Review - The Engaged Intellect
Philosophical Essays
by John McDowell
Harvard University Press, 2009
Review by John Hacker-Wright, Ph.D.
Nov 3rd 2009 (Volume 13, Issue 45)

The Engaged Intellect is one of two collections of essays by McDowell issued this year. This volume  showcases McDowell's remarkable mastery of a wide range of philosophical subject matter, containing essays that treat Plato, Aristotle, Frege, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty, P.F. Strawson, and many other philosophers. It ranges over philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and epistemology.  What, if anything, unites these diverse engagements? McDowell claims that at least some of these essays are thematically united by their opposition to a "rationalistic conception of the intellect... a conception that disengages reason, which is special to rational animals, from aspects of their make-up that they share with other animals" (vii).  This theme is indeed present in many of the essays of this collection, sometimes in ways that are not obvious.  Since this theme is arguably among the most interesting and prominent in McDowell's recent work, and since his approach to naturalizing the mind is quite controversial, I will focus on the essays in the collection that touch on this subject.

There are, to be sure, plenty of contemporary philosophers who would join McDowell in his opposition to a 'rationalistic conception of the intellect,'  but many of these same philosophers would no doubt disagree sharply with McDowell's execution of that program.  Indeed, it seems to me that McDowell's approach might well not be recognized as an approach to that program by other philosophers who see themselves as pursuing it.  That is because McDowell view retains a very extensive role for concepts and reasons in his approach to naturalizing the mind, as brought out in the essays "Experiencing the World" and "Naturalism and Philosophy of Mind."  Since his Mind and World, McDowell has been urging that perception is a thoroughly conceptual affair.  When I perceive that there is a candle in front of me, I am not, on McDowell's view, inferring that fact somehow from non-conceptual sensory impressions;  McDowell here  embraces Wilfrid Sellars' now famous argument against the Myth of the Given.  But instead of giving up on impressions so as to embrace some variety of coherentism, as do, in their various ways, Donald Davidson, Richard Rorty, and Robert Brandom, McDowell rehabilitates the idea of sensory impressions.  For McDowell, sensory impressions are actualizations of conceptual capacities.  Perception is an activity of the mind, for McDowell, but one in which it is not up to me to make up my mind.  While perception is an actualization of the intellect, it is not an exercise of the intellect involving the kind of spontaneity found when we make an explicit judgment about how things are (251).  So, when I see a candle before me, I see the fact that there is a candle before me, a fact with the logical structure of the corresponding explicit judgment that can be made about it.   This feature of McDowell's thought, his attempt to rehabilitate empiricism after Sellars, might not appear to have much connection with the theme of the anti-rationalist 'engaged intellect.'  Yet consider: McDowell is attempting to patch a bifurcation between beliefs and justification on the one hand, and our sensory contact with the world on the other hand.  Our sensory contact with the world is seen as a causal affair and consequently most readers of Sellars would take it to be outside what he termed 'the logical space of reasons,' that is, the order of propositions standing in various relations of inference.  McDowell's empiricism aims to overcome that bifurcation, and in so doing, carves out an important role for experience that is lost when one's response to Sellars' argument against the Myth of the Given is to renounce any justificatory role for sensory experience.  Although extending the purview of our concepts in this way might seem an unlikely position for an opponent of the rationalist view of the intellect, his position should be seen as emerging from opposition to a too rarified view of the intellect as wholly spontaneous and not tied up with the bodily processes like sensation. 

More broadly, McDowell advocates what he calls 'liberal naturalism,' which he opposes to 'restrictive naturalism.'  Both liberal and restrictive naturalism share an opposition to supernatural explanations.  Liberal naturalism is distinctive in that it denies that nature ends at the borders of what can be treated by natural-scientific methods, namely, with events that can be understood via subsumption under causal laws.  Thinking and knowing resist subsumption under such laws, since, as Sellars argued, to view something as a case of knowing is to situate it within the space of reasons, or, as Davidson argued, to see someone as taking up a propositional attitude (such as 'believing that...') is to view them through the lens of the 'constitutive ideal of rationality.'   In either case, a normative order is invoked, and such normative orders slip through our fingers when we approach a human being as a natural organism governed by causal laws.  A particularly lucid statement of McDowell's program of liberal naturalism is worth quoting directly:

To avoid conceiving thinking and knowing as supernatural, we should stress that thinking and knowing are aspects of our lives.  The concept of a life is the concept of the career of a living thing, and hence obviously the concepts of something natural.  But there are aspects of our lives whose description requires concepts that function in the space of reasons.  We are rational animals.  Our lives are patterned in ways that are recognizable only in an inquiry framed within the space of reasons.  On these lines, we can see thinking and knowing as belonging to our mode of living, even though we conceive them as phenomena that can come into view only within a sui generis space of reasons.  Thinking and knowing are part of our way of being animals. (261)

Restrictive naturalism, which sees nature as limited to the realm of potentially discoverable causal laws, must take the view that if thinking and knowing are not supernatural, they must be matters that can be understood in terms of causal laws, or somehow dispelled.  McDowell's argument rejects that as a conceptual confusion: thinking and knowing can be understood as natural but must be seen as sui generis.  In this, he follows Davidson in advocating for 'anomalous monism,' though he differs from Davidson in making room for experience as something that is not a superfluous and philosophically confusing intermediary.

The return to the ordinary world is exhilarating with McDowell.  McDowell's position puts us humans back into the natural world as robustly thinking and knowing agents who have access to a world inhabited by objects via their experiences.  Furthermore, we occupy the world as individuals.  McDowell's position, inasmuch as it allows for experience, makes an important step toward rehabilitating subjectivity from the tendency of late twentieth century philosophy to make the social world primary in accounts of knowledge and meaning.  This is particularly apparent in his responses to Rorty and Brandom in the essays "Rehabilitating Objectivity," "Knowledge and the Internal Revisited," and "Motivating Inferentialism."  His position pits him against philosophers like Rorty, for whom knowledge is a matter of a 'conversation of mankind,' and Robert Brandom, who spells out semantic content in general as a social affair.  For McDowell, the social world has a role in habituating the capacities that are actualized and exercised as we experience the world and make judgments about it.  But our social environment does not play a constitutive role in our ability to make claims about the world, as it does for Brandom.   It's hard to imagine that the halls of the University of Pittburgh's Philosophy Department (where Brandom and McDowell hold positions) did not become a bit chillier with the initial publication of the essays treating Brandom collected in this book.   For while it seems that their positions have significant affinity, both tracing their lineage back through Sellars to the likes of Kant and Hegel, McDowell here claims that Brandom has only given an 'advertisement' for what he claims to have executed in his 700-page magnum opus Making It Explicit.  To be specific, Brandom claims to have executed an account of the semantic content of language in terms of a deontic structure of commitments and entitlements undertaken by speakers who recognize, at least ideally, the rationally consequential relations among propositions to which they commit and entitle themselves in making assertions.  McDowell is deeply skeptical of this approach, which Brandom calls 'inferentialism.'  To pass over much detailed criticism of Brandom contained in this work, I will simply mention what seems to be the underlying core of the concern McDowell has with inferentialism.  Brandom is attempting to lay out an account of semantic content in terms of social practice, and he describes speakers as 'keeping score' on each other as they take up commitments through making assertions and claim entitlements through drawing inferences.  McDowell believes that there is insufficient account of the motivation of players to adopt anything more than a scorekeeping interest in others' 'moves,' and so to be genuinely informed by another's claim.  If he is correct about this, it means that Brandom is describing an empty game, without the content for which he hopes he can offer an account; he would not be describing genuine inferences because it would not have been genuine assertions in which we were trading, but only moves in a game.   Is Brandom, then, overly rationalistic in his approach to the intellect?  I believe McDowell is suggesting that.  The content that Brandom is missing comes for McDowell from experience, and that comes from seeing that our concepts can reach out into the world through our senses.  Brandom's games are, according to McDowell, merely mind games, and they lack the content McDowell locates in our sensory experience.

Yet, not everyone is satisfied that McDowell himself has done enough to bring bodily experience into his account.  Two essays in this volume ("What Myth?" and "Response to Dreyfus") feature responses to Hubert Dreyfus, who has criticized McDowell from a phenomenological standpoint, informed by the likes of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.  This exchange is particularly interesting since it brings McDowell into dialogue with more recent figures in the Continental tradition.  Dreyfus believes that McDowell has overreacted to the Myth of the Given and thereby falls into the Myth of the Mental.  McDowell can't adequately account for the body unless he allows for what Dreyfus calls 'embodied coping skills,' which are non-conceptual.  The debate then centers on skills that we share with animals, which Dreyfus presumes to be non-conceptual in the relevant sense.  A cat whose path is block by a wall can respond to an 'affordance' constituted by a sufficiently large hole, just as we would.  McDowell claims, however, that these shared abilities do not mean that our bodily skills are non-conceptual.  As he puts it:

Becoming open to the world, not just able to cope with an environment, transforms the character of the disclosing that, if we had not achieved openness to the world, would have belonged to a merely animal competence at inhabiting the environment...affordances are no longer merely input to a human natural's natural motivational tendencies; how they are data for her rationality. (315)

McDowell, then, wants to see rationality as handling what Dreyfus sees as desirable: a context-sensitive and largely mute (in the sense of 'non-linguistic') embodied sensitivity to our environment.  The muteness of our embodied coping skills, for McDowell, does not mean that these skills are non-rational or non-conceptual.  Indeed, McDowell turns the tables on Dreyfus and his heroes, especially Merleau-Ponty, in arguing that they actually fall into a myth of their own, the Myth of the Disembodied Intellect, the idea that conceptual rationality is detached from our bodily life and characterizable in abstraction from the specifics of the situations in which it finds its deployment.   McDowell cites a passage from Merleau-Ponty which speaks of our 'merging into' this body.  McDowell points out that if we conceive of ourselves as separated into ourselves and our bodies, then it is too late to try to fix things by speaking of a merger (322); I do not merge into this body, he claims, "I simply am that." McDowell thereby claims that his view of rationality better achieves the stated goals of those approaching embodiment from a phenomenological perspective.  This is no doubt an incomplete debate, but it seems one well worth pursuing.

In my review of McDowell's other recent collection, Having the World in View, I raised some concerns about McDowell's account of perception.  The present volume is generally more programmatic and offers a more accessible account of his overall project and its relations to views of other contemporary philosophers.  If there are concerns about the specifics of McDowell's program, there is still no question that he extends our conception of what might be possible and desirable in a naturalistic account of the mind.  McDowell's account promises a more authentic way of retaining our responsiveness to reasons than any other account on offer in contemporary philosophy, which gives us reason to hope that problems with the specifics of this program might be addressed.

© 2009 John Hacker Wright

John Hacker-Wright, Ph.D., Department of Philosophy, University of Guelph