
experience. There seems to be a layer of (conceptual) receptivity that is
somehow requisite for the proper functioning of the exercises of judgment. So,
in Jackson’s (1986) Gedankenexperiment, Mary would not have acquired any
concept of colour until she could see red, blue and yellow patches. What she
acquires when she sees the patches is neither merely a disposition to respond
reliably to coloured objects by merely seeing them nor a non-conceptual piece
of content offering her maybe a quale but rather the full colour
concepts. Concepts related to experience are somehow more basic for they
constitute a window by means of which we manage to receive something from the
world. The image that McDowell seems to be adopting is one of two layers; on the
first the intake of experience is received through a passive exercise of our
conceptual abilities, on the second, full-blooded judgements are made. He then
preserves the two parts of Kant’s slogan: on one layer he preserves the idea of
a fully irresponsible attainment of content through experience (conceptual, but
still irresponsible), on the other, he preserves the idea that the subject is
fully responsible for her rational operations. McDowell wants to see TE
vindicated and that requires that content comes from a restricted area of our
exercises within the space of reasons and that restriction, in turn, seems to
require that meanings are fixed in a somehow more intimate connection with
experience than what is enjoyed by the rest of our beliefs.
The distinction between experience––grounded by
meaning––and other beliefs seems however hard to grant. McDowell thinks that,
once we have rejected the third dogma, the first one becomes quite innocent. It
seems to us, however, that the rejection of the third dogma makes it even more
difficult to tell apart what is structural and what is only a contingent belief
within our world-view. It is the rejection of the third dogma that makes
stronger, rather than turn unnecessary, our rejection of a distinction between meanings
and beliefs: that would require us to separate out the institution of concepts
from their application in a way that we would find no resources to
accomplish. Analytical truths would be
such that their institution would precede empirical judgments––such as truths
about the structure of mentality or the way we go on––and they would have no
empirical content. The idea that some beliefs have no empirical content can
only make sense if we can separate out contents from conceptual scheme. One can
reject the first dogma without rejecting the third––that leaves one in a
perhaps unstable but tenable position such as that held by Quine. We believe it
is however untenable to reject the third dogma whilst cherishing the content of
the first. Analytical truths cannot be anything but truths concerning
conceptual schemes. It is only when we
master a critical mass of concepts by holding a number of true beliefs we have
to learn in order to grasp them that we can find ourselves applying
concepts––and helping to institute their meanings by applying them. If Davidson
is right in maintaining that we cannot grasp empirical meanings without a
(quite large) number of beliefs about
the world because the dualism between scheme and content is untenable, an
empirical realm of privileged contact with the world is unthinkable. Any
contact with the world through experience is possible only by means of the
beliefs that constitute the conceptual scheme by means of which we make our
judgements and which, in its turn, depend on the full (active) exercise of our
conceptual capacities. Nothing legitimate can ground a special status for a
belief that would place it farther from the vulnerability to reasons that all
of our conceptual judgments possess.
Moreover, the claim that not everything is up for
revision seems to appeal to a picture of the space of reasons as having an
autonomous structure, not responding to the world. It seems like, if McDowell
is consistent in rejecting rampant platonism (cf. 1994: 77-8), the space of
reasons can face no natural limitations to doubting (and revision). A
limitation on our capacity to revise could only come from a transcendental
structure of mindedness that would amount to a pre-existing structure of the
space of reasons where some principles come already instituted and therefore
come ready to be applied. The space of reasons is sui generis in that its elements respond to nothing but
reasons—they cannot respond to any underlying structure of our practices. Of
course we proceed in some specific ways within the space of reasons but “the
way we go on”, as a matter of fact, is not expressible in a set of beliefs or
candidates for judgement beyond revision without appeal to arbitrary choices.
Michael Williams (1996) takes McDowell’s minimal empiricism to be a form of
foundationalism, as it makes an appeal to a tribunal of experience and hence to
an order of justification where experience comes first and our other thoughts
can only be justified afterwards. Williams diagnoses that the attempts to order
the space of reasons amount to the claim that it should have a pre-existing
structure before we engage in exchanging reasons. The thesis of a rational
priority of experience, he argues in his Unnatural
Doubts (1996a), assumes that there is an order of justifications that
should hold beyond any possible revision. We share Williams’s qualms regarding
a space of reasons that has an unrevised sector constituting the separation
between what is in the tribunal of experience and what lies beyond it.
McDowell has to insist that there are two forms of thinking, or cognitive activity:
experience and judgment; and allow for content to behave differently in both
cases, ultimately accepting that there is another way to meaning that merely
what exudes from belief. Meaning comes, ultimately, from experience, but
experience is not belief. Quine’s criticism
of the first dogma—the criticism of the second follows suit—could be phrased
like this: any selection of analytic judgments responds to our conveniences
and, importantly, our conveniences can
change.[7] Applied to the separation between meanings and other
beliefs, the criticism means that any decision for what constitutes Sinne would be as arbitrary as any
other—unless we understand a Sinn as
being any true belief of the form “‘n’ stands for m”. Sinne respond to what comes from any quarter of the space of
reasons—at best we can appeal to truth If we are correct and there is no way to vindicate the first two dogmas,
we should give up the idea of a tribunal of experience as a proper subset of
the space of reasons. The sui generis
character of the space of reasons and the refusal to accept any set of
privileged content beyond revision seem to be at odds with a pre-established
tribunal of experience structured beyond the reach of the exercise of asking
for reasons.
TE is not only unwarranted––for it depends on
assumptions concerning the space of reasons and the acceptance of the first two
dogmas of empiricism––but it is unnecessary for the purposes of quietening the
discomfort provoked by the rejection of the Given. McDowell has shown that the
Given cannot constitute the tribunal that he deemed required for experience to
constraint our thinking but carried on looking for a way to maintain TE. The rejection of the Given can leave with a position
where our concepts respond to nothing but other concepts and experience plays
no separate role in our thinking. This can seem unpallatable if we can feel
that we are confined in a realm of our concepts and judgments—experience is no
window open. The sense of confinement, however, would come from the claim,
implicit in the position to which we could feel forced to recoil, that nature
is alien to our thinking and can affect it at most causally. Experience would
have no more than a causal role on our mental life. This image of experience is
held by philosophers like Brandom and Michael Williams to be what is enough to
ensure contact with the world once that content cannot be attained through pure
receptivity. Williams, for examples, asks what
is wrong with saying that we are the only
source of rational control? The reply will be that to say this is to disconnect
ourselves from objective reality. But why? The world influences our beliefs
causally, setting the context where reflective revision takes place. (1996a:
106)
Williams accepts then an image of nature that places
it outside our attempts to maintain a rational world-view. He holds on to a
de-enchanted image and has little to say to those who feel the unease related
to place nature somewhere unreachable by our thinking. This image holds that
even if causal relations cannot account for our judgments of correctness or our
normativity, they are the real structure of
the world, deeply hidden from our view and from our thinking practices. Causal relations are therefore themselves hard
facts, less reachable than soft ones, and yet more real. If we thoroughly
reject those hard facts, there is no feeling of confinement and therefore
contact with the world is nothing but engagement in the practices sanctioned
with the space of reasons. Causal relations can only be invoked within the soft
facts that we recognize and in conjunction with our conceptual practices—there
are no free-floating causal relations anywhere. Whatever (causal) fact
constraining our thinking and influencing our action is a soft one. Williams’s
image of nature is one that invokes an unwarranted ability to step out of the
space of reasons and take a sideways-on view on our thinking and its connection
to the world.
We maintain that if we join McDowell in rejecting that
image of experience, the feeling of confinement would be sufficiently
exorcised. The world would be thought of as reachable from within the space of
reasons, and nature, partly re-enchanted, would be entirely accessible to
thought. It seems to us that we could quieten the unease provoked by a position
that leaves us out of touch with the world by accepting an image of nature and
experience that makes us capable of being constrained. Re-enchantment of nature
is the crucial step in the articulation of McDowell’s therapy. It makes the
reacceptance of the first two dogmas and the postulation of a tribunal of
experience unnecessary. If our standard of objectivity stop straining us to get
rid of any element that is present in thinking, we can satisfy it within the
scope of our rules and concepts––a scope that involves soft facts. They make
our rational contact with the world intelligible while making the world
transparent. If the world is transparent—reachable from within the space of
reasons—there is no further need for a tribunal of experience unless we take
all of our practices of accepting and rejecting beliefs in different contexts
as constituting this tribunal. Our exercises of conceptual capacities can
respond to the world in the various ways allowed by our practices and there is
no need to assume a pre-existing order of justifications. Our contact with the
world is made immanent, ordinary and involving not much more than our efforts
in thinking according to what we take as acceptable. We learn to be sensitive
to the constraints of the world when we gain the capacity to entertain
thinkable contents and therefore when we are introduced in the space of
reasons. Our thinking not being alien to the world prevents us from being
confined as we can reach for facts and our interactions with the world are
never beyond the limit of what is thinkable. In other words, a thorough
re-enchantment of nature coupled with the idea that experience is always
conceptual if it is not to be mute seems enough to comfort the fear that
without the Given we could loose the world without any appeal to a tribunal of
experience.
5. The rest is silence
We have maintained that a partially re-enchanted nature is all that is
needed to ease the fear of loosing the world, and have highligthed the dangers
of reinstating the first two dogmas of empiricism. We find that our proposal,
in avoiding to theorize about subtleties of mind’s relation to reality, is
further than McDowell’s from estimulating new philosophical worries and the
need for more philosophical construction. We share McDowell’s (and Wittgenstein’s)
conception of philosophy according to which there is no separate realm of
philosophical facts to be discovered and philosophy’s task cannot be to solve
problems (as there can be no answers) but to find ways to preclude them. We
feel that McDowell’s account of experience is too controversial to appease
philosophical anxieties and, furthermore, not necessary for that end. We
believe that our rejection of a “hard” nature of facts (including, crucially,
causal facts) achieves another anti-theoretical result: the negative to indulge
in explanations that try to account for the conceptual—rational, intentional—in
terms of the non-conceptual (as in any naturalism that defines itself on the
model of the natural sciences) or viceversa (as in platonism or idealism).
We have also argued
that our position can respect the demand for external, worldly constraint, and
the sui generis character of the
space of reasons, spontaneous and responsible. Rather than isolating a faculty,
sensibility, or a specific use of reason where receptivity and spontaneity
coexist, where the expected constraint operates, we have insisted that the
world’s discipline applies to thinking at all levels and at all times, in
perception and action as in abstract thought. We have done so, against Davidson
and Brandom, without renouncing receptivity. Quite the opposite. Our proposal
allows not only for all content to be empirically ladden, but also for it to be
experientable.[8]
We have been arguing that soft facts should be part of
the layout of the world while trying to bring the world closer to the
inspection of our thinking. We have explored some of the conditions of
possibility for thought. We have taken for granted that there is thought and
wondered where the sources of its objectivity are: how can it acquire content
that hooks it to the world. We have submitted that the world cannot be
constituted by facts that lack the appropriate conceptual structure (hard facts),
and that the facts that are going to be grasped by (at least some of) our true
thoughts are such that would become unintelligible if they were either a mere
projection of our thinking practices or, on the contrary, nonconceptual
collections of bare objects and properties. The idea that the same kind of
thing can be simultaneously the content of a thought and something that is the
case led us to a version of the identity thesis about truth. We have then
maintained that the softness of facts is not unbearable.
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[1] McDowell
(1994: 42) seems to have accepted the diagnosis that Kant ends up embracing a
view of the objects of our experience that connects them to the subject who has
intuitions (with concepts). He took things-in-themselves to be the real,
non-subjective reality for “[...] [their] radical
independence of our thinking tends to present itself as no more than the
independence any genuine reality must have. The empirical world’s claim to
independence comes to seem fraudulent by comparison. We are asked to suppose
that the fundamental structure of the empirical world is somehow a product of
subjectivity, in interaction with supersensible reality, which, as soon as it
is in the picture, strikes us as the true seat of objectivity.”
[2] Hegel’s
difference with Kant can be illustrated by Kant’s talk of an intelligible
intellect that would dispense with conceptual exercises. He claimed that
[...] we can conceive of an
intuitive intellect (negatively, that is, simply as non-discoursive), that
would not go from the general to the particular [...] and for which there would
be no contingency of the agreement between nature and our understanding [...]
[this agreement] the intuitive intellect does not need [to posit] (Kant 1790:
77).
[3] Compare Wittgenstein’s God in
the two quotes that comes next in the text with Kant’s intuitive intellect of
note 2.
[4] Rorty (1999:375) points out that we can get right something that does
not exist—we can know more about Zeus now than in the Renaissance. We can draw
a distinction between what we are ready to take as a soft fact and something
else we can get right. The distinction, however, makes sense within our thinking
practices: what we take to be existing and what we do not according to our
definitions (and practices that accompany them), preferred analogies,
assumptions etc.
[5] One could
challenge our claims to reject any foundational belief by pointing at the identity
between true thinkables and soft facts as a foundational belief itself. We
would then feel inclined to reply that the challenge to the belief that soft
facts are true thinkables cannot come from anywhere but a reason to challenge
all of our soft facts at once and there are no self-standing reason to support
this challenge. We shall come back to our stance against foundational beliefs
later.
[6] Brandom (2002: 92) diagnoses McDowell’s position to hold all of these
three theses: without perceptual experience we have no knowledge of matters of
fact, conceptual content requires experience and experience is a tribunal to
our thinking. He then claims that McDowell is an empiricis in epistemology, in
semantics and in the philosophy of mind.
[7] In “Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel’s Idealism” Brandom (1999a) draws a
comparison between Quine’s criticism of the first dogma as adopted by Carnap on
the one hand and Hegel’s critique of Kant’s pre-existing structures needed for
experience. Brandom presents the issue in terms of a refusal to accept an
arbitrary distinction between the moment where rules are instituted and the
moment where they are applied. He suspects that any such distinction can only
be drawn arbitrarily.
[8] It would be of
independent interest to argue that, against the reading of Hegel favoured by
Brandom, where the whole of reason is ultimately modelled on the free and
spontanenous operation of Kant’s understanding (endangaring the desideratum of
keeping in touch with a world that preexists free thinking practices), it would
do more justice to Hegel’s undertaking (an to the fact that “phenomenology” is
part of the title of his most important work) to think of reason as
experiential through and through.