What myth?

Inquiry

Volumn 50, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 338-351

  McDowell, John ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH   (United States)

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EID: 34548317262     PISSN: 0020174X     EISSN: 15023923     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00201740701489211     Document Type: Review

References (31)

1. Hubert L. Dreyfus, "Overcoming the Myth of the Mental: How Philosophers Can Profit from the Phenomenology of Everyday Expertise" (APA Pacific Division Presidential Address 2005), Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 79:2 (November 2005), 47.
2. Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 34; cited by Dreyfus in "Overcoming..." 52.
3. "Overcoming..." 52.
4. See "Overcoming..." 47.
5. Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994) 84; cited by Dreyfus in "Overcoming..." 50.
6. "Overcoming..." 51.
7. Plato's Sophist (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997) 101, as cited by Dreyfus in "Overcoming..." 51.
8. Nicomachean Ethics 1142a25-7, cited by Dreyfus in "Overcoming..." 51.
9. See "Some Issues in Aristotle's Moral Psychology" reprinted in my Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).
10. Mind and World 84, cited by Dreyfus at "Overcoming..." 50.
11. "Overcoming..." 51.
12. "Virtue and Reason" in my Mind, Value, and Reality, 66; cited by Dreyfus in "Overcoming..." 51.
13. Dreyfus reads me as holding that "there must be a maxim behind every action" ("Overcoming..." 52). If rationality is as such situation-independent, this is the only possible reading of the claim that rationality permeates action. But it does not fit my thinking at all. In my picture rationality is in action, and just as situation-dependent as action is-not behind action, in the guise of a "maxim".
14. Plato's Sophist 112, cited by Dreyfus in "Overcoming..." 51.
15. Nicomachean Ethics 1142a25-7 (the passage Dreyfus cites in "Overcoming..." 51).
16. See, e.g., Nicomachean Ethics 1138b20. Such talk of correct logos pervades Aristotle's ethics.
17. See "Overcoming..." 47.
18. For a hint, at least, at the quick argument, see "Overcoming... " 56, with note 39 (which belongs with note flag 37 in the text; the notes are plainly misnumbered).
19. "Overcoming..." 58.
20. "Overcoming..." 59.
21. "Overcoming..." 65, n. 54, (The relevant note flag in the text is 51, at p. 59.)
22. "Overcoming..." 59, quoted above.
23. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997) 76 (§36).
24. Truth and Method. Translation revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1992) 475-6.
25. Truth and Method 445.
26. Robert B. Brandom (2000) Articulating Reasons (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press) 6, cited in "Overcoming..." 55. I have left out Brandom's italics.
27. Compare Sellars's "Myth of Jones" in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.
28. Because of the point about the form in which bits of content are present in experience, my talk of introducing conceptual capacities by annexing linguistic expressions to bits of such content does not fall foul of Wittgensteinian strictures against the Myth of the Private Ostensive Definition.
29. In "Phenomenology and Nonconceptual. Content" Philosophy and Phenomenological Research lxii (2001) at 614, Christopher Peacocke writes: "While being reluctant to attribute concepts to the lower animals, many of us would also want to insist that the property of (say) representing a flat brown surface as being at a certain distance from one can be common to the perceptions of humans and of lower animals... If the lower animals do not have states with conceptual content, but some of their perceptual states have contents in common with human perceptions, it follows that some [human] perceptual representational content is nonconceptual". The commonality Peacocke appeals to is entirely at the level of what I am calling "matter". His argument is not responsive to what I have described as considerations about form. And the argument is utterly unconvincing. A cat can see that a hole in a wall is big enough for it to go through. On the principles of Peacocke's argument, this would imply that if I judge that a hole in a wall is big enough for me to go through, the content of my judgment cannot be conceptual in form.
30. "Overcoming..." 59.
31. Phenomenology of Perception 238, cited in "Overcoming... " 56-7.