1 Davidson, Donald ‘Thought and Talk,’ reprinted in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (New York: Clarendon Press 1984)Google Scholar

2 McDowell, John Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1996 [1994]).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Unless otherwise indicated, parenthetical page citations refer to this work.

3 Other philosophers whose approaches to either mindedness, language, or both, appear to require similar revisionism about some ordinary claims we might make about impaired humans are Brandom, Robert (see Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1994]);Google Scholar Rorty, Richard (see Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [Princeton: Princeton University Press 1979])Google Scholar, and Sellars, Wilfred (see Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind [1956; reprint, with an introduction by Richard Rorty and a study guide by Brandom, Robert Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1997]).Google Scholar

4 McDowell takes up the ‘space of reasons’ metaphor from Wilfred Sellars's Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.

5 I will not be addressing those who think the prescription isn't even a potential cure for the disease, or who don't think there is a disease of the kind McDowell diagnoses.

6 On the page where this terminology is introduced, McDowell explains in a note that he uses ‘the lower case to stress that I mean the label ‘‘platonism’’ in something like the sense that it bears in the philosophy of mathematics’ rather than to signal a connection with Plato (77 n7).

7 The ‘language into which a human being is first initiated stands over against her as a prior embodiment of mindedness, of the possibility of an orientation to the world’ (125). Language ‘serves as a repository of tradition, a store of historically accumulated wisdom about what is a reason for what’ (126).

8 Here is a formulation suggesting just this line: ‘[the] bare idea of Bildung ensures that the autonomy of meaning is not inhuman’ (95; emphasis added).

9 When this expresses an attempt to line up our view of the world and the world from a ‘sideways-on’ perspective, McDowell shares Davidson's view that this concern makes no sense (137-8). See Donald Davidson, ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,’ reprinted in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1984). A related worry is whether our concepts ‘fit’ with the bits of the world revealed to us in experience. This is another worry McDowell wants to exorcise. See his remark that we must give up wanting ‘an account of how concepts and intuitions are brought into alignment’ (‘The Content of Perceptual Experience,’ reprinted in Mind, Value, and Reality [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1998]).

10 The context for the note is a reminder that developing an evolutionary account is not the same as putting forward constructive philosophy (124) of the kind that wants to make normativity ‘safe’ by constructing it from materials available in the realm of law (95).

11 ‘I would not dream of suggesting that a dog, say, does not see objects but only patterns of color…Of course objects — for instance predators or prey animals — can be among the features of its environment to which a brute is perceptually sensitive,’ (‘Reply to Commentators,’ Book Symposium on Mind and World in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 [1998]: 403-31, 411). McDowell allows that nonrational animals have ‘responsiveness to objective reality’ (‘Reply to Commentators,’ 412). Normal human animals have this responsiveness transformed into a thoroughly conceptual affair — but we didn't need the theoretical apparatus of the space of reasons ‘to secure for us the very idea of being on to things,’ (‘Knowledge and the Internal Revisited,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64 [2002]: 97-105, 104).

12 This is especially clear in his reply to Arthur Collins's ‘Beastly Experience’ (Book Symposium on Mind and World, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 [1998]: 375-80). The transcendental worry is (in one form) that a freely made-up mind could not be thinking about the world, as that seems to require some kind of constraint by the world. Since animals don't have the kind of freedom that makes it possible to raise that worry, we don't need to (and it would be inappropriate to) apply to them the account which seeks to reveal experience as providing a constraint that is compatible with freedom (‘Reply to Commentators,’ 411).

13 The distinctions are largely heuristic. The fact that we can distinguish these levels in a philosopher's view does not mean that she proceeds by first finding a good account of experience-in-general and then struggles to show that, luckily enough, we humans are able to have experiences of the kind this account fits.

14 McDowell, John ‘Having the World in View: Sellars, Kant, and Intentionality,’ The Woodbridge Lectures 1997, Journal of Philosophy 95 (1998): 431–91.Google Scholar See especially Lecture II, ‘The Logical Form of an Intuition’ (451-70).

15 Construing someone as stringently anti-reductionist as McDowell as having any serious interest at all in this third level may require some defense. But just as naturalizing autonomous rationality is not, in McDowell's view, to treat it reductively, so discussing the actual structure of individual minds need not be a prelude to a reductive effort to construct norm-responsive cognitive equipment out of nonnormative materials. That McDowell is interested in philosophical explorations of that structure is perhaps most clear when he is discussing or drawing on Gareth Evans's work (see § 6 of Lecture V of Mind and World and ‘Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space,’ reprinted in Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1998]).

16 When McDowell talks about ‘reasons for belief,’ he has in mind the reasons that figure in normative explanations of a subject's belief. For example, Jane's believing that she will need her umbrella can be explained by her seeing that it is raining. That it is (visibly) raining is Jane's reason for her belief. But the ‘reasons for belief’ locution does figure, in other contexts, in merely causal explanations of belief. For example, Bob's believing that he is being chased might be explained by us by reference to the fact that he has just been injected with a hallucinogenic drug. But the drug is not Bob's reason for his belief. When I speak of experiences as reasons for belief, I intend to follow McDowell's notion. Where this might be unclear, I will use the locution ‘reason for which a subject believes’. I have borrowed this locution from Jonathan Dancy (see his Practical Reality [New York: Oxford University Press 2000]). I should note that Dancy himself thinks McDowell's account of experiences ultimately cannot sustain the claim that they are reasons for which a subject believes. (See his ‘Acting in the Light of Appearances,’ in McDowell and His Critics, Cynthia Macdonald and Graham Macdonald, eds. [Oxford: Basil Blackwell 2006.]) Adjudicating this dispute would take me far beyond the scope of this paper.

17 McDowell makes this point frequently; see e.g. 62 and 162-4.

18 See 11-12. A key Sellars passage is from Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind §36 (on pages 75-6 in the new edition [Harvard University Press 1997]). McDowell discusses the interdependence Sellars finds between experience and world views in his Woodbridge Lectures (see especially Lecture II, pp. 465ff.). He criticizes Sellars (focusing on this section of Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind) for being unable to allow that what a subject takes in in experience, and what gives authority to the experiential reports that can support world views, just is ‘the fact that things are manifestly so’ (‘Knowledge and the Internal,’ in Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality, 410 n24).

19 See 54-5, and Lecture V (87-107, especially 99-104), where McDowell notes he is exploiting P.F. Strawson's reading of Kant, and Evans's reading of Strawson.

20 Someone could lack the capacities for a number of kinds of experience (because of damage to the systems supporting some sensory modalities) and still have the Strawsonian capacities in question. And it would require both conceptual reflection and empirical investigation to discover how much experiential impoverishment — whether due to environmentally imposed sensory deprivation, or to physiological deficiencies — would be compatible with the possession of the Strawsonian capacities.

21 I will use ‘Strawsonian capacities’ as shorthand for all the relevant capacities, not just those most resonant with themes from Strawson's own work.

22 Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, § 36

23 See his criticism of Richard Rorty's appropriation of Davidson (Mind and World, Afterword Part I, §§ 6-7 [146-55]). See also his comment that Sellars's treatment of placings in the space of reasons (in § 36 of Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind) echoes an early warning of Sellars’s, about epistemologists’ making ‘a mistake of a piece with the so-called ‘‘naturalistic fallacy’’ in ethics’ (§ 5), and that linking the idea of placings to this warning is more helpful than contrasting them with empirical descriptions (Woodbridge Lectures, Lecture I, ‘Sellars on Perceptual Experience,’ 433 n5). This is why McDowell himself speaks of the descriptions of human sensory episodes as placing those episodes in the space of reasons (see footnote 4 above).

24 Any time we produce claims up for assessment as correct or true, their being correct or true is, as this is often put, not ‘up to us.’ Asserting this is not to assert a correspondence theory of truth, nor is it to rule out the so-called ‘identity theory’ of truth implicitly endorsed by McDowell in Mind and World (e.g. on page 27: ‘When one thinks truly, what one thinks is what is the case’).

25 Thus, even here where I’m claiming there is a real sense in which everything is ‘up to us,’ we have to be careful. These points about what is in our control are about what a rational agent could or should do, or make use of — not about what at any given moment the human community happens to notice. (That would restrict the space of reasons to the realm of content-actually-entertained, rather than the thinkable.) Facts of which no one is aware, though they aren't currently being used in the reasons game, belong in the space of reasons.

26 Wittgenstein develops a complicated thought experiment in which one group of people enslaves another, and puts out propaganda to the effect that the enslaved individuals ‘have no souls; so they can be used for any arbitrary purpose’ (Zettel, G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, eds.; G.E.M. Anscombe, trans. (Berkeley: University of California Press 1970, § 528)). The experiment is explicitly developed in Zettel §§ 528-30 and Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. I (G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, eds.; G.E.M. Anscombe, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1980, §§ 96-7, 101)). Wittgenstein is not here directly engaging with and refuting other-minds skepticism. The only way, after all, to indicate what is philosophically odd (as opposed to morally wrong) with the slaveholders’ attitudes is to include modifiers like ‘genuine’ in the descriptions of the behaviors they attribute to the individuals they’ve enslaved. The skeptic will obviously find that question-begging. Wittgenstein was, rather, forcing us to reflect on what we understand by the idea of some action being genuinely the type of action it is.

27 These really are first-nature capacities — some animals have them, and human infants have them long before even rudimentary linguistic competence. But we pick them out as interesting because of our knowledge of where we expect humans to end up — with a fully developed second nature — and we are looking for the conditions that will (causally) enable that to be brought about.

28 There is the phenomenon of noticing someone as if for the first time, or of feeling oneself observing her as if one were an outsider rather than an intimate. It isn't that intimates can't raise these questions about one another — only that these questions don't fit well into ordinary committed interaction with others, so that seriously entertaining them seems to require either that one not be intimate with the individual concerned, or that one temporarily abstract from that intimacy. See the discussion of ‘sharing a life’ below.

29 It must be emphasized that the following discussion is firmly within the philosophy of mind. In particular, nothing I myself say, or claim McDowell must say, about such individuals should be taken (absent further argument) as a claim about their moral status, or as an attempt to limit the scope of moral obligations owed to them.

30 The difference isn't total. We can try to talk about all non-citizens in terms appropriate for trainees, by increasing the number of counterfactuals involved. (Instead of just referring to ‘the situation she would have been in had she finished her training’ we must add ‘and had she been the sort of individual able to benefit from training.’) Some of the questions I raise could have been raised by reflecting on the position of normal trainees. But some of my questions are begged by the assumption that the model of the trainer-trainee relationship can be stretched to cover all cases.

31 McDowell rejects ‘highest common factor’ views while discussing Gareth Evans’s desire for an account of human perception that will have some sort of continuity with accounts of animal perception (64).

32 Some humans will surely insist that they share lives with non-human animals in just this way. I’m here developing the notion of a ‘shared life’ in a way that has immediate and straight-forward application only to human individuals. (See note 48 below for a complication.)

33 See the discussion of Dennett in ‘On the Content of Perceptual Experience.’

34 This is my statement of what I take to be McDowell's view. I should point out that while I don't think it is incompatible with anything stated in Mind and World, I’m not sure this is completely clear from the text of Mind and World itself. If only as a matter of tone, that text sometimes suggests to me that only transparent ascriptions of intentionality (of the kind paradigmatically appropriate to rational individuals) are genuine. But work after Mind and World makes clear that is not so. In particular, McDowell's account of animal perceptual sensitivity is self-standing. It is not the result of loosely applying to animals (because we find it useful or charitable to do so) the account he wants to give of us (see ‘Knowledge and the Internal Revisited,’ 104).

35 McDowell emphasizes that ‘non-demanding,’ i.e. non-transparent, content-attributions can only support discussions of reasons why (‘Reply to Commentators,’ 417).

36 The story he tells about animals depends on their living species-specific purposeful lives. (A particularly clear statement comes in ‘Knowledge and the Internal Revisited’, where McDowell explains that we can attribute genuine awareness, rather than mere reliable responsive discriminatory dispositions, to an animal when we have in view a purposive life appropriate to that of kind animal [103-4]). And some human individuals will be so impaired that they won't meet this condition. But those individuals would not, I think, even have begun the process of Bildung, and so are not the individuals I mean to be thinking about.

37 ‘Reply to Commentators,’ 412

38 Again, not that they will put things that way. But they will sometimes think about their impaired family member in a way that we could capture, from the theoretical perspective, as their wanting to apply that portion of the theory that (on McDowell’s view) strictly applies only to ascriptions made to mature individuals.

39 McDowell's complete gloss on Gadamer's image makes very clear that ‘fusion’ only happens when both parties are citizens of the space of reasons, because only citizens have genuinely conceptual capacities: ‘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 the system of concepts’ (35-6; italics original).

40 McDowell discusses the occasional need to expand one's sense of rational possibility in his discussion of the relation between tradition and innovation (186-7).

41 ‘To reassure ourselves that our responsiveness to reasons is not supernatural, we should dwell on the thought that it is our lives that are shaped by spontaneity, patterned in ways that come into view only within an inquiry framed by what Davidson calls ‘‘the constitutive ideal of rationality’’’ (78).

42 If we were talking about a very young child, McDowell would insist that our report of her as having a preference for red and yellow blocks over green ones is not a report in which mental content is transparently attributed to her. I should also note more generally that nothing in this discussion should be construed as giving aid and comfort to an abstractionist account of empirical concept formation.

43 In another idiom: McDowell's I-We model of the social can embrace whatever is correct in the I-Thou model Brandom and Davidson prefer. McDowell differentiates his model from theirs in the concluding discussion of ‘Gadamer and Davidson on Understanding and Relativism,’ in Gadamer's Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jeff Malpas, Ulrich Arsnwald, and Jens Kertscher, eds. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2002).

44 The context is very different, but I started thinking of domestication as a necessary part of the project of Mind and World in part because I was struck by something McDowell writes in his Woodbridge Lectures, distinguishing his view from the kind of transcendental realism Rorty criticizes: ‘objects come into view for us only in actualizations of conceptual capacities that are ours. To entitle ourselves to this, we must acknowledge whatever we need to acknowledge for the conceptual capacities to be intelligibly ours’ (Lecture II, p. 470; emphasis mine). McDowell here seems especially sensitive to the kind of interlocutor who says, ‘I think it must be the case that we respond to norms. But I do keep worrying that those norms, and our responsive capacities, must be spooky, not quite human. That's because when I try to represent myself explicitly as a responder-to-norms, the represented individual doesn't feel like me.’ ‘Domestication’ seemed an apt word for what such an interlocutor needed for any platonism she could accept. (McDowell himself uses ‘domesticate’ at one point in Mind and World, but as a slightly pejorative synonym for ‘naturalize’: ‘bald naturalism…aims to domesticate conceptual capacities within nature conceived as the realm of law…the idea is that if there is any truth in talk of spontaneity, it must be capturable in terms whose fundamental role lies in displaying the position of things in nature so conceived’ [73].)

45 Of course any philosopher wants to be persuasive as well as right. But when the topics one wants to be right about include the proper way for humans to conceive themselves, a concern with persuasive power is especially appropriate. In the Introduction written for the paperback edition of Mind and World (1996), Mc-Dowell clarifies his project by contrasting it with another one. McDowell's project is to root out the assumptions that make us fear the very existence of norms, and creatures responsive to them, is impossible. What McDowell calls ‘engineering projects’ assume first that norms, and creatures responsive to them, are possible, and then seek to explain how to produce such creatures. If someone insisted that an engineering project was an adequate response to the ‘How possible?’ worry, McDowell remarks that this would be like ‘responding to Zeno by walking across a room’ (xxi). McDowell wants a new ideology, a narrative we can tell ourselves about ourselves, when we feel re-gripped by the ‘How possible?’ question. We need commentary on the engineering, at least. Otherwise, however fabulous the engineered results, we’ll find it impossible to believe they are indeed normatively laden.

46 I do not mean to imply that McDowell didn't have good reasons for selecting perceptual experience as his object lesson.

47 See, for example, the concerns expressed by Haldane, John in ‘Rational and Other Animals,’ Verstehen and Humane Understanding, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement (41), Anthony O’Hear, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996).Google Scholar

48 To be entitled to this, I need to bite a bullet. I have claimed that distinctively human patterns of life require citizens of the space of reasons to produce and maintain them. But I have also attributed real power to those up-and-running patterns, not only to the individuals who are, through their citizenship, able to maintain them. That means that any individual, whether biologically human or not, who counts as living a human life with citizens of the space of reasons counts as being in the space of reasons, despite not being at home in it. It would be beyond the scope of this paper to address the conceptual and empirical issues implicated in the questions ‘When, if ever, does a member of a species other than Homo sapiens count as living a human communal life?’ and ‘How would we tell?’

49 To take another example, I think Davidson could afford to talk about propositional content in a way he forbade himself without compromising his main commitments (see my ‘Davidson's Fear of the Subjective,’ Southern Journal of Philosophy 44 [2006]: 509-32).

50 I am grateful to Jennifer Culbert, Crystal L’Hôte, Dean Moyar, Peter Tumulty, and two anonymous referees for this journal for comments on earlier drafts.