Exorcising the philosophical tradition: Comments on john mcdowell's mind and world

Philosophical Review

Volumn 105, Issue 4, 1996, Pages 427-466

  Friedman, Michael ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 54949156332     PISSN: 00318108     EISSN: 15581470     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2998421     Document Type: Article

References (62)

1. John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994)-which is a version of the John Locke Lectures delivered in 1991. Parenthetical page references are to this volume.
2. Donald Davidson, "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme," in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1984)
3. "A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge," in Truth and Interpretation, ed. E. LePore (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).
4. The idea of the Myth of the Given is of course taken from Wilfrid Sellars, "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind," in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol.1, ed. H. Feigl and M. Scriven (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956).
5. This terminology derives from §36 of Sellars, "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind," which argues that "in characterizing an episode or state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says." Sellars derives the notion of "logical space," in turn, from Wittgenstein's Tractalus. There its connection with the notion of "logical manifoldness [logische Mannigfaltigkeit]" links it to Riemann's generalized notion of "n-fold extended manifold" and thus to the geometrical notion of space.
6. "A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge," 310 (cited by McDowell at 14).
7. Ibid., "A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge," 311
8. The relation between a sensation and a belief cannot be logical, since sensations are not beliefs or other propositional attitudes. What then is the relation? The answer is, I think obvious: the relation is causal. Sensations cause some beliefs and in this sense are the basis or ground of those beliefs. But a causal explanation of a belief does not show how or why the belief is justified."
9. In the terms of Davidson's remarks cited in note 5, then, for McDowell sensations are propositional attitudes.
10. Thus, the contrast between spontaneity and receptivity is not at all the same as that between the conceptual and the nonconceptual. For McDowell, both active judgments and passive experiences belong to the conceptual sphere in virtue of possessing conceptual content (expressible in a that-clause) and thus being at least possible objects of active thought. At the same time, however, it is precisely this possibility of active thought that is definitive of the conceptual sphere: "We would not be able to suppose that the capacities that are in play in experience are conceptual if they were manifested only in experience, only in operations of receptivity. They would not be recognizable as conceptual capacities at all unless they could also be exercised in active thinking, that is, in ways that do provide a good fit for the idea of spontaneity. Minimally, it must be possible to decide whether or not to judge that things are as one's experience represents them to be" (11).
11. McDowell devotes Lecture 3, "Non-conceptual Content," to an examination of Evans's views on the relationship between the "perceptual system" and the "conceptual system" expressed in The Varieties of Reference, ed. J. McDowell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). The perceptual system (which we share with the lower animals) yields outputs having propositional content-expressible in a that-clause-then taken up by the conceptual system (which is distinctive of our human rationality). McDowell objects that this is essentially a version of the Myth of the Given, since it again makes it impossible to see how the relation between perception and conceptualization can itself be rational (51-55). Evans himself characterizes the relation between the internal states that the perceptual system yields as outputs and the conceptual system (for which these states count as inputs) by stating that "[j]udgements are then based upon (reliably caused by) these internal states" (Varieties, 227).
12. "[I]t can seem impossible to reconcile the fact that sentience belongs to our nature with the thought that spontaneity might permeate our perceptual experience itself, the workings of our sensibility. How could the operations of a bit of mere nature be structured by spontaneity, the freedom that empowers us to take charge of our active thinking? If we see no possibility here, we are forced to suppose intuitions must be constituted independently of the understanding, by the senses responding naturally to the world's impact's on them. And then we are in the space of options that Davidson and Evans locate themselves in" (70). Here we are meant to recall Davidson's insistence that the action of sensibility is merely causal and Evans's characterization of the perceptual system as what we have in common with the lower animals (see note 8). McDowell refers (71 n. 3) to chapter 1 of Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975) for the contrast between the pre-modern view of nature as "filled with meaning" and the modern conception (as articulated by Max Weber) of "disenchanted" nature.
13. "Animals are, as such, natural beings, and a familiar modern conception of nature tends to extrude rationality from nature. The effect is that reason is separated from our animal nature, as if being rational placed us partly outside the animal kingdom. Specifically, the understanding is distanced from sensibility. And that is the source of our philosophical impasse. In order to escape it, we need to bring understanding and sensibility, reason and nature, back together" (108).
14. In this connection, McDowell explicitly opposes communitarian or "social pragmatist" interpretations of Wittgenstein, according to which meaning is to be reconstructed out of social interactions (of "ratification" and so on) within a speech community (92-95).
15. Moves in the language of traditional philosophy can be aimed at having the right not to worry about its problems, rather than at solving those problems" (155 n. 30).
16. The problematic of Coherentism first developed explicitly, of course, in the work of British absolute idealists like Bradley, Bosanquet, and Joachim around the turn of the century. As we will see below, McDowell himself expresses considerable sympathy for German absolute idealism. Indeed, one of his fundamental ideas is that it took the insights of Hegel to complete and consolidate Kant's salutary conception of the necessary interdependence between understanding and sensibility. In this sense, McDowell's own interpretation of this interdependence is intended, in the end, to be more Hegelian than Kantian (111) (in the preface McDowell characterizes his work "as a prolegomena to a reading of the Phenomenology [of Spirit] " (ix)).
17. However, pure or "unschematized" categories possess a kind of meaning nonetheless, in that they have thinkable but not knowable content. And this is crucial, in fact, in properly understanding the sense in which pure categories like causality can also acquire "objective reality" independently of intuition-from a practical but not a theoretical point of view-through their application in morality.
18. McDowell mentions Kant's contrast between the realm of freedom and the realm of nature as a model for his own contrast between the space of reasons and the realm of law (71 n. 2). However, if we take the Kantian understanding as our model for the space of reasons, McDowell is here glossing over the crucial Kantian distinction between understanding and reason. The Kantian contrast between the realm of freedom and the realm of nature is developed in the Critique of judgement-in particular, in the Antinomy of Teleological Judgment, where mechanism and teleology are opposed. This last opposition, too, is indeed closely related to problems arising from the scientific revolution; but it involves, in Kant's own terms, the relationship between reason and the understanding (between which the faculty of judgment is supposed to mediate) rather than between the understanding and sensibility (between which the faculty of imagination or "schematism" is supposed to mediate).
19. This does not mean, of course, that the post-Kantians adopt the Kantian conception of reason entirely unchanged. On the contrary, Kant's moral philosophy, in particular, is subject to searching criticism, the result of which is the addition of a fundamentally historical dimension that is not present (at least explicidy) in Kant himself. In this way, Kant's conception of reason is also eventually "historicized." (Here I am especially indebted to comments from Paul Franks.)
20. Here, as McDowell makes clear, he is following P. F. Strawson's interpretation of Kant in The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen, 1966).
21. I myself am rather in agreement with an opposing trend in recent Kant scholarship that has challenged this "two-worlds" account of Kant's transcendental idealism:see, for example, G. Bird, Kant's Theory of Knowledge (London: Rout-ledge, 1962)
22. H. Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism (New Haven: Yale University Press 1983)
23. H. E. Matthews, "Strawson on Transcendental Idealism," in Kant on Pure Reason, ed. R. Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).
24. See especially the chapter on Phenomena and Noumena in the Critique of Pure Reason: If I remove all thought (via categories) from an empirical cognition, then no cognition of any object at all remains over. For nothing at all is thought through mere intuition, and the circumstance that this affection of sensibility is in me constitutes no relation at all of this kind of representation to any object. By contrast, however, if I leave aside all intuition, then the form of thought-i.e., the manner of determining an object for the manifold of a possible intuition-still remains over. Therefore, the categories thus extend further than sensible intuition, for they think objects in general, without attending to die particular manner (of sensibility) in which they may be given. But they do not thereby determine a larger sphere of objects, since one cannot assume that such can be given without presupposing another mode of intuition than the sensible as possible-which we are in no way justified in doing. (A253- 54/B309).This passage seems to me to count decisively aginst the "two worlds " interpretationof Kant'distinction (see note 17)
25. "The fact that experience is passive, a matter of receptivity in action, should assure us that we have all the external constraint we can reasonably want. The constraint comes from outside thinking, but not from outside what is thinkable" (28).
26. As McDowell explains, "the objects of 'inner sense' are internal accusatives to the awareness that 'inner experiences' constitute; they have no existence independently of that awareness" (21). Thus: "[T]he impressions of 'inner sense' must be, like the impressions of 'outer sense', passive occurrences in which conceptual capacities are drawn into operation. But if we are to respect the point about internal accusatives, we cannot conceive these passive operations of conceptual capacities exactly on the model of the impressions of 'outer sense'. We cannot suppose that these operations of conceptual capacities constitute awareness of circumstances that obtain in any case, and that impress themselves on a subject as they do because of some suitable relation to her sensibility" (22).
27. "In 'outer experience', a subject is passively saddled with conceptual contents, drawing into operation capacities seamlessly integrated into a conceptual repertoire that she employs in the continuing activity of adjusting her world-view, so as to enable it to pass the scrutiny of its rational credentials. It is this integration that makes it possible for us to conceive experience as awareness, or at least seeming awareness, of a reality independent of experience" (31).
28. "[C]onceptual contents that are passively received in experience ... are about the world, as it appears or makes itself manifest to the experiencing subject, or at least seems to do so. That ought not to activate a phobia of idealism" (39). The problem I am emphasizing, however, is not simply that the world in question is the world as it appears to the experiencing subject. It is rather diat the very idea of experience of the world-the idea, that is, of impressions of outer sense-is itself a product of spontaneity: die impressions in question become expressions of constraint by an independent world precisely through the integrative activities of the understanding. In this way, the crucial notion of independence is, in the end, given a purely coherence-theoretic reading. For Kant himself, by contrast, the distinction between inner sense and outer sense belongs to sensibility. it rests on the difference between the pure intuition of time and the pure intuition of space. And on this basis Kant develops what he calls a "Refutation of Idealism," according to which our knowledge of the temporal order of our own inner states is ultimately parasitic upon our knowledge of the spatiotemporal order of external objects.
29. Similarly, McDowell speaks of "possession of meaning, the kind of intelligibility that is constituted by placement in the space of reasons" (92-93).
30. In this connection we should not forget that the philosophical conception accompanying the scientific revolution also made it difficult to find a place for less-than-fully-intentional living organisms in "nature"-and thus made even the place of biology among the "natural sciences" highly problematic (cf. note 27). This is the heart of Kant's reply to Humean naturalism. There is an unfortunate tendency to identify the modern view of nature with a Humean conception and to generate an opposition between reason and nature on this basis. Thus Taylor, in contrasting the pre-modern view with the modern one (see note 9), characterizes the latter as "the 'modern' view of a world of ultimately contingent correlations, to be patiently mapped by empirical observation" (Hegel, 4), as "a view of the world not as a locus of meanings, but rather of contingent, de facto correlations" (ibid., 8), and states that the new conception of the scientific revolution "was mechanistic, atomistic, homogenizing, and of course saw the shape of things as contingent" (ibid., 10). Kant's opposing view is that nature as the object of natural science is infused with rational necessity (but not, of course, with "meaning and value").
31. Taylor, in explaining the background and motivations of Hegel's idealism, puts the point this way: "If I am to remain a spiritual being and yet not be opposed to nature in my interchange with it, then this interchange must be a communion in which I enter into relation with some spiritual being or force. But this is to say that spirituality, tending to realize spiritual goals, is of the essence of nature. Underlying natural reality is a spiritual principle striving to realize itself' (Hegel, 39). A few pages later, in describing how Schelling's philosophy of nature gives an ontological foundation to Schiller's aesthetics, Taylor explains that " [art] is therefore the point at which spontaneity and receptivity, freedom and nature are one. And this meeting point is, as it were, foreordained in the ontological fact that nature and consciousness have ultimately the same source, subjectivity" (ibid., 42). In order to preserve the idea that nature as the realm of law consists of "mere meaningless happenings," McDowell presumably wants to "domesticate" this rhetoric as well. Until he shows us how to do this, however, his own conception of the relationship between the understanding in his sense and nonhuman nature belonging to tiie realm of law will, I believe, remain fundamentally obscure.
32. As we will see below, in the context of post-Quinean naturalism the idea of rational normative structure is "psychologized" so as to become thoroughly entangled with the question of human intentionality. In this context, the question of autonomous norms of rationality is indeed inextricably linked to the mind-body problem (cf. Davidson's "anomalous monism"). My point here is simply that the scientific revolution itself does not immediately supply such a context. It is also worth noting that the rejection of teleological and intentional notions characteristic of the scientific revolution extended much further than specifically human inten-tionality-it extended to biological phenomena in general, including animals and even plants (cf. Kant's famous expression of skepticism concerning a Newton capable of explaining a blade of grass, in the Antinomy of Teleological Judgment). And this means that even the purely animal "perceptual system" introduced by Evans (see note 8)-which is rejected by McDowell in favor of an inclusion of perception within the spontaneity definitive of specifically human intentionality-would also be extruded from nature according to the scientific revolution.
33. Frege's "third realm" has often been taken to exemplify this kind of "platonism." However, such a reading of Frege has recently been subject to critical reassessment. See, for example, the exchange between Tyler Burge, "Frege on Knowing die Third Realm," Mind 101 (1992): 633-650
34. Thomas Ricketts, "Logic and Truth in Frege," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supp. vol.70 (1996): 121-140
35. See §75 of the Aufbau: "The merit of having discovered the necessary basis of the constitutional system thereby belongs to two entirely different, and often mutually hostile, philosophical tendencies. Positivism has stressed that the sole material for cognition lies in the undigested experiential given; here is to be sought the basic elements of the constitutional system. Transcendental idealism, however, especially the neo-Kantian tendency (Rickert, Cassirer, Bauch), has rightly emphasized that these basic elements do not suffice; order-posits must be added, our 'basic relations'." Carnap's basic elements are initially undifferentiated "elementary experiences," which are linked to one another by a basic relation of "remembrance of part similarity." Carnap then uses the formal-logical structure of this basic relation to define all further concepts of his constitutional system, including the concepts that characterize and differentiate the basic elements themselves.
36. W. V. Quine traces what he dubs the linguistic doctrine of logical truth to the assimilation of Wittgenstein's Tractatus within the Vienna Circle and holds that this doctrine reached its maturity in the work of Carnap; Quine then encapsulates this "Viennese" teaching as follows: "Metaphysics was meaningless through misuse of language; logic was certain through tau-tologous use of language." See "Carnap and Logical Truth," in The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, ed. P. Schilpp (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1963), 385-386
37. In the Tractatus itself, however, the notion of logical truth-through the idea that there is only one logical structure for any possible language-still retains a Kantian "transcendental" cast characteristic of the reine Logik tradition. And it is this Tractarian conception, of course, which then serves as the primary focus for Wittgenstein's critique of " platonistic" conceptions of meaning in the Philosophical Investigations (a critique that is taken by McDowell as a model for his own rejection of rampant platonism (92-95))In Carnap's Logical Syntax of Language, by contrast, the logical "absolutism" of the Tractatus is explicitly discarded in favor of syntactic pluralism. And it is this Carnapian conception of language which, as explained in the text below, then fuels both the protocol-sentence debate and Quine's eventual rejection of the linguistic doctrine of logical truth.
38. For this debate, with particular attention to Neurath's role, see Thomas Uebel, Overcoming Logical Positivism from Within (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992).
39. Davidson himself explicitly makes the connection in "Empirical Content," reprinted in E. LePore, Truth and Interpretation.
40. Sellars, by contrast, is not so explicit, but he does refer, in §59 of "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind," to Carnap's "Psychologie in physikalischer Sprache," an important text of the protocol-sentence debate that Davidson also cites in note 39 of "Empirical Content."
41. What Kant calls "transcendental logic" is just as distinct from empirical human psychology as is the pure thought of the reine Logik tradition. For Kant, however, the entire point of the schematism of the understanding is that pure thought can have content only by functioning as the a priori presupposition of empirical thinking (including, in particular, empirical psychological thinking). Kant's "space of reason" is thus necessarily spatiotemporal; and this is why, as emphasized above, there can be no possibility of a "platonistic" gulf for Kant himself.
42. The distinction between the logical and the psychological also seems to be central in Sellars's contrast between "placing [an episode or state] in the logical space of reasons" and "giving an empirical description of that episode or state" (see note 3). Sellars wants to avoid a regress threatening his view that knowledge of "This is green" presupposes knowledge that utterances of "This is green" are reliable indicators of the presence of green objects in standard conditions of perception. And the point of his contrast is precisely to distinguish the logical relation of presupposition from empirical relations of temporal and psychological priority ("Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind," §§36-37). This is not to say, however, that Sellars also accepts the idea, characteristic of logical positivism, that "logical" relations are to be explained through the concept of analyticity.
43. These technical problems include, first, the need for special existential axioms (reducibility, infinity, choice) in the wake of the discovery of the paradoxes, and second, the metamathematical results of Gödel and Tarski, which threaten Carnap's attempt to preserve the analyticity of logico-math-ematical truth in the face of the first problem. Quine discusses this crucial second set of problems in §7 of "Carnap and Logical Truth."
44. Quine of course distinguishes logical truth in the narrower sense, restricted to first-order logic, from analytic truth in the wider sense, which is to include the results of substituting synonymous terms into logical truths in the narrower sense and also, in Carnap's hands, set-theory and higher mathematics. And Quine holds, in addition, that logical truth in the narrower sense is at least relatively determinate in translation on a behavioral basis. Quine makes it perfectly clear, however, that the maxim of preserving elementary logical truth is simply an instance of the maxim of preserving obvious truth in general, and thus gives no aid and comfort to the linguistic doctrine of logical truth: it applies equally to "There have been black dogs', for example. In the end, therefore, the obviousness of elementary logical truth collapses into that of "stimulus analytic" truth in general. See W. V. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), §§12-14. Essentially the same idea is found in §3 of "Carnap and Logical Truth."
45. McDowell explains that when "one finds a spookiness in norms if they' are conceived platonistically," "[t]his reflects looking at norms from nature's side of the duality of norm and nature; nature is equated with the realm of law, and that poses the familiar threat of disenchantment" (94). Within the reine Logik tradition, as we have seen, normative structures definitive of the Kantian "space of reasons" are indeed separated from the spatiotemporal realm. This, however, has nothing to do with the disenchantment of nature-the extrusion of "meaning and value"-effected by the scientific revolution; it is due, rather, to a rejection of Kant's own doctrine of the schematism of the understanding (cf. note 33). Only when the normative structure of the space of reasons is "psychologized" does the disenchantment of nature effected by the scientific revolution become relevant here.
46. W. V. Quine, "Reply to Chomsky," in Words and Objections, ed. D. Davidson and J. Hintikka (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1969), 303.
47. Davidson himself tends to minimize his divergence from Quine. For example, he often compares the indeterminacy of translation with that of different scales of measurement-for a recent instance, see "Three Varieties of Knowledge," in A. J. Ayer Memorial Essays, ed. A. Griffiths (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 161.
48. I myself doubt whether this particular comparison can capture the full force of Quine's "no fact of the matter" rhetoric, and in any case I have here chosen to emphasize the starkly physicalistic side of Quine in order better to bring out what I take to be Davidson's genuinely novel contribution: the attempt to show how our "constitutive ideal of rationality" can survive in a post-Quinean context (cf. note 41).
49. In "Three Varieties of Knowledge," Davidson explains the source of anomalous monism as follows: [Mental concepts], at least in so far as they are intentional in nature, require the interpreter to consider how best to render the creature being interpreted intelligible, that is, as a creature endowed with reason. As a consequence, an interpreter must separate meaning from opinion in part on normative grounds, by deciding what, from his point of view, maximizes intelligibility. In this endeavor, the interpreter has, of course, no other standards of rationality to fall back on than his own. When we try to understand the world as physicists, we necessarily employ our own norms, but we do not aim to discover rationality in the phenomena. (162) Here, McDowell's gulf between reason and nature is clearly evident in the contrast between the standpoint of the radical interpreter and that of the physicist.
50. Here see especially Davidson's revealingly entitled paper "Psychology as Philosophy," reprinted, with appended discussion, in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980)
51. [T]here is no way psychology can avoid consideration of the nature of rationality, of coherence, of consistency. At one end of the spectrum, logic and rational decision theory are psychological theories from which the obviously empirical has been drained. At the other end, there is some form of behaviourism better imagined than described. Psychology, if it deals with propositional attitudes, hovers in between. This branch of the subject cannot be divorced from such questions as what constitutes a good argument, a valid inference, a rational plan, or a good reason for acting. These questions also belong to the traditional concerns of philosophy, which is my excuse for my title. (241) (This quotation comes from the appended discussion. The idea that notions of rationality "have no echo in physical theory" occurs on 231.) Davidson, like Quine, thus rejects the distinction between the normative realm of logic and the descriptive realm of psychology. For Davidson, however, psychology has itself become an explicitly normative discipline.
52. Such rational constraints include, paradigmatically, logic and rational decision theory-both considered explicitly as "psychological theories" (see note 41). Note how strange it is from a traditional point of view-for a Kant or a Frege-to characterize logic a "psychological theory."
53. Impressions of sense are manifestations of sentient life and hence natural phenomena. [Anomalous monism] ensures that it cannot be as the natural phenomena they are that impressions are characterizable in terms of spontaneity. Their place in nature is their location in the quite different structure of the realm of law. So actualizations of a natural capacity of sensibility, considered as such, can only be intuitions on a dualistic conception: products of disenchanted nature operating independendy of spontaneity" (76). For McDowell, then, only if we recognize that impressions of sense belong to our second nature-and thus do not belong to the realm of law-can such a dualistic conception of concepts and intuitions be definitively overcome. From Davidson's own point of view, however, there is nothing in anomalous monism itself to prevent events of sensory stimulation from having both physical and rational-intentional properties. Davidson's own motivation for maintaining that the relation of sensory stimulation to belief is causal but not rational is rather to avoid "epistemic intermediaries" between belief and the world; see note 45.
54. Indeed, immediately following the quotation just given, McDowell continues: "My point is to insist that we can effect this deletion of the outer boundary without falling into idealism, without slighting the independence of reality" (34).
55. See "A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge," 312: "
56. [W]e should allow no intermediaries between our beliefs and their objects in the world. Of course there are causal intermediaries. What we must guard against are epistemic intermediaries" (my emphasis). In this connection, McDowell's portrayal of Davidson as the arch Coherentist becomes especially misleading. Thus, for example, McDowell chides Davidson (16) for using "confinement imagery" in the very paragraph from "A Coherence Theory" from which I have just quoted. However, when Davidson here states that "we can't get outside our skins to find out what is causing the internal happenings of which we our aware," he is arguing against Quine's reliance on sense-data-like sensory stimulations, not expounding his own view: he is here rejecting "internal happenings of which we are aware." Moreover, McDowell then proceeds to criticize Davidson's appeal to the principle of charity for "start[ing] with the body of beliefs to which we are supposed to be confined" and then seeking "to make the confinement imagery unthreatening by reassuring us that those beliefs are mostly true"-so that Davidson is here responding only to "a shallow skepticism, in which, taking it for granted that one has a body of beliefs, one worries about their credentials" (17). The point of the principle of charity, however, is that a system of noises does not count as a body of beliefs in the first place unless it is interpretable as mostly true-true of independent objects in the external environment to which one is (epistemically) immediately related. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Davidson explic-itly retracts the Coherentist label in "Afterthoughts, 1987" to a reprinting of "A Coherence Theory" in Reading Rorty, ed. A. Malichowski (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).
57. "To reject the [Myth of the Given] ... is to refuse to conceive experience's demands on a system of beliefs as imposed from outside the activity of adjusting the system, by something constituted independently of the current state of the evolving system, or a state into which the system might evolve. The required adjustments to the system depend on what we take experience to reveal to us, and we can capture that only in terms of the concepts and conceptions that figure in the evolving system. What we take experience to tell us is already part of the system, not an external constraint on it" (135-36).
58. See Truth and Method ,3.3.3:
59. "Certainly, those brought up in a determinate linguistic and cultural tradition see the world differently from those belonging to other traditions. Certainly, the historical 'worlds' that dissolve into one another in the course of history are different from one another and from the present world. Nevertheless, it is always a human world-i.e., a linguistically constituted world-that, in whatever tradition, presents itself. As linguistically constituted, every such world is open of itself for every possible insight and thus for every possible extension of its own world-picture-and correspondingly accessible for others."
60. This last passage initiates a section (184-86) devoted to defending Gadamer's ideas on the importance of shared cultural and linguistic traditions for mediating our understanding of one another against Davidson's more individualistic conception of radical interpretation.
61. Recall that for McDowell there is no distinction at all between the conceptual contents of experience and-at least when the subject is not misled-the perceptual facts in the world corresponding to that experience (26, quoted on page 430 above).
62. "When the specific character of [an alien's] thinking starts to come into view for us, we are not filling in blanks in a pre-existing sideways-on picture of how her thought bears on the world, but coming to share with her a standpoint within a system of concepts, a standpoint from which we can join her in directing a shared attention at the world, without needing to break out through a boundary that encloses a system of concepts" (35-36). After a fusion of horizons, however, we (along with the alien) have changed our system of concepts-in the terms of Gadamer's remarks cited in note 47, our initial horizon has undergone an "extension of its own world-picture." And we have thereby changed, apparently, the "world" corresponding to our system of concepts as well (note 49). So the possibility of fusion does nothing to diffuse the threat of idealism.