Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Wittgenstein on philosophy, normativity and understanding
- 2 Value judgements
- 3 Formal theories of meaning and theories of sense
- 4 Singular thought and the Cartesian picture of mind
- 5 Experience, knowledge and openness to the world
- 6 Mind and World and idealism
- Glossary
- Guide to further reading
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Singular thought and the Cartesian picture of mind
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Wittgenstein on philosophy, normativity and understanding
- 2 Value judgements
- 3 Formal theories of meaning and theories of sense
- 4 Singular thought and the Cartesian picture of mind
- 5 Experience, knowledge and openness to the world
- 6 Mind and World and idealism
- Glossary
- Guide to further reading
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
A theme common to Chapters 1–3 is this: McDowell's approach to rulegoverned practice, to moral judgements and to grasp of meaning within a language has been to emphasize the impossibility of adopting a useful philosophical stance “outside” the area of judgement in question. There is no prospect of a fruitful analysis that starts outside a region of conceptual judgement and attempts, for example, to ground those judgements using a description of the world couched in independent concepts. To put the point less metaphorically, McDowell rejects any form of philosophical analysis that consists of providing a reduction of one set of concepts into another that is supposedly less philosophically perplexing.
In this chapter I shall examine another instance of this general theme. McDowell gives an account of singular or object-dependent thought that rejects the contemporary neo-Russellian assumption that such thoughts contain both conceptual elements and extra-conceptual worldly objects. Such an account describes thoughts simultaneously from within and without. Instead, he sketches a neo-Fregean account that describes such thoughts from within the perspective of Fregean sense. This will underpin the key claim that McDowell makes in Mind and World: that there is no outer boundary to the conceptual order. So even perceptual experience, which, in contrast with the beliefs those experiences give rise to, might seem to be a point of contact with an extra-conceptual world, is really, according to McDowell, always already conceptualized.
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- Information
- John McDowell , pp. 141 - 176Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2004