Attending to Reasons
55
a theoretical construct – that is, any less a set of theses requiring systematic elaboration and giving rise to further questions. For consider: McDowell is committed to regarding the world itself, not just our understanding of it, as conceptually structured. “We have to suppose,” as he declares elsewhere, “that the world has an intelligible structure, matching the structure in the space of logos possessed by accurate representations of it.”11 This proposition is scarcely an innocent truism. It is a claim of considerable moment and brings into play an ageold spur to metaphysical speculation. How can we avoid wondering why there should be this sort of natural sympathy or pre-established harmony between mind and world? If the mind does not impose its own order on an alien world, but finds its standards of right thinking woven into the very fabric of reality, then why not see the mind as the way in which the world comes to an awareness of itself, or why not seek some common source of both mind and world? It is no surprise, therefore, that philosophers resolved to be “post-metaphysical” want nothing to do with McDowell’s idea of the mind’s intimacy with the world.12 I share his conviction that in experience the world impresses itself upon us as the knowable world it is.13 But nothing is gained by pretending that such a view does not stake out a substantive philosophical position.
3.
EXPERIENCE AS A TRIBUNAL
McDowell’s approach removes one obstacle to conceiving how experience can serve as a tribunal of our thinking, yet other obstacles remain, and they embody questions that cannot be exorcised, but have to be tackled. Let us grant that it is the world itself in articulate form, the fact that things are thus and so, that is given to us in experience. Certainly the thesis is not without its points of obscurity. If, for example, receptivity involves the exercise of conceptual capacities, then the way we experience things to be must be capable of error, and not just of errors that reflect the limits of the capacities deployed (as when our perception leads us astray in cases of 11
12
13
McDowell, “Two Sorts of Naturalism” (1995), p. 178 as reprinted in McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). Such has been the reaction, in their different ways, of Richard Rorty (“The Very Idea of Human Answerability to the World: John McDowell’s Version of Empiricism,” pp. 138–152 in his Truth and Progress. Philosophical Papers, vol. 3, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Ju¨rgen Habermas (Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999, p. 43). Some may object to McDowell’s taking the world to be “everything that is the case” (27), the totality of facts, in other words, and not the totality of objects about which facts can be asserted. The supposed distinction amounts, however, to little more than alternative ways of speaking. The objects that make up the world are not bare “things-in-themselves,” but objects having such and such features, their having them being what is meant by the facts being thus and so.