Procedimiento seguido en el grupo de comparación 

For McDowell, holding that the content of perceptual experience is conceptual enables us to ‘credit the experience of rational subjects with the epistemological significance it intuitively has’ (McDowell, 2013: 41). McDowell is committed to the idea that human beings derive knowledge of the world through their experience of it, and that our empirical beliefs and judgements can

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be justified by our experience of the world30_{. McDowell therefore remains}

committed to a form of empiricism. Dreyfus denies that the perceptual experience pertaining to unreflective action plays such an epistemological role. In many cases, the unreflectively acting agent may not be consciously aware of many features of their environment, even those features directly relevant to their current activity: ‘when we are ready to leave a familiar room we not only do not need to think that the door affords going out. We need not even respond to the door as affording going out. Indeed, we needn’t apprehend the door at all’ (Dreyfus, 2013: 18).

Further, Dreyfus takes the epistemological motivation behind McDowell’s conceptualist account of perception to necessarily imply a picture wherein ‘we are never merged with the world […] We always stand over against it bringing our subjective perspective to bear on an independent objective reality’ (Dreyfus, 2013: 17). That is, a conceptualist account of perception commits McDowell to the mediational picture: ‘he still accepts the Cartesian separation between the world and the perceivers and agents to whom the world is given’ (Dreyfus, 2013: 17). Dreyfus takes McDowell’s conceptualism to be informed by Cartesian assumptions about the role of the mind. For Dreyfus, a Cartesian framework is present in any account of the relationship between the human being and the world that emphasises the role of conceptual capacities. Such an account, cannot, by definition, escape the mediational picture.

30_{This commitment - which has something seemingly truistic about it – contrasts, for example,}

with an “inferentialism” argued for by McDowell’s colleague Robert Brandom, who argues that there is no need for a conception of experience which plays a transcendental role in justifying our beliefs (see Brandom, 1994). As I am going to discuss McDowell’s debt to Sellars, it is worth noting that McDowell and Brandom disagree over whether Sellars wants to retain a place for some form of empiricism in his philosophy after his comprehensive critique of its traditional assumptions (see McDowell, 2009c).

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McDowell’s philosophical project, however, is constitutively aimed at avoiding the kind of Cartesian picture that Dreyfus thinks he is committed to. In Chapter One, I noted that both Dreyfus and McDowell want to vindicate some form of “common sense”, “natural”, or “default” picture of the human being’s relationship to the world that traditional philosophical frameworks struggle to provide. Further, McDowell recognises that affirming a role for conceptual capacities can indeed cause difficulties of a Cartesian sort. Dreyfus & Taylor’s diagnosis of the mediational picture clearly resembles McDowell’s own understanding of a Cartesian picture of the mind-world relation:

In a fully Cartesian picture, the inner life takes place in an autonomous realm, transparent to the introspective awareness of its subject; the access of subjectivity to the rest of the world becomes correspondingly problematic, in a way that has familiar manifestations in the mainstream of post- Cartesian epistemology (McDowell, 2001: 236).

McDowell takes the Cartesian distinction between a subject and object to entail ‘a self-contained subjective realm, in which things are as they are independently of external reality’ (McDowell, 1998: 241). McDowell argues that the right way forward is to dismantle such a Cartesian framework, and undermine the assumption of an autonomous inner realm. In papers that predate

Mind and World, we can find him stating that his work seeks to ‘undermine

pervasive and damaging prejudices in the philosophy of mind’ (McDowell, 1984: 294). McDowell’s project, in an important respect, mirrors Dreyfus & Taylor’s phenomenologically informed goal of overcoming Cartesianism. It is important to note another crucial similarity. McDowell does not take his project to be narrowly epistemological – that is, he argues that the relevant question is not

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simply ‘How is it possible for there to empirical knowledge?’ (1994: xiii). The philosophical difficulties are more basic than that approach allows:

It is true that modern philosophy is pervaded by apparent problems about knowledge in particular. But I think it is helpful to see those apparent problems as more or less inept expressions of a deeper anxiety – an inchoately felt threat that a way of thinking we find ourselves falling into leaves minds simply out of touch with the rest of reality, not just questionably capable of getting to know about it. (McDowell, 1994: xiii)

Dreyfus might be concerned that McDowell only wants to bypass Cartesian difficulties about knowing the world, and that there may still be a remnant of Cartesianism in the assumption that human beings are primarily knowers insofar as it implies some disengaged, neutral perspective that simply formulates judgements about an environment. However, McDowell is clear that is the human being’s very access or relation to external reality that is the issue.

The concern, above, is that Cartesian philosophy of mind “leaves minds simply out of touch with the rest of reality”. This is a concern about our conception of intentionality, a concern about how our intentional content bears substantively on a world external to our minds. We can therefore contextualise McDowell’s talk of ‘our unproblematic openness to the world’ (McDowell, 1994: 155), which we have seen Dreyfus quote approvingly (Dreyfus, 2005: 45). Maximilian DeGaynesford characterises McDowell’s project in terms of intentionality, asserting it to be ‘about whether our experience is even of the world, whether our thoughts are even directed onto the world, whether we even speak about the world’ (2004: 10). DeGaynesford argues that it is appropriate to characterise McDowell’s project as ‘fundamentally concerned with intentionality’, in that it is ‘about whether our experience is even of the world,

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whether our thoughts are even directed on the world, whether we even speak about the world’ (2004: 10). Tim Thornton usefully links McDowell’s critique of Cartesianism to these concerns about intentionality here:

McDowell aims to show how Cartesian scepticism is the result of a picture of the mind that separates mental states and the world. This division leads to a

loss of the world rather than merely doubts about the

possibility of knowledge of the world, because even when beliefs are true, on this picture, the mind never reaches as far as the world. (Thornton, 2004: 164)

The Cartesian picture of internal mental states separated from the states of affairs they supposedly represent does not only cause problems for our conception of empirical knowledge, but for intentionality. Indeed, McDowell has said that his aim is to become ‘philosophically comfortable with intentionality’ (McDowell, 2009a: 3). That is, McDowell wants to overcome a Cartesian framework of the mind-world relation by making sense of intentional content.

Importantly, McDowell is clear that a conceptualist account of intentional content can cause difficulties of a Cartesian shape. In Mind and World, McDowell uses Donald Davidson’s “coherentism” to represent the kinds of problems that arise from emphasising conceptual capacities. Elsewhere, Davidson speaks about the need to re-establish unmediated touch with the familiar object whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false’ (Davidson, 1973: 198). This is a good description of the sort of picture of the relationship between the human being and the world that we want to secure. McDowell does note that such a concern should make the project of Mind and

World ‘fully congenial to Davidson’ (1994: 138). However, in “A Coherentist

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affairs play only a causal role in justifying our empirical beliefs. The key slogan here is that ‘nothing can count as holding a reason for a belief except another belief’ (Davidson, 1986: 310). External states of affairs (Davidson’s “familiar object”, for instance) do not play a role in our framework of beliefs. In Mind and

World, McDowell expresses what such a position entails: ‘we risk losing our grip

on how exercises of concepts can constitute warranted judgements about the world […] what we wanted to conceive as exercises of concepts threaten to degenerate into moves in a self-contained game’ (McDowell, 1994: 5). There is no justificatory relation between the external world, and our framework of beliefs. McDowell sometimes puts this in terms of a “constraint” – what we want is a picture of the external world constraining what we can believe about it, a picture of how our thought owes something to how the world really is. A coherentist picture is in some sense a specific version of a mediational picture. Such a picture ‘does not accommodate any external constraint on our activity in empirical thought and judgement’ (1994: 8). What we end up with is an autonomous space of beliefs that are only purportedly empirical.

It is crucial to recognise that McDowell identifies an underlying dualism of normative phenomena and a modern conception of natural phenomena. According to scientific naturalism, natural phenomena can be exhaustively explained by the resources of science. In McDowell’s terms, natural phenomena belong the explanatory space of “the realm of law”. However, we cannot understand normative phenomena – such as conceptual thought – by placing it in this explanatory space. Conceptual thought is characterised by justificatory or inferential relations, rather than the causal relations of the realm of law. The explanatory “space of reasons”, therefore, ‘collects rational items together

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(concepts, premises, conclusions etc.) with a layout appropriate to those items (inference, justification, etc.)’ (DeGaynesford, 2004: 23). McDowell recognises that the space of reasons and the realm of law are difficult to reconcile; that ‘the structure of the space of reasons stubbornly resists being appropriated within a naturalism that conceives nature as the realm of law’ (McDowell, 1994: 73). Beyond the sort of “detachment” entailed by a Cartesian “subject-object” model, there is a danger of conceiving of our conceptual capacities and their operation as ontologically distinct from the natural world.

McDowell’s view is that our modern conception of the natural is far too narrow, and should be expanded to admit normative items. An important aspect of this move is conceiving of the operation of conceptual capacities – including their epistemic role - as a natural propensity of human beings. It is in this way that we can vindicate Aristotle’s conception of the human being as a rational

animal. As DeGaynesford puts it, ‘it is gaining the correct stance on the natural

order which assures of our openness to the world in experience […] conversely, all current illusions luring us away from openness ultimately resolve into a handful of views about the natural’ (2004: 45). While I do not agree that McDowell could put his project into “a handful of views about the natural”, it is true that a satisfactory picture of the relationship between the human being and the world shows us how to accommodate conceptual thought within the natural world, as well as showing us how conceptual thought is constrained by natural states of affairs. I will return to this particular dualism in 3.4, revisiting it intermittently.

So, McDowell and Dreyfus share a concern that an emphasis on the role of conceptual capacities can imply a Cartesian picture of the relationship

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between human being and the world. Dreyfus thinks that this implication is

necessary – any account of intentionality that appeals to capacities belonging to

the mind remains beholden to a Cartesian framework. As such, McDowell’s conceptualism is necessarily committed to a Cartesian or mediational picture. As we have seen, Dreyfus’s phenomenological non-conceptualism takes the route of bypassing or undercutting the idea of “mediation” by appealing to the idea that non-conceptual perceptual and bodily capacities are reliably and directly “keyed on” to our familiar environment. This entails a “contact” theory. The motor intentional content that pertains to unreflective action is directly in contact with the world, and is not susceptible to the difficulties encountered by conceptual forms of intentionality. For McDowell, however, this is an unacceptable route. McDowell argues that the satisfactory picture we want to secure will necessarily involve a role for conceptual capacities. Dreyfus’s appeal to something “non- conceptual” in securing this relation is not fit for that purpose, because non- conceptual content cannot secure the normative constraint that is required. McDowell’s view here is decisively shaped by Sellars’ critique of “the myth of the given”.